Holy Water-Gate wins Grand Prize, BEST DOCUMENTARY at the Rhode Island international Film Festival, August 13, 2005. For more information and photos from the discussion panel, please visit:
http://www.film-festival.org/award05.php

NorthJersey.com — May 22, 2005

SUPPOSE YOU were asked to name one of the biggest criminal coverups in American history. Maybe you would point to Wall Street or to the White House or to another political institution.

But the Roman Catholic Church? This is just one of the questions to emerge from a new documentary about decades of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests as church leaders kept silent or actively kept evidence from police.

Observer-Tribune — May 19, 2005

A former township man who has become a leading figure in the fight to stop sexual abuse by clergy members is featured in an award-winning documentary to be shown tonight.

The former township man, Mark Seranno, 41, was sexually assaulted as a nine-year-old child by James Hanley, the former pastor at St. Joseph Church in Mendham who has since surrendered his clerical collar.

Serrano now lives in Virginia and will be featured in the documentary entitled “Holy Water-Gate: Abuse Cover-up in the Catholic Church,” which will premiere at 10 p.m., today, Thursday, on Showtime Network.

The 56-minute documentary examines the priest’s sexual abuse scandal and the cover-up of the abuse by clergy.
It is a companion program to Showtime’s original picture, “Our Father,” starring Christopher Plummer and Ted Danson.

Milwaukee Sentinel — May 19, 2005

Although she is in her mid-80s and he is in his mid-40s, Sister Rose Thering and psychologist Peter Isely grew up devoutly religious in small-town Wisconsin. Both have spent years agitating for change in the Catholic Church - and both, coincidentally, are profiled in award-winning documentaries that will be shown on cable TV this week and next.

Of the two, Isely is probably better known in Milwaukee, a result of his high-profile work as a spokesman for the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

His story, along with those of other abuse victims, is told in "Holy Water-Gate: Abuse Cover-up in the Catholic Church," which makes its American TV debut tonight on Showtime.

The hourlong documentary, which last year won a CINE Golden Eagle Award for investigative journalism, features interviews with church leaders, including Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Chicago's Cardinal Francis George, as well as with a New Jersey priest who talks about his own abuse by a priest when he was an adolescent and an Illinois man who describes himself as a former pedophile priest.

The Boston Phoenix — January 10, 2005
HOLY WATER-GATE: ABUSE COVER-UP IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Rhode Island filmmaker Mary Healey's documentary gives the victims of the Catholic Church a collective voice. It's chilling to hear grown men and women describe their sexual abuse at the hands of trusted priests while seeing footage of those very priests flash across the screen. It's shocking to hear, from the mouth of a perpetrator priest, about the "homoerotic" church-run treatment centers, or about how boys over the age of 14 were considered "fair game as long as you didn't get caught." And it's distressing to hear, through Healey's personal narrative, how Church leadership opted for administrative solutions (the "geographical cure"). In just under an hour, Healey offers a crash course in the historical, legal, religious, and cultural aspects of the Church's scandal. But the film never feels superficial. We are, as one survivor says, "learning about what we don't want to learn about," and through that process, gaining a necessary "knowledge of evil."


The Providence Journal — January 8, 2005
R.I. filmmaker had to put aside 'Catholic girl mindset'

Holy Water-Gate, a documentary that premieres Monday in Brookline, Mass., took a personal toll on the woman who made it.

As a filmmaker documenting the far-reaching sexual-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, Mary Healey had scored a coveted interview. She and her camera were inside the Chicago mansion of Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of the third-largest diocese in the nation. After numerous requests from Healey in 2002, Cardinal George had agreed to an interview.

But as the Warren filmmaker met with the church dignitary in his lakeside residence, where nuns served tea and cookies, she had two instincts: one, as a journalist who believed in hard questions; the other as a Catholic who had grown up believing in the church.

South County Independent — January 8, 2005
Crisis of faith captured on camera

Mary Healey recently received a CINE Golden Eagle Award for her documentary, "Holy Watergate: Abuse Cover-Up in the Catholic Church." The independent filmmaker, who teaches communications and film studies at the University of Rhode Island, joins Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Ken Burns as a recipient of the award.

"I was trying to give the audience this visceral, almost poetic statement that I think everyone can say at some point in their lives they've regretted not doing something, not standing up to somebody," she said. "We've all been through that, and it changes us. Whether we act or not, that changes us."

East Bay Newspapers — January 6, 2005
After refinancing her house to free up funds, and spending five years conducting research and interviews, Warren resident Mary Healey has at long last completed her documentary, "Holy Watergate: Abuse Cover-up in the Catholic Church." The hour-long film will debut for the general public at the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater in Brookline, Mass., on Monday, Jan. 10, at 7:30 p.m.

TownOnline.com — January 6, 2005

The film, which will be screened at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Jan. 10, looks inside the long-hidden situation and offers reasons for its causes while explaining some of its numbing effects. Conlon got interviews with men and women at the center of the crisis, including victims, rights advocates, journalists and, in one shocking case, a perpetrator who speaks openly about his and other priests' behavior.

NewEnglandFilm.com — January 5, 2005
Rough Waters

Mary Healey talks about her documentary "Holy Watergate," which delves into the Catholic Church scandal.

"I think many documentary filmmakers realize that as they immerse themselves in a story they are changed by the events and people they encounter," Conlon says. "This is certainly true for me, and I am really proud of the work. The effect that the film has had on me as an individual is an extremely positive one."

The Cutting Edge: Holy Watergate

"Self-sacrifice of the marathon monks' variety is theoretically present in the lives of Catholic priests, too, but the sordid hunger for power and its application has a greater hold for some (of any religion, creed or profession, for that matter).

This very personal tale by American filmmaker Mary Healey peels away the protective shell of a damaged church. Along the way, it shows how the rest of society, in particular the media, is almost as culpable for averting its eyes and ears for so long.

The high-level protection of abusive priests, which not only kept them from legal punishment but allowed them to continue their abuse of children in new environments, took decades of diligent research and pursuit by victims and a handful of journalists to uncover. Healey puts some history behind the actions of both the church and its pursuers and shows how it was the protection of power and prestige that crippled the church's morality. She also shows us those within the church who have fought to change the culture, including a priest who was himself abused as a child."

- Bernard Zuel, THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD (Australia)