Alex Heeney reviews Sinéad O’Shea’s film Pray for Our Sinners, a heart-wrenching documentary about the quiet resistance to Catholic rule in Ireland.
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Sinéad O’Shea’s Pray for Our Sinners is a heart-wrenching and important documentary about the abusive Catholic rule in Ireland. In the wake of independence, the Catholic Church took over every institution. Then, it used that pervasive power to torture children and women. O’Shea focuses on her hometown, Navan, where a small, quiet, but important resistance was happening. It was so quiet she hadn’t heard about it before, despite growing up in the town. O’Shea reveals the lives broken and just barely saved amidst the widespread Catholic Rule.
At the centre of this story are a married couple of doctors, the Randles. They did everything they could to help fight for the rights of children and women. Often, it was at great personal cost. Along the way, O’Shea documents how the Catholic brainwashing of the country begins in childhood. It’s in schools, at church, and in the home. She then explains how organised religion has contributed to the ongoing abuse of marginalised people. As she repeatedly reminds us, if you live in a small town and don’t have friends to support you, you’re a target.
The film’s narrative begins with the story of Norman, whose extreme beatings at school as a nine-year-old. His torture helped galvanise the fight against corporal punishment in schools across the country. Norman landed on Dr. Randle’s doorstep after a particularly bad beating. This led the Randles to campaign to get the media to reveal the extent of corporal punishment happening in Irish schools both across Ireland and internationally. The campaign was slow but eventually effective. But Norman paid a high price. He was kicked out of school, started working at age nine, had career paths closed off, and is still suffering from PTSD in middle age. There’s still no possibility for compensation in sight.
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O’Shea then focuses most of the film on the consequences of the Catholic Church’s dominance over women, especially those with unwanted pregnancies. We learn about the brutal Mother and Baby homes — where the women were mistreated, many babies died, and many illegal adoptions happened — and the priest in Navan who regularly drove women there. He’s a complicated figure because he regularly rebelled against the church and yet, in this particular way, was its best agent of patriarchal enforcement. We also learn about how the Randles created an alternative space in their own home where women could hide and have their babies in peace — and keep them, too.
As much as Pray for Our Sinners is a crucial history lesson in even more horrors of the Catholic Church than those already widely documented on screen (Indigenous genocide, sexual assault), it’s especially a study in trauma and resistance. We meet so many middle-aged and elderly people who suffered at the church’s hands and still can’t talk about it, can’t face it, can’t deal with it. The trauma is so bad, and the culture of silence is so strong.
It feels like the film’s subjects are telling their stories for the first time. We sense they are only able to do so because of a bond built with the director and because they are telling them in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Their sentences regularly end with the director’s name, reminding us that this is only a story they were willing to tell to this particular person who encouraged it.
They also don’t have the language to talk about their experiences. One woman repeatedly describes her experience at the Mother and Baby home as “it wasn’t very nice.” But it takes several interviews for her to even remember the specifics. Only after O’Shea’s probing does she reveal the horrible things that were said to her while giving birth and the extent of the cruelty in the home. The reticence to talk about the horrors is not just because, as O’Shea explains early in the film, if you talked about your feelings you were considered hysterical. It’s also that the few women we do meet in the film survived with the best outcomes: they got to keep their babies. They were emotionally and often physically tortured, but they realise their experience was common and that it pales compared to so many others’.
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O’Shea is deliberately vague about the personal details of her subjects. Aside from the Randles, we only learn their first names and their particular story which involves the Randles. We know nothing about their professions or any other personal identifying information; there aren’t even chirons to help you keep track of the names (the press kit, I think, deliberately keeps the names out, too). I suspect the reason for this is two-fold. First, O’Shea is granting them their privacy so their stories and names won’t show in a Google search. Second, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a reminder that these are just a few stories of many. And these are ones with relatively happy endings, even though they are still traumatic ones. It allows these women to serve as a stand-in for the widespread suffering of pregnant unmarried women at the hands of the church that happened over decades.
There were several films at TIFF about state-sanctioned institutional oppression of women and marginalised groups around the world, including Unruly (set in Denmark in the 1930s) and Plan 75 (a slight dystopia set in Japan). While most of the other films were essentially, if not explicitly, about eugenics, Pray for Our Sinners is a reminder that once institutional oppression begins, it knows no limits. The film references that disabled people were also oppressed, but is about how even the average person was subject to the harms of the Catholic church, and had no way of escaping it.
Pray for Our Sinners also makes for an interesting companion piece with Alice Winocour’s Paris Memories (also at TIFF 2022), about a woman who survived a mass shooting, and can only recover it by recovering her memories and revisiting the site of the trauma. In Pray for Our Sinners, this is something most people aren’t even able to do, in part because there’s no support for them once they’re confronted with the suppressed trauma.
Pray for Our Sinners also made me appreciate Neasa Ní Chianáin’s films about incredible teachers in Ireland (School Life, co-directed with David Rane) and Northern Ireland (Young Plato, co-directed with Declan McGrath) who take care of their students’ emotional and intellectual lives. Pray for Our Sinners reveals just how far from the norm, in most of Ireland’s history at least, this level of care, empathy, and support in schools has been. Ní Chianáin’s films offer hope for the future of education and how it can help resolve intergenerational trauma rather than create new traumas. These three films would make an extraordinary triple feature about the power of institutions to harm, and equally, how they can do good, instead. Sometimes, it just takes one person to fight back.
In that sense, all three films are hugely inspiring reminders that an individual can make a difference in a rigged system. Like Mike Leigh’s Peterloo — which left me feeling triumphant that although the world is unjust, I can be part of the fight, and that fight matters — Pray for Our Sinners also shows that a few people of modest means can fundamentally change people’s lives, and even catalyse change for a country.
Sinéad O’Shea’s film Pray for Our Sinners was one of Seventh Row’s Best Acquisition Titles of TIFF 2022. The film is still seeking distribution in North America and the UK.
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