Deliver Us from Evil (2006)

Deliver Us from Evil is a difficult film to watch, but it is an essential one. The Oscar-nominated 2006 documentary chronicles the tale of a pedophile priest and his many victims, but its scope is more expansive. By zeroing in on the specific case of defrocked Father Oliver O’Grady, the filmmakers paint a stark portrait of institutional corruption and abuse of power. Yet Deliver Us from Evil is never sensationalistic. It is a powerful and heartbreaking story told with consummate skill.

Director Amy Berg, a TV news producer who did extensive coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, digs into the chilling saga of O’Grady. Once known as “Father Ollie” to his California parishioners, the Irish native with a thick brogue and a grandfatherly appearance hardly comes across as a monster – at least, not initially. “He was the perfect example of what you would think a priest would be,” says one woman who knew him for more than 20 years. “He was the closest thing to God that we knew.”

But O’Grady was a predator whose crimes spanned three decades, a pedophile who charmed and manipulated his parishioners in order to get to their children. After serving less than half of a 14-year prison sentence for his crimes, O’Grady was deported to Ireland, which is where Berg met him for a series of astonishing interviews. His admissions are made all the more horrifying by the insouciance with which he delivers them, nodding his head and grinning as he recounts how, yes, he used to get aroused seeing kiddies in their underpants.

But Berg gives far greater voice to O’Grady’s victims – particularly two women and one man – who were children when he raped them. Nancy Sloan was 10 years old in 1976 when she told her parents what Father Ollie had done to her. The parents confronted O’Grady’s superior, who consequently ordered the priest to write the family a letter of apology. 

So began a pattern of deceit and cover-up. O’Grady’s bishop at the time, Merlin Guilfoyle, coerced an agreement from Sloan’s family; if O’Grady was sent to a monastery far away from children, the parents would not press charges. Two years later, however, Guilfoyle assigned Grady to another small-town parish some 50 miles away.

More molestations followed. O’Grady’s supervisor, then-Bishop Roger Mahony (later archbishop of Los Angeles), continued the practice of enabling O’Grady’s crimes. More allegations of abuse prompted the priest’s reassignment to yet another parish, this time in Stockton, Calif. The list of victims grew, the youngest of whom was 9 months old.

The film is devastating on multiple levels. Not only does it provide disturbingly close access to a confessed child sex predator, but Berg places O’Grady’s crimes in a larger context, examining a hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church that tacitly allowed child abuse and even protected the abusers.

Berg doesn’t overload the docu with a surfeit of interviews, but the theologians and canon law experts whom she does employ, especially victims’ advocate Father Tom Doyle, offer some provocative ideas. Of particular resonance is their contention that the church’s vow of celibacy inevitably led to the monstrosities perpetrated by O’Grady and others.

Deliver Us from Evil is certain to stoke viewers’ outrage, but it does so fairly. Neither didactic nor simplistic, it lets the events and players speak for themselves through interviews, archival footage and other materials. Certain church officials are hoisted on their own petard. In a videotaped deposition, a monsignor who knew about O’Grady’s problems concedes he did not see a similarity between the priest’s molestation of a 10-year-old girl in 1976 and the rape of a little boy more than a decade later. After all, the monsignor explains, one was with a girl – which, according to Nancy Sloan, the monsignor attributed to a “natural curiosity” while the other was more about homosexuality.

There is a lot of suffering in Deliver Us from Evil, but it doesn’t surrender to hopelessness. O’Grady’s victims and their families have pain that will never go away, but they appear to be determined, resolute and inherently decent people whose strength is inspiring.