Last night’s PBS program on Frontline, called “The Hand of God,” needs to be watched by all of those who hold so fast and so mindlessly to the corporate hypocrisies of the Catholic Church, as well as by the rest of us who are “recovering Catholics” (a phrase the reflects the evil addiction that today’s Catholic hierarchy goes to great lenghts to feed).
You can watch it online here.

“I was inspired by my brother’s strength of spirit in surviving his abuse,” says Joe Cultrera. “His story was unlike any I had seen in the media. I thought a detailed film about his and my family’s experience would prove healing and freeing for others.”
Paul Cultrera and his siblings were raised in an Italian-Catholic family in Salem, Mass., and attended Catholic school from kindergarten through high school. From an early age they were immersed in the beliefs and teachings of the Catholic Church.
“There was the Catholic Church, and everything else was hell,” Paul recalls. “Everyone beyond the bounds of the Catholic Church was doomed. Everything was presented to you in terms of sin.”

Joe Cultrera, the person who made the documentary, is a friend of a friend of my brother’s. That’s irrelevent except for the fact that it’s the initial reason why I took the hour and a half to watch it, even though its scheduling intruded on my favorite program, “Boston Legal” — which I had to tape and then stay up late to watch.
The documentary uses great compassion and understanding in portraying the deep emotional roots that ethnic communities tend to have in their neighborhood churches — many of which, although solvent and functioning, are being closed by the higher powers of that “one true church.”
The film is a brutal indictment — not of faith or the faithful — but of the powerbrokers who run what has become a corrupt, hyprocritical , and destructively self-perpetuating system that poses as a Christian religion.