Jon Wiener | The Nation

Pope Benedict. (Flickr)

Reports continue to develop on the Catholic Church’s cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests. Now, a powerful documentary is telling the whole story on TV: Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, which is playing on HBO for the month of February. The filmmaker is Alex Gibney, who won the Academy Award for best documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side, on torture in Afghanistan. His other films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. I spoke with him recently for KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.

Jon Wiener: You start your film at a Catholic school for the deaf in Milwaukee in 1972. The heroes of your film are a small group of deaf guys who went public as adults with the truth about what a priest had done to them when they were students at the school. You interview the deaf men, but they can’t talk—they speak in sign language. And yet they are wonderfully articulate. It’s amazing to watch them—as you translate in voice-over.

Alex Gibney: The four guys had all been students at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. They had all been abused, and as young men, just post-college, they had banded together to see if they could stop this abuse from continuing. They were the first people in America to make a public protest about sex abuse of children by priests. They spent many years trying to have their voices “heard.” Yes they can’t speak, but they are so expressive—you can see on their faces and in their hands their testimony, which is at once horrible but also gripping. They maintain a sense of humanity and humor and idealism despite all of this.

The timing here is significant. When did the Church hierarchy first hear about the problem of pedophile priests? Was it this Milwaukee case in 1972?

Certainly not. Documents going back to the fourth century show that the Church was aware of a pedophilia problem. We also learn in the course of this film that, in the 1940s and ’50s, there was a man named Gerald Fitzgerald who ran an order called the Servants of the Paraclete, charged with dealing with pedophile priests. He became so concerned about the number of priests who were abusing children that he actually put a down payment on an island off the coast of Grenada to house pedophile priests there. That didn’t happen.

The story really has two parts: what the priests did to the boys, and what the Church did to the priests. What did the Church do?

Very often the “treatment” for pedophile priests was prayer. And then they’d send them back out. Basically, what the Church did was to cover it up. We interview one person in the film called a “fixer.” He was a Benedictine monk. His job was to go around to parishes where there had been pedophile priests, bringing a bag of money to pay people off and make confidentiality agreements—to buy people off.

When you say “the Church knew,” who exactly are we talking about?

It had been believed for many years that bishops were basically on their own, dealing with these matters as they saw fit. That was the fiction that Rome had advanced. But it turns out that, to defrock a priest, you had to go to Rome. Only a pope can do that. Those issues went to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who ran an organization called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly known as “the Inquisition.” In 2001 Pope John Paul II decided to give Cardinal Ratzinger all the authority on all sexual abuse cases.

Where is Cardinal Ratzinger now?

Now he is Pope Benedict XVI.

So who is the most knowledgeable person in the world about priests abusing children?

Pope Benedict. Every report starting in 2001 came to his office.

The first part of the story is what the priests did to the boys. The second part is what the Church did to the priests. And there is a third part: What did the Church do for the victims?

Almost nothing. The overriding concern of the Church was not justice for the victims, not protection of victims. It was to care for the priests. Pope Benedict said he was very sorry for the victims, but you can see in the actions of the hierarchy that their concern is for protecting the Church from scandal, and also protecting their brother priests.

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One of the significant parts of the story is how civil society managed to take over from the religious hierarchy and demand justice and dispense justice—either through financial claims or through criminal prosecution. At the end of the day, you see committed people—including some priests—who understand that there’s a crime here, and that they have to fight against it. Part of the story is people coming together in order to make that happen.

You show Patrick Buchanan and some guests on Fox News saying the lawsuits and the media attention to sexual abuse by priests are “an attack on the Church.” Are they right?

No. There’s moving moment in the film where Father Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who has testified for the plaintiffs, says “many people ask me why I don’t testify on behalf of the Church in these cases. I tell them I always testify on behalf of the Church.” He means that “the Church” is the 1 billion Catholics who are its members. The parishioners, the faithful, in his opinion, are the church. This film is not anti-Catholic. It’s anti-crime. This is a crime story. And a story about a cover-up of criminals.

What about you? Are you Catholic?

I was raised Catholic. I’m not a practicing Catholic now. I’m very much a cultural Catholic; my identity was shaped by having been Catholic.

Your documentary is subtitled “Silence in the House of God.” Obviously that refers to the silence of the church in the face of these crimes. But does it also refer to the deaf men who made the first complaints, using sign language, back in 1972?

It does indeed. Theirs was a more beautiful silence—the silence of those signs, that ultimately led to reform and change.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Flickr/Ninian Reed)

The best thing about The Americans, the new spy show on FX, is that the Soviet spies are not Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They are a different married couple—Russians, sent by the KGB from Moscow to Washington, DC. The show begins shortly after Reagan takes office. 

