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San Francisco Chronicle, October 19, 2008
‘Immaculate Confession’: priests, nuns in love
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Simone Grudzen always knew her family was different. It wasn’t every kid in San Jose who had a priest for a father and a nun for a mother.
“I never volunteered the information as a kid or later as a teenager,” she says. “Because then I would have to explain. Also, I didn’t quite understand the story myself.” In 1966, Grudzen’s father, Jerry, was ordained at Maryknoll Catholic Missionary Society in Ossining, N.Y. At Maryknoll, he met and fell in love with Grudzen’s mother, Marita, a nun. At first the couple resisted a physical relationship, hoping to form a spiritual union. When that became impossible, they left the church and married.
In her film “Immaculate Confession,” Grudzen explores the story that she knew only “in bits and pieces” as a child.
“It was hard to understand because it was such a mythic love story,” Grudzen said in the Bernal Heights apartment she shares with her partner, Emily Drabant. “My sister and I didn’t understand the gravity of it until our teens.”
“Immaculate Confession,” which Grudzen directed and also produced with her older sister, Corita, will premiere next Sunday in the United Nations Association Film Festival. Grudzen, 32, studied documentary filmmaking at New York University.
“I always saw myself working in documentary,” she said. “And because this was a real story in my life and my parents’ life, I felt that it was just a natural progression to do the film.”
Instead of doing a social-issue documentary with a lot of statistics and a broad overview, Grudzen decided to tell three individual stories.
“I interviewed 100 priests before we shot, because we wanted to decide who we wanted to focus on,” she said. “I think it’s a really interesting subject - celibacy and the priesthood - but I felt like we would reach people better if we told a few intimate stories and got to know these characters a little better.”
In addition to her parents, Grudzen chose John Dee, a Minneapolis ex-priest and musician who had recently been widowed, and Tom Durkin, a priest-turned-sex guru who moved to Hawaii and embraced Eastern spirituality and communal living.
“I didn’t want to focus so much on the politics and history so much as I wanted to humanize these characters. You know, once you become a priest, you’re sort of leaving your life behind - your family, your friends - so you really lose your identity in a way. And that’s what the church wants. And I guess I wanted to film these people reclaiming their humanity and reclaiming their sexuality.”
In her film, Grudzen refers briefly to the molestation scandals that unmoored the Catholic Church in recent years. She runs a title card at the beginning that says, “Priests who molested children many times are allowed to continue to administer the sacraments. Whereas, once a priest marries, he’s immediately excommunicated.”
“That’s a really important point,” Grudzen says, “that these priests who had integrity - who came out with their love - were immediately excommunicated upon marrying.”
Apart from that, she doesn’t address the molestation crisis.
“I felt that that’s a whole other film,” she said, “and I felt that would really overshadow these stories of integrity.”
In one generation, the image of priests and the public’s faith in them as spiritual guides has taken a devastating turn. In the ’40s and ’50s, Grudzen says, “to be a priest was really to be a rock star. If you were in the middle class or working class, that was the way to advance your education, the way to travel and the way to just sort of become exalted. You became someone everyone can look up to. And that’s how my dad saw it as well.”
Today, “American culture is definitely moving away from a young priesthood,” Grudzen said. “There are more priests over 90 than under 30. One in four churches in the United States is without a parish priest.” To offset the shortage, priests are imported to this country from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Philippines. Sri Lanka.
“Optional celibacy,” Grudzen says, “is the direction the church should go.”
At one time, the Catholic Church permitted marriages, but in 1139 established a mandatory celibacy doctrine to keep property within the church. In the mid-’60s, at the time of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (Vatican II), many priests were optimistic that the marriage ban would be lifted.
“Priests and nuns who had not left (the church) yet thought that it was right around the corner,” Grudzen says. “So a lot of these priests and nuns were sort of informally pairing off, thinking, ‘OK, just another year.’ ”
Grudzen’s parents were part of that generation. When they fell in love, she said, “they were in a state of crisis, and I don’t think either of them really knew how it was going to turn out. They were taking a leap of faith.”
When her father was assigned to Bolivia for one year, her parents sent covert love letters to each other on reel-to-reel tapes. Her mother’s fellow nuns collaborated in smuggling the tapes to avoid the suspicion of the mother superior.
It was her parents’ example of “following their hearts” and weathering the rejection of family and church, Grudzen says, that made it easier for her to come out as a lesbian.
