I saw Deliver Us From Evil last night with Alice. Hands down, this is the best documentary I’ve seen this year… or ever. I’m trying to remember other documentaries I’ve seen such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and some Micheal Moore documentaries and “Super Size Me”. Too bad there aren’t more documentaries, and too bad there aren’t more documentaries that aren’t so politically slanted. I admit, when I go watch a documentary, I set myself up to align my views with the filmmaker so that I can go in there watching a documentary that I won’t get angry at… I don’t know how Bush lovers could have sat through Farhenheit 911 and not have gotten angry at Michael Moore for the exaggerated depictions of “the other side”. When I went to go watch “An Inconvenient Truth”, I went in there wanting to be enlightened about global warming. What I got instead was Al Gore’s campaign film. I mean, maybe I should have studied up on the film a bit more since I went in there after only having watched the trailer (which didn’t really channel the fact that Al Gore would be in every shot of the film). Anyway, so documentaries are interesting. You learn something but you always have to question who the filmmaker is and what his/her beliefs are and the motivation behind the film. Documentaries are taken to be more “truthful” in nature and those who watch it give it more credibility because it is supposed to depict “reality” or uncover an unknown “truth”. I guess you can think of it as a longer version of the news, and obviously a bit tainted by whoever is making it.
I read up a little bit about Deliver Us From Evil. I thought, great! This film is about Catholic priests who molest children and it got 100% on rottentomatoes.com. I wasn’t really expecting an objective film. If anything, I was gearing myself up to swallow a documentary that probably set out to defame the church. I saw that it was made by a woman. How awesome is that? A woman filmmaker. Well, I wasn’t about to give her credit just yet.
Once the movie started, I was just getting situated. The victims’ families were being interviewed. In the beginning, you see the victims’ families entrusting the church, especially a priest named Oliver O’Grady. These families let this priest come and spend nights with them not knowing what was going to happen. This was an so eye-opening film and as you hear the victims’ stories, you are with them from beginning to end - from the moment they trusted this priest to come into their lives and into their homes, to the final destruction of the family unit, the never-ending grief and changed lives from what had happened and what is continuing to happen because the Catholic church is not fixing this horrible problem.
This film could have flopped in so many ways but it didn’t.
There were many things that set this documentary apart but I will talk about two things in specific detail. The first thing that makes this documentary worth watching is that the story is not based on just personal stories of the victims. Most of the narration was done by Oliver O’Grady himself, the convicted pedophile priest who was sent to prison after sexually abusing children for twenty years. Of course, his candid interviews made me question why he was so open about what he did and the film touches on his dissociative disorder a bit. He speaks openly about what he did but there is really not a trace of shame, guilt, remorse for what he did to these children. In his mind, he was just being affectionate and loving, even though sometimes this translated into raping a 9 month old baby. Oliver O’Grady’s testimony is powerful because he was a perpetrator and he’s openly admitting to this problem that he shares with some priests (10% of a specific seminary are known pedophiles). He tells of his asking for help within the church structure only to be moved from one parish to another. He gets therapy but it obviously isn’t enough because he continues molesting children for 20 years before he is convicted and sent to prison. Perhaps since it is public knowledge that he did what he did, it was easier for him to come out clean and tell his story since he had nothing to hide anymore, and no church to hide behind. After serving 7 of the 14 years in prison, he is deported back to Ireland, where he came from, where no one knows of his history. He is free to roam wherever he wants. Obviously, this man needs a lot of help - both spiritually and psychologically. Since the release of this film, he moved from Ireland to Canada. Canada has children too, by the way.
But the film isn’t entirely about O’Grady, it just uses him as a prime example of a larger problem that has existed since 4 AD in the Catholic church, ever since they made priests take a vow of celibacy. This leads to the second thing that separates this film from other documentaries, and the redeeming factor of not having it slip into the anti-church genre, Father Tom Doyle. Including someone who was part of the church system who lost his job because he spoke against the authority of the church also be the advocate for the victims’ family was a strong move on Amy Berg’s part. Instead of having anti-church or nonbelievers side with the victims to say the Catholic church is corrupt, evil, etc, Father Tom Doyle provides a lot of insight to what’s going on. Here’s a quote I found online:
Father Doyle, in one of his segments, discusses how you have to understand how being raised Catholic is different than being raised in other religions, and that having that understanding is crucial to fully grasping the extent of the damage a man like Father O’Grady could wreak. I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic schools, and have an uncle who is a retired priest, and I understand exactly what Doyle means. When you are raised Catholic, you are taught from the cradle that the Church’s authority is absolute, and that the Church is the only path to heaven. Within the hierarchy of the church, clergy are essentially the right hand of God, the bastions of faith and dispensers of hope and salvation. Being violated by your priest, therefore, is essentially like being violated by God and by the very faith that gives that person such absolute control over you. One of the victims talks about the way that priests are deified within the church, and how much power that gives them over the people — especially the children — of their parishes. O’Grady told more than one victim that their parents wouldn’t have let them come to his house if there was anything wrong with what he was doing, and pulled his victims out of class to molest them in his office in the middle of the school day.
