Deliver Us from Evil

I just watched "Deliver Us from Evil" a documentary by Amy Berg, released in 2006, about the story of one of the Catholic Church's pedophile priests, Father Oliver O'Grady and the harm that he did during 30 years of priesthood covered by the bishop who just kept changing him from one parish to another in Central California without applying straightforward discipline. The Bishop's conduct was clearly motivated by both, his own interests in terms of his promotion within the church hierarchy, and by defending the image of the Catholic Church. He did so without thinking on the harm implied to the children and their families. This pattern was repeated in numerous dioceses and cost the Catholic Church in America 1 billion dollars in settlements to over more than 100,000 victims.

The documentary shows how two of Fr. O'Grady's victims went to the Vatican and wrote a letter to the Pope in order to tell their stories and avoid these situations in the future but they were not allowed to enter and hand-in the letter to the Pope.

The conclusion of the film: there is not such thing as the church as a mother. The church is a body of corruption that does not want to hear their own children cries and problems. The warmth that a Catholic parishioner experiments in their parish, is betrayed by the conduct of his/her church authorities and it is reduced to a well mounted paraphernalia with no soul nor trust.

I couldn't avoid to think on what Hannah Arendt regards as to be the main forces that lie behind any totalitarian system: ideology and terror. Ideology, as the service of the people to an idea, and terror, as the fear that paralyzes any reasoning and force people to act awkward and erratically. The ideology, in this case, is the idea of system. The catholic hierarchy serves to the idea of the system so it can be alive: a body that has to survive despite the harm of some of its own children. On the other hand, the fear is filtrated in the very nerve of the decisions and causes reasoning mutilation, lack of perspective, myopia in front of the damage that the victims suffer from the "sinners and repented priests".

To me, the message of Christ remains pure and the catholic doctrine, valid. The causes of the undesirable results are in the very origin of a dirty gestation of any totalitarian system and, the Church, that follows a monarchic model, is not immune to these effects.