Thank God I Never Met Fr. John Geoghan

The critically acclaimed movie Spotlight opens in 1976, at a Boston Police station, where two policemen discuss the arrest of Catholic priest Fr. John J. Geoghan for child molestation, and a high ranking cleric talks to the mother of the children. The Assistant District Attorney then enters the precinct and tells the policemen not to let the press get wind of what has happened. The arrest is hushed up, and the priest is released.

The whole movie is centered around the abuses of Fr. John Geoghan, which were hushed up by the Boston Archdiocese. He was the priest who had helped spark the investigations of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church around the world.

Feeling Haunted by Joan ... and in Love

Renee Falconetti as Joan of Arc

It is said that if you put a frame around something, then it will be considered a work of art. This should tell us something about how important a frame is to art. When incorporated in just the right way, the frame is what can make the art.

One of my favorite movies is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. He knew how to frame his art. When I was a child, a commercial came on the television advertising a showing of the movie Psycho on a local TV station. I didn't know about framing at the time, as I was only about 4 or 5 years old, but the images from the movie haunted me, and even though the commercial only implied the shower scene, for years every time I took a shower I would only think of Psycho and who could be in the room with me as I shut my eyes to shampoo my hair.

A Reflection on D-Day

US Army troops waded ashore at Omaha Beach in northwestern France on June 6, 1944.

Like most children before Saving Private Ryan was released in 1998, I knew very little about D-Day from school. It was pretty much taught to us as a day that began the United States involvement in the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. I had also read a little about it, but was still very ignorant of its significance. It wasn't until college in 1997 that my girlfriend (and future wife) asked if she could see the 1962 film The Longest Day she had rented from Blockbuster in my dorm room (I was one of the few that had a TV and VCR in my room) for a report she was writing that I began to learn more about D-Day. D-Day had been a special day in her family, because her mother's uncle had stormed the beaches of Normandy, survived for about three days after, until he was finally shot dead by Nazis. Still, she did not know much about D-Day herself, so for both of us The Longest Day would be our first major introduction to the subject.