Deliver Us From Evil

We the People, a.k.a. the Audience

Up Close and More Than We Asked For

By James McKinney

On topics that I know little or nothing about, I wonder why I should weigh in, and why anyone should pay any attention to my thoughts… But then, why not? After all, we’re all in this together, I guess, aren’t we? Is that the blogger’s credo?

OK, so watching Deliver us from Evil was for me a form of torture. It was clear that “Father Oliver” was, apparently like many, most, maybe all pedophile predators, hopelessly addicted to this behavior. And listening to him cheerfully bloviate on how easy he thinks it should be for his victims simply to get over it and get on with life as if nothing had ever happened made his disconnected, pathologically dissociative personality disorders positively spine-chilling. Watching him between scenes of his victims and their families crying out in agony and mired in emotional misery, his criminally twisted views become all the more sinister and disturbing. Many of the online comments and blog posts that I read wonder how it could be that he is not languishing in prison, but is instead free to live his life and will actually receive a pension from the Catholic Church when he reaches the age of 65.

However, it should perhaps be noted that as an unintended consequence of our penal system of justice, some sexually predatory pedophiles with criminal records, who fear returning to prison (and with good reason I understand, as they are at the bottom of the prison hierarchy and are often violently abused there themselves) murder their victims to keep them quiet. Father Oliver, on the other hand, never having had much more than a slap on the wrists followed by a transfer to a new parish, actually considers inviting his victims over for tea, and entertains the sick fantasy that they might just consider it all “water under the bridge” and go their merry ways.

Watching the deranged Father Oliver, who claims that he himself was abused as a child by an older brother, display his pathetic emotional and psychological phantasmagoria, it may be that somehow, some way, we might find it within ourselves to pity and maybe even forgive him—but never forget, or ignore, or pardon, or unleash him back into society.

And that leads us to the real target of the film which rightly seems to be the scale of the Catholic Church cover up, the rot at the top of the Church hierarchy, and even the theological underpinnings of its tenets regarding human sexuality. With its hell-and-brimstone condemnation of all sexuality not practiced purely for procreation, it seems to hold rape and pedophilia as just another sin of “sexual deviation.” It is true that not all sins are considered equal, and molesting girls is not as bad as molesting a boys, which compounds the infraction with homosexuality, condemned somewhere on a scale from “bad thoughts” and masturbation all the way up to birth control and worst of all, a woman’s right to choose, which of course can bring much worse condemnation and even ex-communication.

At the risk of being misjudged, I might wonder if in some ways the attitude of the Church isn’t therefore in some measure more humane than the punitive response taken by civil society… Pedophile priests do not often resort to murdering their victims perhaps in part because they do not fear going to prison. On the other hand, it is clear that when they are criminally sociopathic, most of us would say they should go to prison, just like any other child molester or rapist. Whatever the dilemma facing the Church in interpreting the obligations of confessor confidentiality, they cannot sweep such serious crime under the carpet and simply allow it to continue in another parish location. And civil society is making the Church pay billions of dollars to victims in cases worldwide, bankrupting a number of dioceses in the process, and some might say seriously threatening the existence of the Church itself.

Keeping things in perspective, “In a statement read out by Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi in September 2009, the Holy See stated, ‘We know now that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases,’ adding that this figure was comparable with that of other groups and denominations…. A Perspective on Clergy Sexual Abuse by Dr. Thomas Plante of Stanford University and Santa Clara University states that ‘approximately 4% of priests during the past half century (and mostly in the 1960s and 1970s) have had a sexual experience with a minor’ which ‘is consistent with male clergy from other religious traditions and is significantly lower than the general adult male population which may double these numbers.’ Additionally, according to Newsweek magazine, the figure in the Catholic Church is similar to that in the rest of the adult population….” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_sex_abuse_cases]

But again, if we look still deeper, I wonder sometimes if Western society overall shouldn’t carry some of the blame and responsibility for serious negligence in the handling of this all-too-real aspect of human behavior that few of us want to acknowledge much less deal with. Within our views on sexuality in Western culture and society, and I would venture to include Judeo-Christian traditions as well as Islamic traditions in the discussion, there are clearly contradictions and cognitive dissonance. There have been phenomenal changes over the past 50 years or so in the way that American society in the United States has perceived issues of pornography, sexual freedom, sexual orientation, gender identity, gay marriage, etc., to name just a few. (Amy Berg’s story of her trials and tribulations in getting an acceptable rating from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as recounted in her Huffington Post interview is in itself a case in point.)

