Staggering

I just completed viewing Netflix’s seven-part documentary series titled The Keepers. I am still reeling.

On the night of November 7th, 1969, 26-year-old Sister Cathy Cesnik, a teacher at Archbishop Keough High School in Baltimore, Maryland, failed to return home after what was to have been a short trip to the store. On January 3rd, 1970, Sister Cathy’s partially-clad body was found by two hunters in a remote area of Landsdowne, a community just south of Baltimore.

Nearly forty-five years later, two of her former students, now in their sixties, launched their own investigation into her still-unsolved murder. The twisted, perverse and sickening story uncovered by Abbie Shaub and Gemma Hoskins (l to r pictured above), left me staggering.

Spoilers below …

What began as a quest to discover who it was that murdered Sister Cathy became an ever-expanding window into a foul, dark world of sexual abuse and rape and a decades long cover-up of heinous crimes.

All of the seven-part series was wrenching, but episode two is particularly brutal as a now sixty-two-year-old survivor, going by the name of Jane Doe, details her account of multiple rapes by a priest and his friends and accomplices over a two-year period at her above-named school. Some of the rapists were police officers, likely brought into the priest’s office at the school to take his pleasure only a few minutes before the victim was summoned to his office over the school’s intercom system.

As the story unfolds we find that Jane Doe is not alone. Many others, slowly escaping the decades-long paralyzing trauma of their terrifying experiences, and heartened by Jane Doe’s courage, began to emerge from the shadows.

What follows is the evolving story of a cover-up of large-scale proportions.The Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore, the Baltimore City Police Department and even the FBI have been uncooperative and largely unresponsive to FOIA requests and other inquiries for information by Shaub, Hoskins and reporters seeking to understand what happened to Sister Cathy, who, we find out, had made a promise to a young Jane Doe to take care of “the problem” for her, just one day before her disappearance.

The Keepers by itself is enough to draw anyone into its story’s tangled web. But when coupled with the recent criminal charges and upcoming trial of Cardinal George Pell in Sydney, Australia—a close aide to the Pope charged with sexual assault, and the now week-old story of the thirty-four Chilean bishops who have all offered their resignations to Pope Francis for their failure to properly handle multiple accusations of the sexual abuse of children, a weight of deep sadness weighs down my heart. And now, there are stories rumoring the possible, soon-to-come resignation of Pope Francis himself, a controversial figure whose rise to the papal office in 2013 remains controversial.

As most of you know, I am not a Catholic, so it would be very easy to say, “This is not my problem.” But the truth is, many innocents have been abused over decades and throughout the world. And I suppose on this darkened planet of ours, the Catholic Church’s pedophile problem may only be a small piece of a much larger puzzle. Yes, every Christian is guilty of sin, and every church and every denomination has its problems and issues, some more troubling than others. But this rancid infection in the Catholic Church today, an infection that is not new, demands our attention and prayers.

I do recommend The Keepers for viewing (on Netflix) but only if you have the internal constitution to deal with some pretty graphic descriptions of hideous acts of violence against innocents.