Better Late Then Never

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The first must-see film of the year.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

This is an exceptionally well made documentary that is very difficult to watch, as it deals with the molestation of children by priests who were trusted by their families. It only follows a couple cases, though if you watch the news you realize that this is actually a much wider-spread problem--as many more priests in the US have been prosecuted for raping kids. But this isn't the worst part--church officials have actively impeded prosecution, often transferred molesters to new and unsuspecting parishes instead of turning them over to the police and wouldn't think of excommunicating them. In fact, they CONTINUE to employ them and provide them with retirement incomes--in addition to allowing them to set foot in a church building! If the quality of a documentary is based mostly on how angry it makes you feel and how well it convinces you of their position, then this is a GREAT film. Well constructed and hard-hitting--this is a terrific film.By the way, it is important to point out that these men are NOT molesters because of celibacy. For years, I did psychotherapy with victims and offenders and can tell you from my experience that these men CHOOSE the priesthood to have access to children. Plus, if they NEED sex, why not have an affair or hire a prostitute--it sure beats raping kids. And, by the way, I no longer work in this field, as working with these evil victimizers was simply killing me--plus I didn't feel therapy is effective for these folks.Finally, if you are Catholic, I don't see how you can remain in the church, as this would condone everything. When you see this film, it becomes clear that the church was CLEARLY a co-contributor to the emotional and spiritual rape of countless children. Now perhaps you could say to yourself that the offenders and their superiors who condoned it only represent a small portion of the Catholic church. But what about the rest of the Church and the Pope? Where is their response of such evil?! The silence is deafening.

Deliver us from evil is a documentary film exposing the atrocities committed by Irish born Father Oliver O'Grady, and his time as priest and leader of a parish in various different towns in California. It also displays the conspiracy of the Catholicism, its constant protection of employees within the church and the lengths they went to, to protect gods name while standing by and watching children robbed of their innocence.Although much of the information we see about the Catholic Church and the corruption at the very heart of it, is not completely surprising and I'm sure many people already have their beliefs on paedophilia within the church and its ongoing cover-up, it is with the shameless nature that these "Men of god" talk about the case that is difficult to watch. When Bishop Mahony is asked at one point, "If you knew of a priest having sexual urges towards boys and girls as young as 8 or 9, would that be just cause to remove him from his post" he replies in monotone "No" . It is unsettling to say the least and combined with interviews with the offender himself Father O'Grady, a truly vile and disgusting individual and clearly sociopathic and the victims and their families, we are presented with such a hopeless and desperate story from where there truly is no redemption.Father O'Grady intersperses the documentary with various appalling remarks and commentaries and it is abundantly clear from the get go that he has no sense of realty and that the disconnection he has leads to a point where he feels it is acceptable to write to his victims and arrange a nice friendly reunion. It is so far-fetched and so ridiculous that we have to questions his sanity and motives throughout. He gives us certainly no just cause for sympathy, describing with a smirk what he did with various young girls and boys and what aroused him and why. The saddest part being that after this documentary was made he was arrested and sentenced to three years for further child pornography charges. It begs the questions, how can the Catholic Church protect him still and how has he evaded a longer jail sentence.The Catholic Church is presented in such a poor light, that it's very difficult to know what to believe and who to trust. With more and more cases emerging of child abuse within the church and of many more cases that still go unresolved and undiscovered, it is an eye opening insight into the truth and the need to protect our children and the children of the future with such reverence and love.The victims and their families who gave interviews during the film are unfathomably brave people. It seems that for some there is no light at the end of the tunnel and even 30 years later they remain as scarred and as unhealed as before. It is truly heart retching to see the long term affect this has particularly to those who believed so fervently in god before and who feel betrayed and violated themselves by the church.While the film does not offer hope nor light, it does offer us truth and facts that may have remained hidden. It is very honest and does not shy away or worry that it may offend. If nothing else we can learn so much from this film and focus on bringing justice to the victims and their families and work so much harder to find and punish those responsible.

In a terrible way, that monster Oliver O'Grady has rendered a service to the human race. He and others like him have set off deafening alarm bells. He illustrates the moral insanity of someone in a position of trust who is governed by his hormones and not his religious precepts. O'Grady has called into question not only the "infallibility" of the church hierarchy all the way to the top, but has left the seeds of profound doubt as to the power of prayer to protect the vulnerable from evil. People who attack the Catholic Church from the outside usually only succeed in stiffening the resolve of its followers to continue with renewed faith. It's the hypocrites and dogmatists within the church who inflict the mortal damage that may eventually consign it to the scrap book of history. Any religion or spiritual institution worthy of preservation must contain its own safety mechanism built within its very precepts. I recall, following a recent sex scandal in the media, a televised town hall meeting in which a conceited and arrogant Catholic lobbyist harangued the audience (mostly Catholics) with her usual spiel, "no salvation outside the church", "sexual abuse is far more prevalent outside of the church", "no place for women in the priesthood", etc, etc. When asked what was the problem the church had with women priests she smugly retorted: "according to the bible, how many women disciples did Christ have?". I felt like responding "best evidence suggests Jesus died on the cross before he was 30 and his disciples were also in their 20's, how come the median age of a new pope in recent times is 63 years?" - but I abstained from commenting. As the audience became increasingly restive and annoyed by her delivery, I became increasingly content; "keep up the good work ma'am, you're message is accelerating the church's eventual demise; a reformed Catholic Church might have struggled on for another 1000 years.

Harboring Impure Thoughts is a sin in the mores of the Catholic Church. If one is attracted to a person sexually, a man, a woman, at whatever age, one also associates that quality with the object of even the most conventional Catholic marriage. So to a man who from the start of his sexual growth is trained as a Catholic priest, what's the difference between an object of pure lust and an object of affection? The danger, in turn, is not merely a danger to his own self but a danger to those objects of lust and affection of his. What's more, religion is extremely important to many people in all cultures. These people have children, who are raised with an obedient, conventional moral code that links inscrutability with their elders, whose trust is very easy for a neighborhood priest, their nearest connection with God, to acquire.Watching Amy Berg's effective documentary Deliver Us from Evil is a compelling encounter. Her interview cases betray to the camera virtually insufferable stratums of grief, and its audience goes home feeling both bewilderment and anger. There is an integral interview subject who is an Irish Catholic priest who is undeterred by where Catholic orthodoxy has led his decisions to rape and molest 25 children who looked up to him, saw him as a father, and is living out his days in the Irish countryside. If any citizen otherwise had committed the same crime, they would be playing the role of the child to a much bigger, stronger rapist for decades. What is it about this ideology that causes people all over the world to treat related matters with superiority over everyone else? I suppose it is the centuries of tradition that is reassuring to society, even while these families are burdened with crippling depths of shame for as long as they last. The weight of their shame is directly related to that of the trust they put into their victimizers.The film is not an indictment of people who practice the Catholic faith. Not by any means. It is a buoy for the devoutly faithful subjects surrounding Father Oliver O'Grady, who in the 1970s and '80s committed his crimes only to spend a mere seven years in prison and still keep his job, a voice and a vent for them. I know I haven't said much about the film itself, but the fact that I would rather talk about what the film made me think about should speak of the value of seeing it.