Deliver Us From Evil. 103 minutes. Rated: MA. Director: Amy Berg. Website
Back in 1992, Irish pop singer Sinead O’Connor was widely pilloried for tearing up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on air, during an appearance on Saturday Night Live.
Somehow, it’s hard to imagine that the stunt — an attempt to draw attention to the issue of child abuse among the Catholic priesthood — would provoke such an extreme reaction today. In the ensuing years, allegations of abuse against priests and religious ministers seem to have become almost commonplace, to the extent that "pedophile priest" is now somewhat of a stereotype — one often based more in caricature than reality.
This in itself is reason enough for a documentary such as Deliver Us From Evil, which details the atrocious acts of abuse committed by former Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady in the US during the 1970s and ’80s. If nothing else, the film serves to get beyond stereotypes and once again put human faces to a very real, very serious issue.
The film’s most potent ingredient is the willing participation of O’Grady himself. The man is despicable almost to the point of being pitiable, offering his sordid confessions for the camera without any apparent sense of remorse, in the hope of obtaining (in his words) "forgiveness and absolution".
If O’Grady isn’t enough to rouse a sense of moral outrage, the testimonies of his victims and their families will do the trick. One couple, who regarded O’Grady as a close friend only to later learn he’d been abusing their daughter under their own roof, recall the betrayal with such open grief that it will have many audiences weeping in sympathy.
More unsettling, albeit more difficult to substantiate, are the film’s allegations of complicity among the Church hierarchy. It seems certain that for many years, O’Grady was allowed to offend with the full knowledge of his immediate superiors, as they responded to any complaints against him by simply relocating him to another parish.
That said, the extent to which the issue of abuse pervades the Church at large, and how high up the hierarchy the alleged complicity extends, is certainly less clear, although the film would have viewers believe that both abuse and complicity are rampant.
The dearth of hard evidence, beyond compelling eyewitness testimony, is a recurring weakness in the film. Several nasty allegations are levelled against O’Grady and allowed to