DELIVER US FROM EVIL

Written and Directed by: Amy Berg

Grade: 4 stars out of 4

Reviewed by Steven Snyder

Without question, the two most powerful, most gut wrenching – not to mention most important – documentaries of the year have been Jesus Camp and Deliver Us From Evil.

Both about the church, both about children, both about the way the word of God has been used as a shield by people with agendas more horrifying than religious.

Jesus Camp detailed the way kids are being indoctrinated at an early age into the evangelical world. Not taught the way of the Lord, nor welcomed into a place of personal discovery but corralled into camps that spread religion as a weapon of war, both political and religious.

And now here is Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg’s documentary about the recently unearthed molestation scandal inside the Catholic Church.

On the surface, it seems like an issue too big for a single film to handle, but Berg counters the challenge by focusing on a single story – that of Father Oliver O’Grady. Berg unwinds O’Grady’s story from the beginning, introducing us to a parade of pleasant people as they discuss their loyalty to the Church and, more specifically, O’Grady himself.

One family talks of how they let the priest stay over. A father recalls how he was taught at an early age to always trust the Church and its leaders. A woman talks about how, as a child, she was handed over to O’Grady by her parents, time and again.     

We meet one family after another before we learn how O’Grady molested their children –in one scene, a father corrects the charge: “she wasn’t molested, she was raped!” - and was quietly shipped around California, a few miles here, a few miles there, by a church that wagged its fingers and did nothing to stop the crime.

We hear the kids talk about the ways O’Grady assaulted them. We hear from the families about the ways this violation, of both body and spirit, destroyed their lives.

And then, in bone-chilling frankness, we hear the story from O’Grady himself. He sits and talks with the cameras without shame, takes a stroll down the street which winds its way next to playgrounds and schools, chatting about his sexual attraction to kids and his attempts to overcome his inner demons.  Today he sits in Ireland, immune from prosecution, still receiving checks from the church.

Words can’t quite describe how disturbing this film is. While scandals have erupted over priests, we as Americans have tended to write off each case as just another bad apple. But here, we start to understand the problem is not with an apple, but with the orchard – with a church that has suppressed and obstructed justice at every turn.

Few documents have been as sobering or revealing about this scandal than the footage of the church’s deposition testimony shown here, one pious man after another expressing how he cannot “recall” or “remember,” and that he didn’t think the molestation episode with this child or that child was “related.”

Make no mistake, Deliver Us From Evil is a journey into the very heart of darkness. Not because O’Grady ruined so many lives, but because, as Berg so dutifully points out, this is only one case in hundreds of known, and thousands of likely unknown, cases. Just as the Church has upheld its enforcement of celibacy through the centuries, it has protected priests who have targeted younger, and more helpless victims, for sexual gratification.

If this had been one family, it would be a travesty. If it had been two families, it would be a tragedy. But as it stands now, Berg makes a compelling case that this is THE scandal of an American generation.

One only hopes that these thousands of savaged souls – many who now say they have lost their faith due to these monsters in God’s clothing - can find solace in Psalm 34: “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them.”