The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Sandy Hook priest focus on short movie
NEWTOWN — Two years after the massacre of 16 children and a teacher in his small-town primary school in central Scotland, Monsignor Basil O’Sullivan was dismayed to realize he was crying all the time.
Far from feeling better with the passage of time after the deadliest shooting in modern British history, O’Sullivan was feeling worse. He didn’t know at the time he was having a breakdown.
All he knew was a priest who cried at the sight of a 5-year-old was of no use to his parishioners.
Little did O’Sullivan know how important his experience would become 14 years later, in 2012, after the massacre of 20 children and six educators at a small-town school in Connecticut.
O’Sullivan had never met the pastor of the only Catholic church in Newtown, Monsignor Robert Weiss of St. Rose of Lima, and O’Sullivan had no way of knowing Weiss was preparing Masses for eight children in five days.
But O’Sullivan’s heart told him what to do, because O’Sullivan’s heart knew the mass murder of little children is a trauma unlike anything a priest has ever seen.
“It leaves a mark that never goes away,” O’Sullivan said last week from a cottage in Dunblane, Scotland, his parishioners bought for him when he retired. “I was keen to get in touch with (Weiss), knowing very well what he was experiencing at that moment when he had to face his congregation, and what his parishioners were going through.”
What happened next is the subject of a short film that debuts Sunday at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan.
The 20-minute short, directed and produced by the same team behind the 2016 documentary “Newtown,” dramatizes the transforming power that personal presence has in life’s most isolating moments.
“It was priest to priest, pastor to pastor,” said Weiss, choking up as he remembered receiving O’Sullivan’s gentle, grandfatherly offer to help in an email two days after the Sandy Hook massacre. “I didn’t know what I was doing myself, except that I had to answer him for being so thoughtful.”
The bond that grew between the two caught the attention of filmmaker Kim Snyder, who was in Newtown documenting the devastation in the community.
“There is an unbelievable solidarity that happens in many of these sister communities of mass gun violence,” said Snyder, whose short film, “Notes from Dunblane: Lessons from a School Shooting,” was filmed in Newtown and Scotland in 2013.
“In this short, we tried to show the incredible strength that these two priests have to be vulnerable and human to others,” Snyder said. “Ultimately, it’s a piece about empathy and presence.”
The film has multiple themes — the seasons of grief, the link between personal tragedy and universal experience, and the healing power of time.
It’s also a film of contrasts, between the winter in Newtown and the spring in Dunblane, between the occasional jokes of O’Sullivan and the ready tears of Weiss, and between the tough gun laws enacted in Britain and the lack of federal action in the U.S.
More than anything else the film is a story of two priests who went through hell. The story is told through footage of church events, in their own words in emails to each other, and culminates with O’Sullivan’s visit to Newtown for the first anniversary of Sandy Hook.
The film’s debut comes five years after the worst crime in modern Connecticut history, when Weiss is one of the few community leaders remaining of those who comforted people when night was at its darkest.
Weiss is open about the fact that he suffers from post-traumatic stress, with high levels of anxiety in certain situations and nights marked by sleeplessness and nightmares.
But because of the strength he has drawn from O’Sullivan, Weiss reaches out to fellow priests, pastors and rabbis when other communities are ripped apart by mass shootings.
“There was a scene in the film’s rough cut when Father O’Sullivan is walking into the cemetery in springtime where his children are buried, and I am walking into the woods in winter,” Weiss said, breaking into tears. “It really shows where we both are. He is in a very different place, and they have accomplished a lot, so he is at peace; and I am just starting the journey.”
Grandfatherly advice
The release of “Notes from Dunblane,” which plays at cinemas in Battery Park and Chelsea this week, has caused Weiss to think more about those traumatic days when the only thing Newtowners had to hold onto was each other’s pain.
“We were getting 1,500 to 1,600 emails a day at the church, and I had people here 24/7 answering the phone and emails, and when they brought me the email from Father Basil, to be honest, I had kind of forgotten about the whole Dunblane situation,” Weiss said.
But O’Sullivan, now 85, has never forgotten that day. Sixteen five and sixyear-olds were killed, along with a teacher, and 12 others were injured before the gunman killed himself.
”You can imagine what bullets can do to five-yearolds,” O’Sullivan added. “It was something none of us had ever experienced.”
After Sandy Hook, O’Sullivan knew what Weiss needed to do. He advised Weiss to keep praying, to reach out to fellow clergy and to take care of his health. More recently, he suggested Weiss write a book.
Weiss tried to take the advice, including undergoing three years of therapy. It helped him understand that trauma triggers the unreconciled pain in a person’s life, which needs to be treated along with the emotional wound caused by the traumatic event itself.
But Weiss admits he struggles. He lost a dear friend two years ago, a priest was his travel companion and confidant.
He said he has written a few good chapters for the book, but the key chapter — on forgiveness — is not ready to be written, because much of Newtown is not ready to practice it.
“I am aware I am still suffering a lot from posttrauma,” Weiss says. “You just have to turn it over to the Lord, because it is beyond what you can do. You have to turn it over and just trust.”
In fact, Weiss says, he realizes more and more as he reflects on the week after the massacre — when the church was crowded with wakes and funerals — it was an impossible feat for any pastor to pull off without the grace of a faith-filled community.
Weiss had a plan to get through the funeral Masses for the eight first-graders. He picked three lessons from each child’s life to serve as a model. Weiss knew the children from the church’s religious education program.
“For example, the little Josephine Gay girl was so autistic, and after Mass we would get down on one knee because she used to love to trace with her fingers the decorations on our vestments,” Weiss said. “So we said we learned from her that she had this disability but she can still touch our lives with her unique way of being.”
O’Sullivan said as much when he visited Newtown in 2013 — a moment among the most memorable in “Lessons from Dunblane.”
During a homily at St. Rose of Lima on the first anniversary of the massacre, O’Sullivan repeated words from a homily he gave to Prince Charles and mourners at Dunblane Cathedral 15 years earlier.
“God is love,” O’Sullivan said, as the documentary cuts between both scenes. “And love, although it looks weak, always overcomes hatred and evil.”
The final piece of advice O’Sullivan gave to Weiss was to be open to the idea of living in Newtown after his retirement, should Newtowners do for him what Dunblaners did for O’Sullivan and buy him a cottage.
Weiss doubted, given local real estate prices, that that is in the cards.
“Father Basil said to keep an open mind about it, because he said he will always be the priest from Dunblane, and I will always be the priest from Sandy Hook.”