While in some ways this review serves as a kind of companion piece to David's review of Jesus Camp, the two documentaries occupy very different terrain. They are opposite poles in a game of "heads, I win; tails, you lose." Jesus Camp is disquieting because of the relative new-ness of its particular style of worship; less evangelical religious types may come away from Jesus Camp with a desire to return to the folds of more traditional branches of Christianity. Amy Berg's Deliver Us from Evil puts a roadblock on that particular highway of thought.
Berg's documentary tells the story of Father Oliver O'Grady, a priest in northern California in the 1970s whose superiors moved him again and again whenever his pedophiliac activities threatened to bring the community down on his head (and theirs). The story is nothing new, of course, and the documentary reminds us of this: the Catholic Church has been doing damage control on this issue for several decades, and the story of Father O'Grady is just a single story among many.
What makes Berg's documentary truly compelling where another might just be strident or accusatory is the inclusion of Oliver O'Grady himself. The victims who are interviewed show a remarkable degree of resilience and circumspection, but the film's most riveting moments are of watching O'Grady walk through the streets of his hometown in Ireland, pausing to watch children playing on swings and commenting on the controversy that, to him, seems so far away and so long ago.
It is the disparity between the pain still lived by his victims and the "Oops, sorry" attitude of O'Grady that makes his sociopathy so profound. O'Grady has come to believe that admitting his past is the same as exculpating it. To watch the man treat his systematic abuse (rape, as George Jyono rightly insists it be called) of children as something that can now be laughed off is chilling, and it shows astonishing journalistic integrity on the part of the filmmakers to remain so objective. But Berg is able to do so because she has set her sights on a larger target. O'Grady, despite the pain he caused, is almost an object of pity, a human being incapable of anything resembling love or compassion. But the fact that he was allowed to stay at his post, and then be moved to other parishes where he had access to children, is the systemic amorality at which the film takes aim. The film adduces testimony that strongly suggests that Church authorities in California knowingly moved a pedophile around in the hopes that the problem would eventually go away: Berg shows us segments of Cardinal Roger Mahoney's deposition in a case against O'Grady that could be lifted from the testimony of Alberto Gonzales for its denial and obfuscation.
In the years since September 11, 2001, perhaps as a response to the recognition that religious differences fuel global strife, secularists have enjoyed something of a comeback not seen since the 1960s. Even though Richard Dawkins' and Christopher Hitchens' books on the subject have been vigorously refuted, the fact that their arguments are treated seriously---that there can in fact be meaningful discussion about a world without religion, and on CNN no less--is a sign that some at least recognize the problems inherent in saddling worldly power with divine right. Less deference to religion may not have saved any of O'Grady's victims, but it may have made the victims less frightened to speak out.
Deliver Us from Evil doesn't seek to make any comment about secularism, and if anything it seems to argue for a more personal, less bureaucratic and monarchical incarnation of faith. Berg casts as her hero the indefatigable Thomas Doyle, an intelligent and passionate reformer who sounds like a latter-day Luther; by apologizing to the victims, he makes a revolutionary if toothless statement of responsibility by the Church. But Doyle's talk of a church driven not by bureaucratic protectionism but by personal interaction with God is, of course, not new. Isn't such an incarnation of "personal" faith what we see in the evangelical movement, e.g., "Jesus Camp"? Even though Berg isn't out to indict religion in general or even, it seems, Catholicism, her searing treatment of the complete disregard the system had for the well-being of its laity is enough to prompt a discussion about what form, if any, should religion take to fulfill its promise of a world beyond the material.
