In Hell’s Kitchen: The Moral Quagmire of Fr Bobby Carillo
Actor Robert De Niro has been cast as a Catholic priest in three films : True Confessions, The Mission, and Sleepers. The latter tells a spellbinding true story.
June 14, 2023 by Fr Gordon MacRae
I began this post in May, 2019, but a lot has happened since then that caused me to want to start over. This is an important story about a topic still front and center in the world of Catholic affairs: the Catholic sex abuse crisis. If you’re just plain sick of it, well, frankly, so am I. Both mainstream and Catholic media are still saturated with it. I last wrote of it in April, 2023 in “Follow the Money: Another Sinister Sex Abuse Grand Jury Report.”
Fans of Robert De Niro the actor are not necessarily also fans of Robert De Niro the person. Whatever the reasons for that distinction, I want to write of his outstanding roles as a Catholic priest in three controversial films: True Confessions (1981), The Mission (1989) and Sleepers (1996). In each, his character became embroiled in an unforgettable moral quagmire.
The term, “quagmire” first appeared in British literature in 1570. It combines two older British terms, “quag,” with its origin in the word, “quake,” and “mire,” which means to find oneself bogged down in something. A quagmire was first used to refer to becoming trapped in a bog which looks solid enough to walk upon, but then entraps a person in the unseen muck. Today it is used to refer to a situation that seems innocent enough on its surface, but entraps a person in a moral dilemma.
In each of the films above, Robert De Niro portrayed a priest caught up in such a quagmire. I have written before of one of them. In True Confessions, based on a novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, De Niro was cast in the role of Monsignor Desmond Spellacy. Groomed to become Archbishop of Los Angeles, Spellacy becomes marginally implicated in the murder of a prostitute, a crime being investigated by his L.A. homicide detective brother portrayed by Robert Duvall.
The moral quagmire of True Confessions is that the priest is entirely innocent of the crime, but is he innocent of any knowledge of it? If he knows, how does he know? The title of the film and book gives a hint to the nature of the moral quagmire, a nightmare scenario for many Catholic priests.
But the De Niro role that I want to focus on for this post is that of “Father Bobby” Carillo in Sleepers, a 1996 film based on a book of the same title by Lorenzo Carcaterra published in 1995 but written in 1994, the year of my imprisonment. The story reads like a novel, but it is actually a biographical account in which Carcaterra has changed the names of his characters to protect the innocent.
The book and film unfold in the Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan in 1966 when I was in high school. Hell’s Kitchen was then a poor bastion of mostly Irish Catholics in a tough neighborhood — a term used here with an emphasis more on “hood” than “neighbor.”
In Sleepers, Robert De Niro’s character, Father Bobby, is in stark contrast to much of the media portrayal of Catholic priests since then. He is a priest as tough as the neighborhood in which he lives. Father Bobby meets a group of adolescent boys who hang out in the neighborhood. All have absent fathers or abusive fathers, or both, and over time Father Bobby comes to fulfill a role that today would land him squarely in the crosshairs of societal and media suspicion.
Father Carillo’s Moral Quagmire
Father Bobby does not indoctrinate these street kids into faith. That is something he walks more than talks. I hope you catch the meaning of that because it is central to fatherhood. Father Bobby does not drag them into church. Instead, he protects them, cares for them, challenges them, and becomes a father to them and the sole person on Earth that any of them trust. His lack of Catholic indoctrination might not be the witness some of us might hope for, but it is clearly the witness that these boys most need. One of the saddest aspects of the fallout of the sexual abuse crisis of suspicion in the Church is that such a scenario could never happen again.
But even in 1966, as the story unfolds, Father Carillo is keenly aware of appearances and the necessity of professional distance. As an indirect result of keeping his emotional connection to these young men in check, he is one day not present to them when trouble finds them. Several of them commit a petty crime that escalates. A corrupt judge and court system sentences them to time in “juvey” a New York juvenile detention facility. While there, four of them “earn” a stint in solitary confinement. Sleepers is the slang term for juvenile delinquents serving more than six months in solitary confinement.
While there, they are demoralized and dehumanized beyond description. They are beaten by guards and several of them are repeatedly and brutally raped. To make the awful story shorter, they survive and are restored to freedom but could never be “free” again. They emerged from their nightmare destroyed as men, but they hide the truth. They make a pact to never reveal any of this to Father Bobby — first and foremost because they are ashamed.
