[News Release] Salem Film Fest Hosts World Premiere of Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood

Salem Film Fest and BishopAccountability.org
February 4, 2021

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news5/2021_02_04_Salem_Film_Fest_Sipe_Film_Release.pdf

As part of its winter series preceding its festival dates, Salem Film Fest is presenting the World Premiere of the documentary Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood. Streaming of the film will be available starting on Saturday, February 20, 2021, at 4:00 p.m. EST on Salem Film Fest’s streaming channel. The one-hour film is produced by Zingerplatz Pictures and BishopAccountability.org. A free live panel with the wife, friends, and scholars of the subject, Richard Sipe, will take place at 8:00 p.m. EST on Saturday, February 20th, with a live chat function. The film and discussions will then be available via Salem Film Fest’s video-on-demand channel through Thursday, March 4. Ticket link and information can be accessed at SalemFilmFest.com.

The documentary, directed by Joe Cultrera (Hand of God, Frontline, 2006), explores the life and work of the late A.W. Richard Sipe (1932–2018), the revolutionary scholar of sex, celibacy, and clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic church. Sipe’s key role in the Boston abuse crisis was dramatized in the Academy Award-winning movie Spotlight (2015).

Long before 2002, when the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team made it headline news, Richard Sipe was a key figure in the Catholic church and its problems with sex. As a Benedictine therapist-monk, Sipe helped hundreds of priests in their struggles with celibacy. Sipe: Sex, Lies, and the Priesthood, takes us back to those days and Sipe’s upbringing in Minnesota, and forward to his work with survivors and his groundbreaking books: A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy and Sex, Priests, and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis.