‘DELIVER US FROM EVIL’
O'Grady, quietly delivered by the Catholic Church back to his Irish roots after a few years in an American prison, was (is?) a serial molester of girls, boys and even (Oh, Lord) infants.
Bob Jyono, Japanese-American father of now-grown victim Ann, who feels her life blighted, hates the term "molestation." He favors "rape." And when he loses composure, repeating that word in tearful fury, and partly blaming himself because his girl was too scared to tell him the truth, we know he has thought of murder.
We start to feel the same.
The movie is a litany of victims and a chilling indictment. O'Grady is interviewed at length, still twinkling as dear Ollie, mildly contrite. He belongs in another film, "Hell's Bells of St. Mary." O'Grady sums up the church history to which he has contributed so darkly with, "Sometimes you have a good day, sometimes a bad day."
For many years O'Grady achieved awful days. He seems partly blank on his compulsive habit, yet also pins it on being molested as an altar boy. Warned about his practices long ago, prelates sent him on a vile career tour of small-town parishes, just sort of hoping he might say the Rosary enough to avoid stoning.
The film's secondary devil is Los Angeles' Cardinal Roger M. Mahony. As a bishop, he approved the hush tactics that pinballed O'Grady from parish to parish. The stonewalling and fishy deals continue with other clerics, by now costing the church more than $1 billion. The film's large theme is that the church, caught in a mind-frame of obsessive denial, has a cancerous condition it prefers to treat like acne (and, sure, blame the diabolical media).
The key hero of the well-made film is gutsy Father Tom Doyle, a crunchingly articulate leader of the crusade to open up the church and stop it from abusing its own believers. The movie is a good step in this very uphill effort, even more than Kirby Dick's "Twist of Faith."
Doyle, Berg and some of the victims go to Rome to give a real hot potato of a letter to Pope Benedict XVI. Of course, he is otherwise engaged. As Aldous Huxley indicated long ago in "The Devils of Loudon," the Vatican has a truly baroque commitment to forms of sublimation fed by anti-sexual (and anti-female) paranoia.
When people speak truth to power, but power speaks only to itself with a forked tongue, hellishness endures. One can hope for justice some time this century, with charity suitably tempered.
A Disarming Films release. Director, writer: Amy Berg. Cast: Oliver O'Grady, Tom Doyle, the Jyonos, Nancy Sloan, Case and Jane De Groot, Cardinal Roger Mahony. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. Rated R. 3 1/2 stars.
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