I was watching a well-respected mainstream broadcast journalist the other night talking about a practice of Taliban leaders and tribal warlords in Afghanistan keeping young boys with them to use for sexual purposes. The journalist remarked that it was striking how common the practice was, and he asked one of the young boys what he thought of it. The boy replied that he didn’t mind at all, and that when he grew up and became a warlord himself, he planned to have his own boy companion for the same purpose. I am no expert, but personally I am at a loss to understand how that would comport with even a cursory, much less a strict interpretation of the Qur’an…

Ok, I hope I have earned at least a penny for my two cents. Let me now say something about letting the rest of the audience be a part of the conversation. I did appreciate Amy Berg’s sensitive approach to opening an online “Your Thoughts” forum at the film’s official website [http://www.deliverusfromevilthemovie.com/], but I was not able to access any postings there. Perhaps it has been discontinued.

However, user reviews at IMDb, Internet Movie Data Base, [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814075/] which were available, were almost universally positive, most reviewers giving the film 9/10 stars. Almost all of the reviewers gave the filmmaker high marks for the documentary, and contributed serious analysis and commentary. However, there were a few who gave it a lot fewer, including one that gave it only 1/10 stars writing :

“…i watched the movie and then i heard the awful [truth] behind its' creation. I was doing research for my college newspaper on this documentary and found out that Amy Berg had actually brought that pedophile to a children's playground just to get a good shot for her documentary. As well taking pictures of children with their name badges on without anyone's permission, she even brought him to a school and didn't tell the school the real reason for the documentary. This is an example of the worst kind of unethical behavior and lack of ethics in a journalist but the worst is the danger she subjected those poor children too just for dramatic effect. In my opinion she is just as bad as the scum she is deriding in this documentary. I am sorry but I am quite upset by these tactics…” and she gave a link to the Irish Independent newspaper that reported the story.

Then I found the trailer for Deliver Us From Evil posted on You Tube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW90Q6Z_OM&feature=related] by someone with the user name ZOMGjesus and I think I am beginning to see how producers of UGC might want to share interesting information about video productions that their friends and fellow travelers might also be interested in—and that they might not otherwise find out about.

Also on You Tube [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqAAp4XE660&feature=related] I watched “Father O’Grady,” a deceptively titled video described as:

“This is a movie we made for our final in school. It's a reenactment of one of the children Father O'Grady has molested. Based on a true story. Enjoy.”

In fact, it was a high school student production of a pseudo-thriller-action-police adventure filled with drama and violence. There were 28 obscenity-laced comments posted, most of which condemned the video for its shallowness and insensitivity. It has supposedly had 6,613 views!

Again on You Tube, in “Father Tom Doyle in Deliver Us From Evil” someone going by the user name wonderzhao [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btmuS2H79Y0&feature=fvw] posted a segment of the documentary dealing with the issue of celibacy in the priesthood:

“This segment definitely helps us to understand more about the system of Catholic churches. Religions don't make people less sin or sinner but people of some organizations do. Deliver Us from Evil really takes its audience from different angels to exam religious organizations, especially Catholic churches. It aches me when Bob Jyono - father of Ann Jyono, one child-molested victim of Oliver O'Grady's - broke down for not being aware of his daughter was raped by some one his entire family dearly trusted many years ago.”

It purported to have had 9,045 views, but the added comments had been disabled.

Finally, also on You Tube I watched “Ireland's Catholic Crisis” from Journeyman Pictures, a more serious treatment at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyj7rFyDQvk&feature=fvw]. The synopsis reads:

“Ireland has long been a country dominated by Catholicism. Yet paedophilia scandals and rigid conservatism are deterring any would-be priests. Will Ireland be forced to import its clergy just to keep the faith alive?”

It purported to have had 15, 556 views, and 486 comments, the highest rated being the following two:

Burlearth: “I'm Irish and I want the church completely driven from this land.”

swiftubag1001: “u hold a hand over ure ass when u hear that bell go. alter boys must of had a shit time!!”