Deliver Us from Evil

I saw this movie tonight and found it excellent. Parts of this movie made my skin crawl, others moved me to tears. The sight of a sixty year old man, with a deep bellowing voice, weep in anguish at the pain his daughter went through and the deception the whole family experienced: this touched me deeply.

This movie also offered some helpful insights in alternating between both the abused and the abuser looking back on the abuse. The abuser looks back on it w/ detached shame and remorse. The victims and their families rage with intense, fresh pain despite the decades.

The ray of hope in this movie is Father Thomas Doyle, a priest who reaches out to the families with compassion, hugs, apologies. He's articulate and knowledgeable about church polity and politics as well as the "spiritual rape" that occurs when kids are abused by a religious leader; and he knows his Jesus, that is, he shows Christ talked about "suffering little children to come to me..for such is the kingdom of God."

I still don't understand how the church leadership in California (i.e. in this specific case) leadership forgot this teaching of Jesus regarding children: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

I wish this topic would have come up more in the film.

Addendum: * My thoughts led me back to this film as I recently learned that someone had abused one of my former students. "Deliver us from evil" came immediately to mind; this movie woke me up to the fact that a nice/charming/well-mannered/harmless-looking/great-with-kids person can really be dangerous evil and treacherous, i.e. "prowling around like a roaring lion." For this reason, I think every adult should see this movie.

(Just today I read how a man in Chicago abused a girl after befriending her mom. "She said their friendship grew to the point where she allowed him to take her son and daughter on outings." I cannot but think that if either the mom/neighbor/relative/friend saw this movie someone might have said uttered a word of caution which could have prevented such a tragedy).

* Clearly the priests who shuffled around the abusers (and effectively covered up these scandals), underestimated the trauma and damage caused by abuse. But just what *were* they thinking? "They won't remember it." "They'll get over it". Yet the testimony of the people in this movie show that the long-term damage is enormous. What really went on in the heads of the leadership? I'd like to know.

You judge a tree by its fruit. This documentary succeeds in letting viewers behold this dark little secret that the Catholic Church hopes you will never find out about: The rotting fruit of their sin-harvest that comes from unspeakably heinous crimes against children that are tolerated by them as being business-as-usual! Love is the desire to do good to others but that is the antithesis of all that the Catholic Church represents as it was portrayed in this documentary and as revealed by fearless journalists all over the world who have courageously accepted the bold challenge to find the truth no matter where it takes them and then tell it like it is.

In my opinion, this film is a front-runner for the Oscar for Best Documentary for 2006.

It's absolutely riveting. If you are a fan of "Silence of the Lambs," you should see this because Oliver O'Grady is just as chilling as Hannibal Lecter -- more so because he is real. Filmmaker Amy Berg did a news piece on O'Grady, a Catholic priest who raped dozens -- possibly hundreds -- of children in California. On a whim, she called him in his exile in Ireland and got him to agree to an extensive three day interview. It is a confession unlike any other.

On one level, Deliver Us From Evil is a righteous indictment of the Catholic Church: its inaction, its enabling, its bureaucracy, its male-dominated backwardness.

At the same time, the film is a profile of some incredibly decent people: Catholic parents and children who were victims in this rampage. Their character is inspiring -- their pain is as raw as anything you will ever see on film.

Finally, it's the study about the way a psychopath can play every human emotion to his own advantage.

There is Hell to pay for this man's sins. And some victims are living that hell every day.

The most surprising and disturbing scenes in the documentary "Deliver Us from Evil" is to hear from Father Oliver O'Grady himself about the children and babies he sexually abused when he was a Catholic priest in California. We can see that O'Grady is still mentally ill, he is unaware of the seriousness of his actions in the past. He lives a normal life in Ireland as if all his abuses have been forgiven and therefore insignificant and impertinent to him. Another relevant point of the documentary is to present that both the dioceses of California and the Vatican simply deny or cover up all cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy. It is proven that all religions that view sex as an evil element, or preach fanaticism, certainly have sexual abuse cases done by their members.

This was a shocking account of the political sickness that trickles through our world in schools and, yes, of all places, our Churches. Not a date movie. Similar to Schindler's List, the gripping tales told by Catholic Religious leaders and victims of child molestation in the Church held me in suspense of reality and opened my eyes to the scale and duration of the problem, which still exists in many places today. The disturbing part was the institutional course of action and lack of action taken when high leaders were made aware of the problem and asked for help by BOTH sexual victims AND sexual offenders. As with many parts of systematic human intervention, the easiest thing to do was to ignore or divert and continue. This film is an eye opener. I do not recommend it for children 12 years or younger.