My Amazon Movie Reviews: "Deliver Us From Evil"

Deliver Us From Weasels
4 out of 5 Stars

Director Amy Berg and Father Thomas Doyle deserve a lot of credit for their bravery. Even braver are the victims in this harrowing documentary of child abuse and rape by a California Catholic Priest and the ongoing cover-up. From the seventies and into the nineties, Father Oliver O'Grady was sexually molesting children of both sexes, including the rape of a nine month old infant. But each of the numerous times he was caught, his superiors would deny there was any problem, then promise the problem would be taken care of, then whisk O'Grady off to another location where the cycle would start over.

The difference between this and many of the other abuse scandals to strike the Catholic Church is that O'Grady genially admits he is a pedophile, forcing those in charge of the clean-up detail to whitewash the aftermath of the stated facts. Father Doyle is seemingly the only one in the hierarchy to exhibit any common sense in the matter, and his grilling of Bishop Roger Mahoney (now the Cardinal of Los Angeles) paints an evil picture of a man willing to throw his Christians to the Lions if they came in-between him and his ambitions to higher office. His frigid denials are enough to turn your stomach. Mahoney refuses, over and over, to acknowledge that O'Gardy's actions were criminal or even merited disciplinary action, even denying he recalls any problems with molestations at one point (by claiming it would be the obligation of the church's attorneys).

The pattern is maddening. O'Grady takes a Church, destroys lives, gets caught, gets a promotion to another location. When he finally gets into a scandal he can't wriggle out of, the church buys his silence with an annuity fund. After serving seven years, O'Grady is deported to Ireland, where his sex crimes are unknown and he is free to live out his life as he chooses. Basically, O'Grady is walking free among families (when the film catches up with him, he is living with a family and their children, they have no idea he's a convicted child molester) with the full blessing of the Church and on the Vatican's payroll.

In O'Grady's aftermath, you see a victim's father angry denounce God and religion as fake, a Pope granted immunity from prosecution from President Bush as the scandal creeps towards the top, and - again - O'Grady walking the streets of Ireland. In an interesting side note, the prosecutorial immunity that Bush gave Pope Hitler Youth Ratzinger from the scandal may not protect the Pope from the Irish abuse scandal that now swarms around Cardinal Sean Brady's repeated covering up of abuses. Or maybe, like the despicable laissez faire attitude the Vatican took over Boston's Cardinal Law, they'll just fly Brady in to head a basilica in Rome. As "Deliver Us From Evil" shows, it would just fit the pattern.