Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Directors: Nial Fulton and Sarah Ferguson, Netflix.
Award-winning Australian directors Nial Fulton and Sarah Ferguson deliver an astonishing documentary series. The revelations are compelling, though disturbing to watch.
In a world television first, cameras are permitted into the trials of two Catholic priests facing charges of sex-crimes against children. Their disclosures and frank confessions are jaw-dropping, exposing a web of conspiracy and perversion. With the help of victims and police investigators, Revelation brings to account some of the most powerful figures in the Australian church.
Over three episodes, Revelation exposes the conspiracy of silence that enabled these unimaginable crimes, told for the first time in the words of the perpetrators themselves. We learn details of the crimes of Father Vincent Ryan and Brother Bernard McGrath, who committed horrific abuse against children in their care.
In bristling encounters, convicted priests attempt to justify their depravity as victims desperately seek justice before their elderly abusers die.
In the first episode, we hear details of Father Vincent Ryan’s crimes. He was one of the Catholic Church’s first paedophile priests to be convicted anywhere in the world.
During the trial, Sarah Ferguson goes into the maximum-security prison to interview Brother Bernard McGrath, one of the world’s most prolific paedophiles and the first member of his secretive global order to break ranks.
The system that enabled their heinous crimes is laid bare through the trials that expose how the Catholic Church chose secrecy over transparency and paedophiles over their victims.
As the Church faces its reckoning, Cardinal Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic, stands accused of multiple allegations of child sexual abuse when he was a young priest in the 1970s.
Directed by AACTA Award winner Nial Fulton (Hitting Home, Borderland) and Gold Walkley Award-winning journalist Sarah Ferguson (A Bloody Business), this is a spellbinding and shattering docuseries
It is inconceivable to think one will not be moved by the trauma and tragedy of the victims as they recount stolen childhoods.
- Revelation is streaming on Netflix
