Deliver Us From Evil Review
My Amazon review of this film can be found here. It is reproduced below.
Using Abuse Victims as a Means to an End
There is something particularly shocking about the sexual abuse of minors, rallying, as it does, an array of intense emotions. Those exploring the issue must do so with particularly sensitivity, forcing themselves to present their material in a fair and objective manner. It should not be used as an opportunity to push a particular ideological agenda, be it from pre-Vatican II conservatives who equate all moral wrongdoing with a failure to adhere to traditional Roman Catholicism or reformist liberals who seek to blame the clerical culture of traditional Roman Catholicism for everything that goes wrong. The victims deserve better.
My focus, here, is the journalistic merits of Deliver Us From Evil.
Balance
The film ‘contextualises’ the distressing testimony of the victims of Oliver O’Grady by cutting in interviews with four main participants: Thomas Doyle, Patrick Wall, Jeff Anderson, and John Manly. Doyle is a priest who views all transgressions by Roman Catholic clergy as the necessary consequence of ‘clericalism’, i.e. conservative Roman Catholicism. Jeff Anderson and John Manly are both lawyers suing the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. They are of no assistance to viewers seeking objectivity as both are obliged to present the ‘best case’ for their clients regardless of its objective merits. Patrick Wall, listed as a ‘theologian’ by Berg, is actually a paid consultant to Manly’s law practice. It would not be possible to present a more biased set of ‘experts’ even if one were trying, which may very well have been Berg’s intention.
A possible rejoinder to this is the argument that Berg sought to represent two competing extremes but the Catholic Church’s non-participation meant that she was unable to do so and the lack of balance is, therefore, of their making. To this there are two replies. The first is that the duty of a documentary filmmaker is to present a balanced view of a subject. There are plenty of individuals who could have balanced out the polemics of Doyle, Wall, Anderson and Manly, but Berg desired no such balance. Second, it is not at all clear that Berg ever made a bone fide, good faith attempt at gaining the Archdiocese’s response in the first place. In fact, there is evidence of a history of ethical breaches in her prior dealings with the Roman Catholic Church. If Roman Catholic officials suspected that they would not get a fair hearing, the end product shows they were right.
Issues of Fact
The issues of fact presented are difficult to assess because Berg has fatally undermined the viewers’ ability to do so by providing only biased experts throughout the film. Not a single one has a reputation for scholarship so even if one were to eliminate their ideological and practical biases it is still not clear why they should be consulted. The deposition videos shown are frequently edited so that viewers are unable to put each response in its proper context and the precise order of each clip is confused by Berg who at times to zooms in to cut off the timestamps on the base of the video. I had a feeling of being manipulated in the same sense I do when watching a Michael Moore film (or any right-wing equivalent) or a ‘tabloid’ TV program.
The film ends with a series of claims, white text on black background, but none of these are sourced so it’s difficult to determine their credibility. I suspect many viewers won’t care (it’s an anti-Catholic favourite) but those interested in the truth are put in the difficult position of having to do the filmmaker’s job for them.
Ethics
One disturbing element of the film was the manipulation of the victims at the film’s climax. The Jyono family are carted off to Vatican City, irresponsibly coaxed into believing that there was a chance that they, or someone else on their behalf, could march into to the offices of the head of a sovereign state and slap a letter of protest on his desk. They, of course, were treated as any other media group seeking to enter a foreign state without consent - their entry was refused. Berg, Doyle and Wall knew this would happen yet they persisted in their scheme in order to get the ‘rejection’ footage they knew could be used to paint the Church in a negative light. If it came at the expense of the victims’ dignity, so be it.
Others have commented on the filmmaker’s misrepresentations to a primary school so that they could position O’Grady close enough to its children that they both could be placed together in a single shot. This is another example of the filmmakers placing a premium on ‘moving’ visual imagery over and above the ethical considerations that must be made.
The filmmakers go as far as attempting to morally exculpate O’Grady of his crimes by (under Manly’s leading questions) suggesting it was simply part of a cycle of abuse ‘enabled’ by the Church. It seems that the excuses of a convicted paedophile are suddenly convincing once they can be used against the Catholic Church. The expression ‘cutting of your nose to spite your face’ comes to mind.
Conclusion
Make no mistake, this film seeks incite ridicule and hatred, not of paedophiles, but of Roman Catholicism. Visual imagery depicting traditional Roman Catholic ceremonies is juxtaposed with audio descriptions of sexual abuse, a not so subtle attempt to link the two. The film uses abuse victims as set-pieces around which it attaches a series of contentious ideological claims, avoiding the scrutiny such claims would otherwise endure. But all this comes at a cost. The perceived benefit of a ‘reform’ cannot be used to justify a lack of balance nor ethical breaches of the kind found throughout this film. I cannot recommend this film to anyone seeking a balanced account of the abuse crisis.
Related Posts
- The Intelligence of Film Critics
- Recent Doyle Article
- Reverend Thomas Patrick Doyle
- My Worldview(s)
- A Simplified Representation of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy of Authority
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[...] light of the near universal acclaim of the anti-Catholic propaganda piece Deliver Us From Evil,1 it’s no secret to me that many film critics are either stupid or gullible. I guess they [...]