In 2002, when allegations of sex abuse by Catholic priests in Boston saturated the national media, they had a familiar ring.  Similar stories of abuse and cover-up by Church leaders had emerged in Louisiana in 1985, in Dallas in 1997, and in Miami in 2000, only to be treated as aberrations and buried.  But this time the story was too big to be ignored.  Soon dioceses across America were deluged with lawsuits from distraught survivors.  An independent study done with the cooperation of Church leaders revealed that in the United States 10,667 survivors had accused 4,392 priests of abuse over the course of five decades. 

Looking for the story that would take audiences beyond the headlines and into the devastating emotional trauma that is at the core of this subject, documentary filmmaker Kirby Dick decided to focus on the experience of one person who had lived through this horror.  In the fall of 2002, Dick and his team contacted survivors, priests, and psychologists in more than 50 dioceses across the country.  According to Dick, “There’s a feeling of bombardment that happens with a major news story, where the coverage is so ubiquitous you tune it out or it just becomes names and statistics.  What was missing in most of these stories was a personal insight into the profound pain that accompanies sex abuse, and how that pain rushes back when one finally tries to tell the world what happened.” 

In December 2002, Dick and his producer flew to Toledo, Ohio to meet with firefighter Tony Comes, then 33, and his wife, Wendy.  During an emotional meeting, Comes described how, at age 14, he was abused by a trusted priest and Catholic schoolteacher.  Comes told how he had buried his pain for years, and only recently discussed his abuse with the man he considered his spiritual leader, Bishop Hoffman of Toledo.  Comes later learned that Hoffman had lied about what he knew.  It was at that point that Comes decided to sue the Church, taking the brave step of going public with his story in hopes that he might help some other survivor still suffering in silence.  By the end of the meeting, Dick knew that he had found the subject for his film. 

Over the next 18 months, Dick made a dozen trips to Toledo with his crew, chronicling Comes’ life in detail.  He grew up in a large Catholic family, the middle child of seven children.  They attended Mass regularly, and he became an altar boy, assisting priests with Sunday services.  Comes attended parochial schools in Toledo, including Central Catholic High School, where he struck up a friendship with the charismatic religion teacher and priest, Dennis Gray.

For Comes’ family, the boy’s strong relationship with a priest was cause for rejoicing – they could be assured that someone was around to guide him.  But Comes wasn’t the only boy that Gray was “mentoring.”  Many weekends he would take a number of boys up to his cabin in Michigan, where they would shoot pool, swim, go skinny-dipping and drink alcohol.  The priest had his own bedroom, but would rotate sleeping assignments and select certain boys to share his room.  Comes would sometimes sleep in Gray’s bedroom, and wake up to find he was being sexually abused.  Repeatedly, Gray cautioned the boys that “whatever happens at the cottage stays at the cottage” and threatened them with severe consequences if they were ever to utter a word to anyone.

But who could Comes tell?  Who would believe him?  Gray was a well-respected priest.  So Comes said nothing.  It was 20 years before Comes fully understood the implications of what happened to him, and how much it had affected his life.

For Dick, who captured some of the darker sides of human experience in his internationally acclaimed film “Sick:  The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist” (Special Jury Prize, Sundance 1997, Lion’s Gate Films), as well as some of the headiest concepts in modern thought with the award-winning “Derrida” (Sundance 2002, Zeitgeist Films), making TWIST OF FAITH represented uncharted psychological territory.  “I’d never encountered trauma like this,” he says, in regard to the survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.  “You look in their eyes and you see the intense pain – something very fundamental was taken away from them.”

Producer Eddie Schmidt had an even more personal reaction.  While not a victim of sexual abuse, Schmidt was raised in a strong Catholic tradition.  “My uncle is a deacon, and I went to confession, received Communion, and was confirmed at age 15.  When Tony showed us his old Communion workbook (in the film), I was stunned – I’d used the exact same book as a kid.  Only then did I fully comprehend that the Church of my youth was the very same Church that had allowed this terrible thing to happen to Tony.”

Comes had first told his wife about his abuse before they were married, and for a long time both thought it was in the past.  But when the stories about the Boston abuses began circulating, everything rushed back for Comes, throwing him into a depression that, even as he was deciding to go public, he couldn’t shake.

For Dick, this was the second and equally important part of the story – the reliving of the pain by not only Comes, but by those close to him, and by many other friends and family members who were hearing about everything for the first time.  “Tony did not want to sue the Church – it was agonizing for him,” says Dick.  “But survivors experience a double betrayal.  Not only was Tony abused by a priest he trusted, but then, when he finally went to tell the bishop what happened, he felt betrayed again when the bishop lied to him.  And that, unfortunately, is a recurring theme in the stories of survivors of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.  It’s only when survivors feel they have nowhere else to turn that they decide to sue the diocese.”

In spite of focusing on these very serious crimes, TWIST OF FAITH is by no means anti-Catholic.  In making this film, Dick was struck by how the Catholic Church plays such a supportive and meaningful role in communities like Toledo.  “One of the many tragedies of this story is that so many of the priests and bishops that were complicit in these crimes have also devoted their lives to helping the poor, promoting justice locally and internationally, and helping to build this strongly knit community,” he comments.

The filmmakers found that Catholicism was an integral part of the city, with stately churches on seemingly every corner, which only made the abuses more tragic.  It also made some people wary of talking to the filmmakers.  Only one local clergyman, Father Stephen Stanbery, who is interviewed in the film, publicly identified himself as a supporter of the survivors of abuse.  While Gray and the Toledo diocese declined to participate in the film, TWIST OF FAITH includes video excerpts of Gray’s deposition, taken in conjunction with the lawsuits brought against him and the diocese.

Because the subject of sex abuse is so hard to deal with, and so easy to deny, Dick was intent on giving the film a psychological dimension – to get audiences to stay inside Comes’ head and understand what he’s feeling.  Key to this strategy was not only filming Comes in intimate situations, but also giving him and his wife their own video cameras so each could share their feelings about what was going on in their lives when the crew wasn’t there.  “It’s a technique we’ve incorporated into four films now,” Dick said, beginning with the film “Chain Camera” (Sundance 2001), which was shot entirely by its subjects. 

As Tony’s and Wendy’s trust grew, they shared other videotapes they’d made, which also became part of the film, including their wedding video and a vacation video.  In one self-filmed scene, Comes tells his (then) eight-year-old daughter what happened to him.  “I have never seen that moment in a documentary film before,” says Dick, “the moment when a father has to let his daughter know that he was abused as a child.”

Ultimately, it is Dick’s belief that, on the strength of Comes’ story, TWIST OF FAITH conveys the deep emotional trauma of sexual abuse by priests in a way that is impossible for audiences to ignore.  He concludes, “One of my sincere hopes is that this film has a profound impact on people’s understanding of this tragedy.  If the film helps to encourage the Catholic Church to reach out to survivors and change the way it deals with this issue, perhaps 20 years from now we won’t be learning about another generation of people who have experienced the same kind of suffering that Tony has lived through his entire life.”