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  DELIVER US FROM EVIL USA, 2006 I always had a soft spot for the Catholic Church, as it seemed so fabulous and gothic compared to the drab Anglican services my Mother dragged me to on Sunday mornings during my glum boyhood in a farming town in rural New South Wales. Even out of church, the town's Catholics were uniformly wealthier than other townsfolk, sending their children to a private Catholic school and communing in exclusive social caches, and as I moved into adolescence, Madonna videos and Godfather reruns on TV made ample use of fascinatingly complex Catholic family structures and ritual practices and dramatic Catholic iconography which I received as tantalising signals from a glamorous distant planet. The more I've learnt about the Catholic Church, though, the more I've come to see its spectacle as an elaborate smoke and mirrors show that conceals a very creepy reality. While earnest people of faith trust the Church implicitly and give it custody of their spirit and soul, and a significant portion of their money, the Church appears to give little back and the lack of transparency and, in many cases, blatant evasion of the law, make it seem like some gigantic, ancient mafia. Revelations throughout the 1990s that hundreds and possibly even thousands of Catholic priests were serial rapists, preying on the - shockingly, sometimes infant - children of their parishoners, were redoubled by the Church's stonewalling on the issue, right up to Pope Benedict appealing for and securing immunity from prosecution on charges of conspiring to cover up molestation incidents, from President Bush in 2005. Amy Berg doesn't flinch from the subject of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in her chilling and dispassionate documentary, Deliver Us From Evil which covers the gruesome pathology of Father Oliver O'Grady who raped hundreds of children of both sexes, and one as young as nine months, throught the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in several northern California. Combining heart-breaking interviews with O'Grady's now-adult victims and their broken, guilty parents with blood-curdling chats with O'Grady himself, now living back in Ireland after serving jail time in the US before being deported, Berg crafts a slow-boil documentary that bulds to multiple climaxes that are in turns angry, touching, and infuriating. For most of the film, O'Grady is in the process of sending out invitations to all his victims to meet him in Ireland and receive his apology. Grady's is a deluded God Complex on a grand scale and the gap between his casual appraisal of his "shortcomings" and the toll it's taken on those he raped is enormous. Most effectively, this film proves once and for all that the truly Christian people in the world are the unassuming believers, not the careerist leeches who masquerade as God's messengers. One grown up victim of O'Grady sobs when she hears that her destroyed father has lost his faith, and when a coalition of victims and investigators are turned away at the gates of an aloof Vatican, it's the seat of the Church that looks beastly, ignorant and most un-Christlike. In a way, I wish I'd been able to keep my naive ideas about the Catholic Church, rather than find out how rotten and revolting it is behind the scenes, and worse, how buttressed and immune it has made itself, so that tens of thousands of innocent parishoners get to plough their way through a lifetime of enforced "healing" while their spiderly-powerful Priests, Bishops and Popes skirt accountability and laugh all the way to the bank. Review by Mark Adnum  Film Reviews - Interviews - Features - Film Festival - About - Contact |
Trailer for Deilver Us From Evil
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