“They really inspired me to live my life as I want to live it - with conviction and a sense of inner truth,” she said. “I got that from their story.”
Grudzen has been in a relationship for one year with Drabant, a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Stanford University. She says her parents never had a problem with her sexuality. “They were and are awesome. They’re really accepting, really progressive. I think I got really lucky.”
Having grown up with a priest father, and having met so many priests in preparation for her film, Grudzen believes strongly in the value of religious service - particularly in the tradition of working with the undeserved and the poor.
“I think a lot of change has to happen,” she said. “I don’t feel included in the Catholic Church, given my sexuality. But I recognize that a lot of Catholics are really great people, and I have no issue with the community. My beef isn’t with Catholics; it’s with the Vatican hierarchy and the politics of the church.”
IMMACULATE CONFESSION (not rated) screens at 3:30 p.m. next Sunday at the United Nations Association Film Festival in Annenberg Auditorium, Stanford University. (650) 725-2787, www.unaff.org.
To see a trailer for “Immaculate Confession,” go to www.immaculateconfession.com.
E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page N - 26 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Religion News Service, October 18, 2008
Simone Grudzen
By Joanna Corman
Simone Grudzen is the daughter of an excommunicated Catholic priest and a nun. She is the director of the new film, “Immaculate Confession.” Religion News Service photo courtesy of Jacqui Galle.
Simone Grudzen and her sister, Corita Grudzen, are the daughters of a priest and a nun who fell in love when their father, Gerald, was a seminarian. The couple married six months after his ordination and the church subsequently excommunicated him.
Growing up, the sisters always knew their family was different and vowed to tell their story on film. The result is “Immaculate Confession,” a 55-minute documentary directed by Simone and produced by Corita. The film also profiles two other priests who married, exploring why they broke their vows of celibacy and the fallout on their families.
The film debuts Oct. 26 at the United Nations Association Film Festival at Stanford University. Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Why did you want to tell your parents’ story?
A: My sister and I grew up hearing bits and pieces of my parents’ love story and it always seemed mythic. We wanted to get to the bottom of what really happened.
We wanted to research what the value was in mandatory celibacy and also what the value was in excommunicating these priests who made the brave decision to get married. A lot of priests who have straight and gay affairs are allowed to maintain the priesthood. It’s just when a priest wants to go public with his love of someone that he’s excommunicated.
Q: Why didn’t your parents tell you about their romance, how they fell in love, before you made the documentary?
A: I think the experience of being excommunicated and ousted from their whole community, their histories, their commitment, just being forced out of the church was so painful and so hard that I think it’s like a really bad breakup. You don’t want to talk about it and you want to move on. It took them decades to be able to really delve into it and to be willing to share with us.
Q: Your parents were forced out of the church after they married. What effect did that have on their religious practice?
A: They stopped going to church. My father actually served in the Episcopal Church for a while. They formed a small community and they formed a home church. They still had Communion and did that, obviously, outside of the church walls. At the heart of their belief system and their values is that basically community makes the church.
Q: How did growing up the daughter of a priest and a nun shape you?
A: I inherited a very basic belief that people are inherently good and also a very strong sense of spirituality and a strong sense that there is greater meaning to life.
Q: How did your parents’ experience shape your views on religion?
A: Seeing my parents’ experience with religion and having been excommunicated for falling in love and getting married, I realize the hypocrisy of the church. I think also, my sister and I are almost like bastards of the Catholic Church. We are daughters of a priest and a nun. We are outsiders. I don’t want to be a traditional Catholic, although I do recognize my Catholic heritage and I respect that.
Q: In the film, you make the point that “priests who sexually abused children continued to administer the sacraments while priests who married were excommunicated.” What larger point are you making?
A: I think that expresses more of the hypocrisy of the church because in my mind, that’s one of the worst evils one could ever commit — to molest a vulnerable child. The fact that my dad was excommunicated and that there are other priests who have molested multiple children and are still allowed to practice the sacraments, I just really abhor the hierarchy and the politics of that.
Q: What do you think of mandatory celibacy for clergy?
A: I believe in optional celibacy within the Catholic priesthood.
Q: Why?
A: I think that there are a lot of young men who would be amazing priests who will not become priests because of the mandatory celibacy requirements. The church has lost so many wonderful priests because of this requirement. Sexuality is a human right, and I don’t think that the church should have the power to take that away.