The show features sex that is better than the sex on Downton Abbey but not as good as Girls.

If Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin of Homeland had been assigned to this case, they would have caught Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, the stars of The Americans, in episode one.

Ron Radosh, David Horowitz & Co. will be unhappy with this show (of course they are unhappy about so many things) because the spies in question are not American communists. They would have a point there—the most successful Soviet spies in the United States were not Russians. I’m not talking here about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Historians today pretty much agree that Julius was a spy but that he didn’t give the Soviets the secret of the A-bomb; Ethel was innocent but was framed by her brother David Greenglass because the FBI threatened to indict his own wife.

The real A-bomb spies, the people at Los Alamos who really did help the Soviets build their bomb in the late 1940s, were Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee who was arrested and convicted, and Theodore Hall, an American whom the FBI suspected of spying at Los Alamos but who was never arrested. After spying for the Soviets, he had a long and happy life as a distinguished scientist in Britain; late in life he admitted to his crime—and said he never would have done it if he had understood the nature of Stalin’s terror. (See Joseph Albright and Marcial Kunstel’s book Bombshell.) Klaus Fuchs served ten years and was released; Theodore Hall never served a day in jail. Meanwhile, as readers may have heard, the Rosenbergs were executed.

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During the Reagan years portrayed in The Americans, the most succesful Soviet spy of all time was at work—and he wasn’t Russian either. He was another American, CIA official Aldrich Ames. In 1985, Ames was named the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  He gave the Soviets the names of all of America’s spies inside the Soviet Union. They were all arrested and executed—that story is told by Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes. He got away with it for seven years, before being arrested in 1994. Unlike Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, he didn’t do it because he believed in the ultimate goals of communist society; he did it for $2 million. That would make a good TV show, although a depressing one.

The Americans is about Soviet spies in the United States; why not a show about American spies in Russia? That would take some imagination, since the US didn’t have any spies in the Soviet Union for virtually the entire duration of the Cold War. According to Tim Weiner, “over the whole course of the cold war, the CIA had controlled precisely three agents who were able to provide secrets of lasting value on the Soviet military threat, and all of them had been arrested and executed.”

As for the plot of The Americans, “implausible” is too generous a word; suspending disbelief turned out to be impossible for us. The eighties music, however, was pretty good—if you like Fleetwood Mac.

What’s the buzz in post–Fleetwood Mac Russia? Read Katrina vanden Heuvel and Alec Luhn’s interview with opposition rocker Yuri Shevchuk.

December 26, 1862: thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, in the largest mass execution in US history–on orders of President Abraham Lincoln. Their crime: killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August.

The execution took place on a giant square scaffold in the center of town, in front of an audience of hundreds of white people. The thirty-eight Dakota men “wailed and danced atop the gallows,” according to Robert K. Elder of The New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached, they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ ”

Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers. The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion.

Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Souix. A series of broken peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”

The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving” tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War” didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a military court sentenced 303 to death.

Lincoln, however, was “never an Indian hater,” Eric Foner writes in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He did not agree with General John Pope, sent to put down a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, who said “It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” Lincoln “carefully reviewed the trial records,” Foner reports, and found a lack of evidence at most of the tribunals. He commuted the sentences of 265 of the Indians—a politically unpopular move. But, he said, “I could not afford to hang men for votes.”

The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—from all of their lands in Minnesota.

Mankato today is a city of 37,000 south of Minneapolis, notable for its state university campus, which has 15,000 students. In Mankato, which has heretofore neglected its bloody past, a new historical marker is being erected at the site of the scaffold, at a place now called Reconciliation Park. The marker, a fiberglass scroll, displays the names of the thirty-eight Dakota who were executed.

The Minnesota History Center in St. Paul is currently featuring an exhibit titled “Minnesota Tragedy: The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.” “You can’t turn your head from what is not pretty in history,” said Stephen Elliott, who became the director of the Minnesota Historical Society last May after twenty-eight years at Colonial Williamsburg. He told the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Whatever we do, it’s not going to somehow heal things or settle it.” The impressive state-of-the-art exhibit includes the views of both white settlers and Indians, voices from the past as well as the present. “Visitors are encouraged to make up their own minds about what happened and why,” the official guide declares. The website and online video are particularly impressive.

The mass execution of the Dakota Indians isn’t the only fact missed in the Lincoln biopic. Check out Jon Wiener on “The Trouble with Steven Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln.’”

Calvin Trillin is The Nation’s Deadline Poet. He’s also a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, and has written many best-sellers, including the classic Alice, Let’s Eat. His new book is Dogfight: the 2012 Campaign in Verse.