My favorite part of the film was when Father Tom Doyle is preaching and he says (I paraphrase), “As Catholics, we’re brought up to think that a good Catholic is one who is silent and obedient. That’s not what a good Catholic is. A good Catholic is one who wants to be like Jesus.” He really nailed it. He also goes on to say, “The only time Jesus was angry was when he was at church.” Tom Doyle’s role in the film is to bring it back to the core of what it means to be a believer. It’s not about the church, it’s about that personal relationship with God. It’s so powerful to have someone who is still a believer to bring the focus back to where it should belong.
Amy Berg interviews other theologians, a clergy abuse psychologist, lawyers of victims, and uses footage of Roger Mahoney (who went from bishop to cardinal, and is the reason why O’Grady wasn’t treated or convicted sooner because he was trying to protect his own career) who ends up incriminating himself with his dodgy answers. She also uses footage of Monsignor Cain, who is pretty much Mahoney’s accomplice in this whole mess in trying to cover up the scandal. Most of the people interviewed were either Catholics, grew up Catholic, were involved in the church, or were working in or around the system. It wasn’t so much a documentary that set out to question people’s faith, but a documentary focused on showing a problem within the Catholic church that needs to be addressed immediately since it has gone ignored too long. The fact that O’Grady himself was molested by a priest when he was young, and the fact that the Catholic church already spent over a billion dollars in settlement cases against allegations of child abuse is a fact that no one can ignore.
It seems that the simple solution would be to let the priests have families and not make the vow of celibacy a requirement (They mention in the film how the vow of celibacy is not required by God but something that the Catholic church chose to enforce in order for the priests to focus on the church and if they died, the possessions/inheritance/property/etc. would remain in the church and not passed down to his own family members) but something tells me there’s something more deeply-rooted than that. There are many questions of sexual immorality around this issue. The church first ignored one of the victims’ allegations because she is a woman and they chalked it up to curiosity. Once the victim is male however, it becomes a homosexual problem, and a reason to respond. However, Oliver O’Grady didn’t care whether or not his victims were male or female, as long as they were children, he got what he wanted. The problem is… since it’s an action against his vow of celibacy, raping children to having consensual sex with women all fall under one category of “sexual immorality”. I suppose spiritually, all of these things are just considered a sin. In practice though, the problem lies in the definition between sex and rape. Oliver O’Grady had a thing for children. Children who were helpless, innocent, and inherently submissive. This was a power thing. He didn’t just fondle or “touch inappropriately”, which is what he says he did. He went as far as to rape these children, as young as 9 months old. One victim’s parents didn’t know that O’Grady had gotten to their daughter as well (the whole time, they were on O’Grady’s side when allegations arose from other places) and only found out recently when O’Grady finally was sent to prison. The reason the daughter did not tell her parents was because she was scared that her father would kill O’Grady (since the father had at one point told her that if anyone hurt her, he’d kill him) and feared that her father would be sent to jail for it. She kept it a secret because of “her love for her own father”, according to the Japanese American father who ends up breaking down in the film after finding out that O’Grady had raped his daughter from when she was 5 years old until she was 12.
Tom Doyle tries to restore the victims’ faith back into Christ. When the Japanese American father says he doesn’t believe in God anymore, you can see his daughter (now 40 years old) break down when she hears him say this (she is still Catholic). This was heart-wrenching to see. People are losing their faith because of the institutionalization of the church. People are placing themselves higher than God. They do not want to admit that there is something inherently wrong in the way some things are being done and are driven by their own greed for the next higher-up title. Some visual parallels of the priests to the pharisees in Passion of the Christ came to mind. What happens when people deify themselves to be holier than they really are?Was this film setting out to make the church look bad? Was it an objective film? Well, I think it tried to be. It tried to interview the Catholic church but they refused to be interviewed (evidently now they are trying to talk to the filmmaker). What can you do as a filmmaker who wants to get all sides of an issue but only end up with one? Not much, but the tone of the film (in my humble opinion) tried to keep it in the context of the church, almost like a believer setting out to point out a point of concern within the system (even though the filmmaker says she is a non-practicing Jew).
Anyway, this was the most emotional and well-planned out documentary I’ve ever seen (or that I remember seeing). I feel sorry for a lot of people in the film. It goes to show that no person is qualified to say he/she is perfect. This really gets to the heart of humanity, which is that we are all JACKED UP.
Go watch this film. So far, it’s only playing in three locations in S. Cali - in Beverly Center, Pasadena, and in Irvine.
Here are some links of interviews with Amy Berg.
http://www.arrivistepress.com/October06/csmithey_amy_berg_1006.shtml
http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/interviews/amyberg.html
Alice, who saw the film with me, remembers the quotes so much better. Check it out here.
