Jason Berry’s career has focused not just on exposing clerical abuse - his other preoccupation is jazz, the subject of a new documentary
His 1992 book Lead Us Not Into Temptation about the Gauthe case led to nationwide exposure on then issue in the US in what then became known there as “the Watergate of the Catholic Church.” He went on to expose one of the church’s most powerful and notorious predators, Fr Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legionaries of Christ and close person friend of Pope John Paul II.
But exposing clerical child sexual abuse has not been the main preoccupation of Berry’s life. Apart from his family, he has two great loves: his native city and the genre of music it created - jazz. Both inspired two of his books, Up from the Cradle of Jazz, a history of New Orleans’ music published in 1986, and City of a Million Dreams in 2018.
Berry told The Irish Times “the years I spent interviewing abuse survivors shaped my sensibility on this film about jazz funerals. The sorrows of loss and yearning or transcendence we filmed suggest that dancing for the dead achieves a closeness to God”.
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