Jon Wiener: Your new book is not just a collection of verse from your Deadline Poet contributions to The Nation—it’s a 150-page narrative poem.

Calvin Trillin: Let’s not be afraid of the word “epic” here. It’s a long epic poem in iambic pentameter, interrupted at points by what we call “a pause for prose.” There’s a prose piece, for instance, that’s called “Callista Gingrich, Aware That Her Husband Has Cheated On and Then Left Two Wives Who Had Serious Illnesses, Tries Desperately to Make Light of a Bad Cough.”

I’m from Minnesota, and I appreciated the fact that you wrote about Michelle Bachman—to a Beatles tune!

Yes I did—feel free to hum along:
      Michelle, ma belle
      Thinks the gays will all be sent to hell....
You may recall that Representative Bachmann said that Hurricane Irene was “God’s warning to curb excessive government spending.” That was the hurricane last year that caused so much trouble in New England, especially in Vermont. I wrote a poem called “Why be so hard on Vermont?”
      We know that this God’s an all-powerful God
      God’s actions are not nonchalant
      We know he can punish whomever he wants
      So why be so hard on Vermont?

You also managed to find a rhyme for Minnesota’s other presidential candidate, Tim Pawlenty. This is quite an achievement. There is an easy way to write a poem about Tim Pawlenty, which is to put his name at the beginning of the line—something like “Tim Pawlenty, he’s the guy/Whose trial balloons would never fly.” That’s my own effort.

That’s very nice, Jon. You have a future in poetry ahead of you.

You inspired me. Now I’m going to retire from writing poetry. But you took the hard route—you actually found a rhyme for “Tim Pawlenty.”

Yes I found “cognoscenti:”
      There were in fact among the cognoscenti
      Some folks who placed their bets on Tim Pawlenty.

That shows the difference between an amateur like me and a true professional.

Thank you. Sometimes I object to people going into politics because they have names that are difficult to rhyme. Otherwise, I’m very open about the political system. It’s hard to remember now, but four years ago one of the people mentioned as a possible presidential candidate was the Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. I was terribly worried about Blagojevich—because my candidates have nice clean iambic names like “Ross Perot” or “John McCain.” But I later found that Blagojevich was not hard to rhyme, and I wrote one titled “On the Auctioning off of Barack Obama’s Senate Seat”:
      It seemed to Rob Blagojevich
      A powerful appointment, which
      Was his to make—should make him rich.
      His plan turned out to have a glitch:
      Perhaps the feds had flipped a snitch.

One of the other things you do is take popular songs and write new words to them—“Blue Moon” for example.

“Blue Moon” I used for “Ayn Rand”:
      Ayn Rand
      Because of you I’m now free
      Because of what you have taught
      I know it’s all about me. . . .

However I didn’t find any limericks here. I was hoping for something like “There once was a girl named Callista…”

I don’t think I’ve ever written a limerick. I’m not sure why.

Maybe limericks don’t match the epic form of your work.

I like that word “epic.” “Heroic” is a good one, too: “heroic couplets.”

For “Obama” there are obvious rhymes, especially “Osama.” But you rhymed “Obama” with “Yokohama.” How did you manage that?

I also used “Cinerama.” But I don’t think I’ve ever used the best one, which is “Slap yo’ mama.” I’ve only heard it in Louisiana. It’s often used to speak about food—like “you taste this étoufée, you’ll go home and slap yo’ mama.”

Some reviewers of Dogfight were moved to write their own verse, notably Michiko Kakutani, the much-feared reviewer for The New York Times. She wrote:
      The 2012 campaign is Trillin’s focus in Dogfight.
      Its title invokes the Romney dog Seamus’s plight.
      That poor Irish setter on the roof of the family car,
      Whose tale so doggedly stuck to the former Olympics czar.
She went on in that vein for thirteen stanzas. I have to say that, in my opinion at least, you are better at this than Michiko Kakutani.

Gee, thanks! For some reason, when you write verse, people often want to reply in verse. People sometimes write letters to The Nation complaining about my verse, and they write in verse. I always find it comforting, because just about the time that I begin to think I might be the worst poet in the world, some evidence to the contrary is presented on the letters page of The Nation.

Have you ever tried to rhyme something with “Michiko Kakutani”?

Haven’t tried that. I hope that she prospers, but does not enter politics.

Do readers ever send you suggestions for rhymes that you haven’t come up with?

Yes, but usually they’re not quite rhymes. They say “so-and-so’s name rhymes with such-and such.”
And I say, “that’s not quite a rhyme.”
And they say, “it’s close enough.”
And I say,  “‘Close enough’ won’t do—rhyme is all I’ve got.”

For more from The Nation’s Deadline Poet, check out his latest here.