Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action ~ 1John 3:18
Winner of the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival for Best Documentary opened in select cities, including Los Angeles on Friday, October 13th, 2006. It has now earned the high honor of being nominated for an Academy Award.
Deliver Us From Evil centers on the story of Father Oliver O'Grady, the most notorious pedophile in the history of the modern Catholic Church. Devoid of any sense of shame or remorse, O'Grady used his charm and authority to befriend and violate dozens of faithful Catholic families across Northern California for more than two decades. His victims ranged from a nine month-old infant to the middle-aged mother of another adolescent victim.
Despite early warning signs and complaints from several parishes, the Church, in an elaborate shell game designed to avoid liability and deflect criticism, lied to parishioners and local law enforcement, while continuing to move O'Grady from parish to parish. Internal Church documents prove that beginning in 1973, he raped and sodomized with the full knowledge of his Catholic superiors.
Remarkably, Deliver Us From Evil filmmaker Amy Berg tracked down Father O'Grady and persuaded him to participate in the making of her film. O'Grady's dispassionate account of the hundreds of children he molested is deeply chilling. It is juxtaposed with survivor's stories not only of being abused by Father O'Grady, but of being raped of their faith by a religious institution they had been raised to place every ounce of their trust and hope in, of losing the support they so desperately needed from their church communities, and of an adult lifetime spent searching for basic acknowledgment that the Church still isn't willing to extend them.
Alongside them, never-before-seen footage of the eventual deposition of Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony and his former second-in-command Monsignor Cain, interviews with experts such as Canon lawyer and historian Fr. Thomas Doyle, prosecution attorneys and former priests weaves a devastatingly brave portrait of the wider clergy sex abuse crisis.