It is impossible to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the very masterpiece of human wisdom,” wrote the 19th century historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, with a dash of sarcasm. ‘In truth, nothing but such a polity could, against such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The experience of 1 200 eventful years, the ingenuity and patient care of 40 generations of statesmen have improved that polity to such perfection that among the contrivances which have been devised for controlling mankind, it occupies the highest place.”
One wonders what Macaulay would have made of the child-abuse scandals dogging the Catholic Church, especially in the United States, where about 100 000 cases have been reported — and experts estimate that only about a fifth of such cases are actually reported. That means that a good half-million people in the US could have been abused by Catholic priests.
The documentary Deliver Us from Evil focuses on one particular abuser, the Irishman Father Oliver O’Grady. He tells his story, as do several people abused by him during his time as a parish priest in California in the 1970s and 1980s. He appears to have raped hundreds of children, both male and female, so those who tell of this trauma in Deliver Us from Evil represent a small fraction of his victims.
O’Grady must be unique in that he is willing to speak on camera about his sins, to admit that he has done enormous wrong, and even to make some gestures of repentance. But, as the film develops, and we see more and more of the weirdly calm O’Grady, one is led to ask whether he is as repentant as he appears, and in fact to wonder whether his ultimate mea culpa and attempt to contact his victims is a genuine attempt to ask for forgiveness, or another way of manipulating and controlling them.
Scary stuff, all round. The emotions that come to the fore as O’Grady’s victims and their families tell their stories are understandably strong. This forms a stark contrast with O’Grady’s apparently candid but strangely blank confessions, often punctuated by an odd smirk. In the witness box he is asked whether he perhaps suffers from a form of dissociation — that he cannot connect his deeds with their consequences, that he cannot feel any empathy for his victims. A lack of empathy must be debilitating for a priest, but obviously such a lack enabled O’Grady’s spree of molestation, and in the witness box he blithely admits that dissociation must be one of many mental ailments he suffers from.
What’s even scarier is the way the Catholic Church dealt with the child-abuse scandals. Basically, it tried to sweep them under the carpet (though it has by now paid out more than $1-billion in damages). But this was a long-standing manoeuvre. Every time someone reported O’Grady’s abuse of children he was simply moved to another parish, meaning that the church just kept shunting him around California for more than a decade, giving him ever more opportunities to rape more kids.
Cardinal Roger Mahony, for one (though there are others), in effect protected O’Grady from prosecution and sponsored his further crimes. Today O’Grady lives in retirement in Ireland, apparently supported by the church, and with no checks on his behaviour. Cardinal Mahony is Archbishop of Los Angeles. He recently apologised to victims of abuse, but that was after the church was forced to pay more than $200-million in damages — an out-of-court settlement, naturally.
As former priest Tom Doyle points out in Deliver Us from Evil, the Catholic Church is structured like a medieval monarchy, and the laity’s duty is to shut up and obey. The personal ambitions of the likes of Mahony are more important than the suffering of congregants, although the church is supposed to be there precisely to allay that suffering. The need to keep the church’s image squeaky-clean trumps any empathy for the victims of child-abuse, or even any self-examination on the part of the church hierarchy.
Deliver Us from Evil does not have to demonstrate that the basic beliefs of the Catholic Church are now about a millennium past their sell-by date (including its doctrines on sexuality), but it does show, very comprehensively, how corrupt it is as an institution. It makes one think, too, about the way that corporations and governments seem so very often to reach this point: where the desperate attempt to keep the image looking good, at any cost, becomes the overriding concern that trumps all others — while the real, deep and painful issues are not dealt with. Think Enron. Think our health minister.
None of this makes easy viewing in Deliver Us from Evil, and I do have questions about whether such films are right for the cinema. ‘Always better on the big screen,” says Ster-Kinekor’s advertising, but not when something’s mostly shot on video and overall it’s fairly eye-hammering. This is an important documentary, but its natural medium is television. And that goes for such works as Anyone and Everyone, on the gay and lesbian festival now, as well as The 11th Hour, the documentary on global warming opening next week.
Deliver Us from Evil did give me one laugh, though. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, otherwise known as The German Shepherd, was in charge of the internal politics of the church during the rampages of priests such as O’Grady. Ratzinger has been accused of ordering the church hierarchy to maintain the cover-up. In 2005, the Vatican was humiliatingly forced to ask the US government to confirm that, as a head of state, Ratzinger was and remains immune to prosecution in the US. How I chuckled at that.