THE KEEPERS

The Keepers tells the story of Sister Catherine Cesnik, a 26-year-old nun living in Baltimore who was abducted and murdered back in the 1960s. The case was never solved, but was linked to a horrific history of sexual abuse by a chaplain called Father Joseph Maskell

We all know the Catholic church has kept its share of hideous secrets. As “Spotlight” and other cases showed, priests have used their authority to sexually abuse underage girls and boys under the protection of the Church, which used its power to squash the press.

And yet, Netflix’s “The Keepers” is shocking. Ryan White’s docuseries blows the lid off a Catholic scandal from the ’60s, one that is still playing out. This true cold-case crime story has not been solved — and is still unfolding with new developments.

Sister Cathy Cesnik was 26 and a beloved teacher at Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School when she was murdered in 1969. Fifty years later, documentarian White, journalists, and former students delve into the mystery and the role the school’s chaplain, the late Father Maskell, may have played in it. Decades after they left the school, women in their 60s tell White about Maskell’s shocking sexual abuse, and the institutional corruption and cover-ups around it. White got his title from one of the survivors, who used the expression “the keepers” to refer to the women who hold on to all of those secrets and lies and keep the truth from slipping away.

In 1969, Sister Cathy Cesnik disappeared; months later, her body was found in a secluded wood. In 1994 and again in 2014, “Jane Doe,” one of Sister Cathy’s former students, recounted her sexual abuse by the school chaplain. “The Keepers” reveals who she is, and fresh outreach into the community brought out 40 other women who suffered similar abuse. Over seven episodes, White unpeels the layers of this horrifying network of Catholic and government corruption and lies via extensive interviews and reenactments.

The reporting

White worked closely with freelance journalist Tom Nugent; he’d tracked the story for years, but couldn’t get it published and resorted to blog posts instead. “The story was virtually undercover,” said White. “There was not a lot of information about it. It bubbles up in the ’90s in a hearing around Jane Doe — but the institutions and the church were successful in squashing it. Then there was virtual silence for the last 25 years. Everything we were investigating or uncovering was new to us.”

Finding Gemma and Abbie, two loyal students of Sister Cathy who doggedly post everything they learn on a Facebook page, “were to me cinematic gold,” said White, “a fresh way to get inroads to a true-crime story. They were doing their [reporting] and we were doing ours. We’re covering their uncovering. They didn’t understand why we would want to document certain points of their process. But it was a way to get confrontations as they ask questions of people directly involved in the crimes about why they failed these children.”

At the heart of the mystery is school chaplain Father Maskell, who died a free man in 2001.”He was under the care of the archdiocese,” said White. “His path of destruction never ended with any literal form of justice. He got away with the abuse in the ’80s, fled to Ireland. The American criminal justice system and the church never did anything. We don’t have the answers. We don’t nail a perpetrator. Institutions failed. Victims are still around. The state attorney, Baltimore police, and the people in power in the legislature repeatedly blocked child-abuse assertions because of the lobbying of the Church. They will be held accountable. It won’t go as far as putting someone in jail, but putting someone accountable for what they failed to do.”