I went with a bunch of random Catholics to Amy Berg's Deliver Us From Evil, the single most horrifying documentary I've seen since the stupid Silent Scream they inexplicably seem to show every secondary school kid in Singapore. (Did they even give us the pro-choice argument back then? Seems terribly imbalanced to have graphic images of feet being sucked out of a uterus on the one hand and just...words, if that, for the other side. I guess showing us someone being raped probably isn't kosher in the classroom though.)

Deliver Us From Evil is about the recent child abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and in particular about Fr. Oliver O'Grady, who engaged in pedophilic acts in various dioceses (dioceze?) in California from the 70s to the 90s. O'Grady was allowed to continue abusing children unchecked because Archbishop (now Cardinal) Mahony kept transferring the priest every time an incident got reported, promising families that he would not get to work with children again, and essentially perpetrating a cover-up on such a horrific scale that it boggles the mind.

Almost all of the film consists of interviews -- with the victims, their families, lawyers, and scholars -- as well as archive footage of deposition hearings. There's almost no editorializing, and no real need for it either. If anything, the even-handedness probably adds to the horror of the experience. Victims and family members break down in sickening long takes. When one father talks about how his five-year-old daughter was raped, in their house, by someone they trusted with all their being, I could have puked right there in my seat.

O'Grady himself speaks a lot. The priest is mild-mannered, unremorseful, and, most terribly, reminds me of the Irish priests I have known since I was young. Superficially, because of the accent, but also in his mannerisms and personality. Obviously I'm not drawing any other kind of comparison, but you can imagine how everything hit me that much harder because of the similarities.

About halfway through the film, Amy Berg gets a psychologist to try to piece together a psychodynamic theory of why rates of child abuse are so high among the Catholic clergy. Her theory (and you might have heard this): because seminarians have to enter the religious life at such an early age, their psychosexual development is essentially stunted in adolescence, which causes them to perceive younger people as their sexual peers. Also (and I find this a little more suspect, although the deposition interviews would suggest that, at the very least, the superiors involved in O'Grady's case felt this way), from the Church's point-of-view, since all sexual acts outside of marriage are sinful, pedophilia, adultery and masturbation are all in the same basket of wrongness. Which is why the Vatican sees fit to allow priests who are child abusers to go on serving -- it's just not bad enough in their eyes to warrant their removal.

If all this is true -- and I'd need more than theories and anecdotal evidence to believe it -- then the Church needs psychologists, stat, as well as some sort of impetus for reform.

So. If this movie ever makes it past the media censors in your fascist country (unlikely), make every effort to go and see it. It's kind of shattering, though, so be warned. Then, after that, talk to me about it, because it's a kind of a crappy thing for Catholics to have to face, and although it's not going to dent my faith, it certainly makes me feel uneasy about the Church as an institution, and humanity in general.