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Deliver Us From Evil

2006, Movie, NC-17, 101 mins

Deliver Us From Evil: Review

DELIVER US FROM EVIL
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It's estimated that serial pedophile Father Oliver O'Grady abused well over 100 children during his career as a California priest, though the exact number of his victims may never be known. But the most infuriating revelation in Amy Berg's powerful documentary is the lengths to which current Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahoney and other church officials went to protect Father O'Grady and themselves, even though it meant knowingly delivering countless other children into a child molester's hands. Berg begins by tracking Father O'Grady's crimes through the memories of a group of survivors and their families, then records the actions taken by several parents and one courageous cleric to call attention to what they suspected was a widespread problem. Then-bishop of Stockton, Merlin Guilfoyle, and later his ambitious successor, Bishop Mahoney (who hoped to become archbishop of L.A. and didn't need a pedophile scandal on his watch), solved the problem by quietly moving O'Grady from one parish to another. None of O'Grady's new homes were farther than 55 miles apart, so the moves conveniently enabled "Father Ollie" to continue molesting his prior victims while exposing himself to a new flock. O'Grady was eventually arrested and tried for his crimes in what became the most notorious sex-abuse case in church history, and Berg provides revealing clips taken from a series of depositions given by Cardinal Mahoney and two other high-ranking officials, the bulk of which boil down to three stock responses: "I don't know," "I can't remember" and "Not that I was aware of." Abuse survivors Nancy Sloan, Ann Jyono and a young man identified only as Adam, whose mother O'Grady seduced so he'd have access to her son, share their stories, but what really hits home is how evidently their abuse informs not only their lives but the lives of their guilt-ridden parents. O'Grady, who makes himself fully available to Berg's camera, emerges as a smiling, easygoing man who seems to have made his peace with what he's been doing; he goes so far as to write letters to several victims inviting them to a kiss-and-make-up get-together. But his simplistic conclusion that "this never should have happened," and the dry-eyed, chillingly matter-of-fact manner in which he describes molesting a frightened young boy suggests that whatever decency he possesses was never any match for his deformed sexual desires. Berg's anger is palpable throughout, and the expert interviews she includes yield interesting insights into the possible whys of both the long history of pedophilia within the Catholic Church (celibacy at a young age results in psychosexual arrested development) and the Church's response (any kind of sex involving a priest is a violation of clerical celibacy so it doesn't matter if the sex is with child), which still amounts to little more than willful ignorance and plausible deniability as the lives of their most vulnerable charges are destroyed around them. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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