Revelation

Sarah Ferguson spends her working life tackling confronting stories but none has tested her like Revelation, a three-part series on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, in which she comes face to face with some of Australia's most notorious serial paedophiles.

"Throughout the long-running scandal of clerical abuse in Australia, there was one voice we hadn't heard, that of the perpetrators. I wanted to ask them how they led their double lives and how the church enabled them, but how do you interview men whose crimes are so vile and disturbing?

"It was a struggle not to let my revulsion at their crimes drag me off course.”

One of the interviews was conducted behind bars in a maximum-security prison where Bernard McGrath, a former brother from the Order of St John of God and headmaster in residential schools in Australia and New Zealand, is serving 39 years for crimes against children.

"A prison warden brought McGrath into a secure room where we'd set up the cameras. He tried immediately to draw me into a whispered private conversation," recalls Ferguson.

"I was prepared for this because his lawyer had warned that he would try to manipulate me. I moved back on my stool, making him lean towards me, shifting the power balance. I was apprehensive, not because of who he was but because of the professional challenge of drawing him out.”

Ferguson interviewed Vincent Ryan, a priest of the Maitland-Newcastle diocese on the eve of his trial. Ryan had already spent 14 years in prison and was facing new charges from men who had been altar boys in his church in the 1970s and 1980s.

"The interview went for hours across two days,” says Ferguson.

"Ryan looked at me at one point and said whatever I thought of him, he was sure of God's forgiveness. I am not easily offended because it obscures critical thinking, but this outraged me. Not because it wasn't possible according to his faith but because he had not earned it.

“He was so far from understanding the effect of his crimes that he was nowhere near forgiveness.

These were difficult interviews because as individuals they've spent many years practised in deception, both deceiving themselves and other people.”

“So even though they have been convicted, they don't want to talk about what they did except on their own terms and there is still a strong sense of solidarity towards the church.

"They told me more than they intended. After the interviews I was physically and mentally drained.”

Throughout filming, Ferguson was conscious of the confronting nature of the material and its potential impact on the audience.

"There is a risk in pulng criminals like this on camera, the material has to justify the affront. You have to be very conscious of what the effect will be on the viewer of hearing and watching a paedophile priest talking about his life, that's right on the edge.

“But the moment of seeing the person themselves, the person who actually perpetrated these crimes, in their ordinariness, it is a revelation.

"This is this ultimate double life, they are standing up in church on Sunday preaching about morals and committing heinous acts before and after, sometimes immediately before and immediately after.

How is someone capable of leading a life like that?”

Identifying suitable cases of accused men willing to take part in Revelation and navigating the legal hurdles to get cameras into court were enormous tasks.

"Finding priests or brothers willing to have their trial filmed was extremely difficult," says Ferguson. “This is a new frontier, filming sexual assault trials.”

"We had the support of the Chief Judge of the NSW District Court and the Chief Judge of the County Court in Victoria who, to their immense credit, got the arguments about bringing these cases into the public domain.

"The Director of Public Prosecutions in NSW and Victoria and three trial judges were all crucial parts of the process, along with barristers and solicitors. These are heavily protected cases.

"There is great concern in the system to protect the victims of child sexual abuse going to court, there are individuals you can't identify but we found a way to tell the stories.”

Over her career Ferguson has witnessed and reported on dreadful things, mass death from the Boxing Day tsunami, the suffering of abused women and children escaping domestic violence and forced marriage and the exploitation of the global people smuggling trade.

All have left a mark, but none like Revelation.

"The experience of making this series has scored deep lines of empathy and understanding in me, of the crime, of the complicity of a powerful, self-serving institution and above all the ruinous consequences of child abuse on an innocent being who is ripped from childhood in that moment," she says.

"I've spent my professional life understanding power and trying to give succour to the weak when abused by power but nothing before this had taken me so far into human selfishness and suffering.”