ShareThisBy CARLA MEYER
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
The wrenching documentary "Deliver Us From Evil" explores the mind of a pedophile as it accuses the Catholic Church of failing to protect children. The film also serves as a kind of time capsule, evoking a more innocent era, before the church abuse scandal rocked the country and inspired greater cynicism.
In the film, Bob and Maria Jyono of Lodi, Calif., speak of gladly letting the Rev. Oliver O'Grady into their home in the 1970s. They considered it an honor when O'Grady, like Maria a native of Ireland, broke bread with the family and stayed over. It seemed to bring them closer to God.
When their grown daughter, Ann, told them years later that O'Grady had raped her as a girl, the betrayal went beyond the personal to the spiritual. Or as Bob Jyono puts it, "The whole world collapsed."
The Jyonos' acknowledgement of the access they granted O'Grady, later imprisoned for abusing two brothers (not interviewed in the film), makes you wonder how they didn't know what was going on. But watching their agonized faces, the question evaporates. These people are obviously still in great pain.
Their anguish stands in stark contrast to the twinkly demeanor of O'Grady, living in Ireland when director Amy Berg filmed him (his current whereabouts are unknown). With a soft, lilting voice, the man accused of violating children throughout the Stockton, Calif., Diocese speaks openly of his attraction to boys and girls, of wanting to embrace and be close to them.
Employing a very gentle vocabulary to describe horrifying acts, he speaks of being a "people person." But a shot of O'Grady from above, as he descends a long, rectangular staircase, symbolizes the depths of depravity to which this man descended.
O'Grady apologizes on camera and says he wants to make things right, but he seems removed from his actions. Not so the adults who say O'Grady abused them as children.
Nancy Sloan, who recalls meeting O'Grady at a church camp while she was a student at Sacramento's Holy Spirit school, says that seeing a car like the one the priest drove still makes her physically ill. Ann Jyono and a young man identified as Adam M. speak poignantly of their troubles with forging romantic relationships.
O'Grady cost the Stockton Diocese millions of dollars, and his victims big parts of their childhoods, yet he served only seven years in prison before being deported to Ireland. With the former priest having successfully eluded more punishment, Berg uses her film to make a case against the church, and specifically Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles.
Her film alleges that Mahony, then bishop of the Stockton Diocese, knew of the threat posed by O'Grady yet continued to put children in harm's way by allowing him to serve as a parish priest. Even O'Grady seems to support this interpretation of events. In file footage of deposition testimony, Mahony seems to deny these allegations but is so noncommittal that it's hard to tell.
Berg's role as advocate for abuse victims is admirable, but she at times imposes herself too greatly on their story. An attempt at a big, confrontational finish just seems stagy _ and unnecessary given the power of all that has preceded it.
102 minutes
Not rated
(Carla Meyer can be reached at cmeyer(at)sacbee.com.)
