Deliver Us From Evil
Rated: Not Rated
I won’t attempt to retell or summarize the stories of these victims because I feel like any description would simply shortchange their pain. You have to hear it from them to truly understand the horror of the experience. Not just the abuse, but the way that abuse poisoned everything around it. I was brought to tears as Bob Jyono, a father of one of the children, cries about how he was unable to protect his daughter from this monster and you wish that no father would have to live with such agony of not only having their child sexually abused, but trusting and personally knowing the abuser. It’s absolutely torturous. But what puts Deliver Us From Evil beyond simply finding random victims and telling their stories is that all these victims shared a priest and the priest is now willing to come forward and tell of his abuse (because he’s served a seven year prison sentence and how happily lives in Ireland). Oliver O’Grady is a frighteningly disturbed. Whenever he talks about the abuse, he describes it as being “affectionate” towards the children. It’s almost unnerving how predictable he is in his character. He was abused at a young age. He was abused by both a family member and by clergy in his own church in Ireland. He abused his younger sister. For him, it’s not about sex but about power. These are all things you hear on Law & Order: SVU but it’s absolutely chilling when it’s this real and it’s clear that while O’Grady knows what he’s done is wrong, he never seems to feel it’s wrong. You never see him express half the emotion we see from his victims. But the most terrifying aspect of the film is that while O’Grady is evil, his deeds are dwarfed by the church’s cover-up. It’s absolutely sickening and confounding to see his superiors constantly obscure, deny, and actually facilitate his behavior. Whenever O’Grady’s deeds reach a crisis point, the diocese literally moves him down the road. They don’t report it to the authorities, partially because it’s clear they feel responsible not to the laws of man but to the laws of God but mostly because they want to protect themselves. And this is where the creepiness of most religious institutions becomes apparent because it’s obvious in the case of O’Grady that these men who have such power and are so ambitious in governing the morality of man, are absolutely amoral themselves. The church was built to serve God but now the cruel irony is that the church’s main function is to serve the church. And if it’s simply a self-serving entity, then what’s the point? If you can’t be moral when it comes to a crime of unquestionable immorality, then how can you ever speak of “morals” again? Deliver Us From Evil is an incredibly difficult film to watch. It’s hard to see these families suffer. It’s hard to see someone as twisted as O’Grady try to defend himself. It’s hard to watch anyone and especially an institution as massive and powerful as the Catholic Church allow for children to be raped because they’re too self-serving to do anything about it. It’s all hard to watch but Berg has woven a definitive work in exploring a scandal that most would sadly brush off as either 24-hour news fodder or a cheap joke from a hack stand-up comedian. I pray that more people see this film and then demand do what anyone else with half a heart would ask: stop clergy abuse. Words by |