Twenty years pass. The 14-year-old boys are now 34-year-old men. One became a prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Most of the others became street thugs having dropped out of school and all engagement with the human race as a result of what they endured at the hands of the State. All of them occasionally still see Father Bobby, and to a man, they still trust and revere him.
I have to remind readers at this point that this is not some seedy fictional story. It is a true account. In the early 1990s when Lorenzo Carcaterra wrote it, the mainstream media had no interest in the story because the priest in the account is not the perpetrator of sexual abuse, but rather the savior of its victims. And lest you choose to believe that such abuse could not happen in a state run juvenile justice facility, I have firsthand knowledge to the contrary.
At the time Sleepers was written in 1994, my friend Pornchai Moontri was in the solitary confinement unit of the Maine State Prison for nearly seven years. The news venue, PBS Frontline produced a segment on that very same place filmed just months after Pornchai was transferred from there to the New Hampshire State Prison. If you have never viewed PBS Frontline’s Solitary Nation [part1, part2] , be brave and consider doing so. The abuse by guards is all masked because they were on camera and knew it, but the true nature of such a place remains clear.
The Reckoning
Back to Sleepers. One day, some twenty years after Father Bobby’s friends emerged from solitary confinement, two of them ventured into a dark neighborhood bar. Seated alone in a booth was “Nokes,” the most monstrous and sadistic of the guards who sexually assaulted and dehumanized them twenty years earlier. By the end of the day, his victims exacted the justice denied.
In the aftermath, Father Carillo learned the entire truth of what happened to these men in juvenile detention. He then had to wrestle with the deepest, most perplexing moral quagmire of his life as a man and as a priest. He was told by their lawyer that he alone could save them with an alibi defense. All of this painfully reminded me of another story told in my post, “Getting Away with Murder on the Island of Guam.”
Most who have read that story agree that all the media hype about the supposed crimes of Catholic priests — some sadly true but many not at all — pale in comparison to the crimes committed against Pornchai and his mother. And yet, the survivor in that story, like the survivors in Sleepers, fled not from the Catholic Church but to it. Pornchai himself confirmed this in a post written upon his arrival in Thailand, “Free at Last Thanks to God and You!”
Pornchai and I had another friend, TJ, who was released from prison only to find himself back here at age 26 with a new petty offense. Just after Pornchai left in 2020, TJ was moved from solitary confinement to a crowded cellblock. He unpacked his few possessions and obtained a pass to come to see me in the prison Law Library. With his head bowed in silent shame for his failure to live uprightly in freedom, he told me only that life was hard and he “did something stupid.” I don’t know the details.
What I do know, and it is well documented, is that for much of his young life until he was old enough to escape, TJ was a victim of unspeakable sexual and physical violence. The pairing of sex and violence is especially psychologically destructive. Like the young men in Sleepers, TJ and Pornchai both carried in their hearts a devastating devaluation of their lives. With every day in “fight or flight” mode, freedom was stolen from them long before prison.
As an accused Catholic priest, one would think that I would be the last person TJ would want anything to do with, but Pornchai and I taught him that he need not be forever defined by the sins of others. We did not allow his past to excuse his present and neither should he, but we also placed his offenses into the totality of his life. We saw through his façade and challenged him too grieve his past without letting it rule his present.
So I, too, was in a quagmire here — with Pornchai and TJ and others. I was left with the irony of sheltering them not only from what happened to them, but also from what happened to me. When leaders of the Church built upon God’s Truth, God’s Justice and God’s Mercy reflected none of these, I covered for them in the presence of Pornchai and TJ. They looked to the Church for healing and hope, and I could never deprive them of that. Neither could Father Bobby Carillo.
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Note from Fr. Gordon MacRae: This post ends in another glaring irony. At the time my diocese was besieged by a grand jury report from the State of New Hampshire in 2003, the State was itself hiding an enormous sexual abuse scandal brought by former residents of its Youth Detention Center. Over the last year, that story had come to light.
The Diocese of Manchester paid $30 million in unquestioned mediated settlements over the last 30 years, while state officials raked the Church over the coals. Now the State of New Hampshire has earmarked $100 million to settle in excess of 1,300 pending lawsuits against the state. One attorney described this as “the largest child abuse case in U.S. history.” Unlike its treatment of the Catholic Church, however, the State has not convened a grand jury to investigate and create a grand jury report as has happened to Catholic institutions across the land. Apparently, for the State some things are best left in the dark.
You may also be interested in these related links:
In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men
Grand Jury, St Paul’s School and the Diocese of Manchester
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”