Deliver Us from Evil is a documentary about the “clergy abuse” problem in the Catholic Church. It focuses on one priest in particular and some of his victims, used as a microcosm of other cases.

It is very well done and very tasteful (although, sometimes the clips of the priest in question are titillating rather than informative) and not anti-Catholic at all. If anyone out there is or used to be Catholic, I recommend it; if you have a particular interest in pedophilia in the Church, I recommend it; if neither is the case, I wouldn’t recommend it. I feel that one has to have a base understanding of some of the issues at hand (either the Catholic Church itself or pedophilia) to not come away from it with a sense that the Church is corrupt in all things, not just this one. As with all religions, my sense is that there are people in it who are, fundamentally, good people. I think that they may be deluded, but when that drives them to give to the poor, spend time in meditation, and treat people fairly, that delusion may be acceptable.

A few things stayed with me after having watched it.

One of them is a therapist, Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea, Ph.D. (thank you, Nancy) who has been helping the victims deal with & move on from their experiences. She indicates that a lot of men who end up in the seminary start in minor seminary, a kind of spiritual prep school that feeds into seminaries. She believes that this basically causes sexual retardation, disallowing them to explore their sexuality at the time when it starts to become a part of their life. This really struck me, because it rings so truly. The priest in question obviously has no idea what kinds of social/sexual boundaries are in place. On some level, he knows that what he’s doing & what he’s feeling is wrong, but he has no idea what other outlets are available to him, has no idea what other people might do in the same circumstance. The therapist also says that she feels that the Church comes down on priests, or people who want to be priests, with a sort of an all-sex-is-bad attitude. So pedophilia becomes not a problem of sex with children but of sex at all. It’s not a worse kind of sex since there is no good kind of sex (for a priest). This is also an interesting perspective since the reaction of the Church to the scandals has been, by all accounts, staggeringly insensitive and almost ignorant, as though the Church really doesn’t understand what everyone’s so worked up about.

Another is when the father of one of the victims, while being interviewed, realizes that he’s been using euphemisms for what happened to his (now nearly 40 year old) daughter. He says “she wasn’t molested, she was raped!” and later, “it’s not pedophilia, it’s rape!”. This seems to tie into the fact that all sex is bad. The fact that he raped a 5 year old girl, in my mind, necessitates a harsher sentence than a 15 year old girl, than a 25 year old woman. Maybe if we get to 75 or 85 we get back into the zone of really, really unacceptable rape (coming from the agreement of all of us here that rape is, objectively, bad, we can surely agree that rape of someone who is trusting of you is that much worse for the betrayal of that trust). This is something else Dr. Frawley-O’Dea touches on: that the people who have been abused by clergy are victims not only of sexual abuse, not only of social abuse (in terms of trust they had placed in the person), but also of spiritual abuse.

What struck me most, however, was a discussion that occurs disjointedly throughout the film about the causes of pedophilia & other forms of sexual disease in the Catholic Church. Frawley-O’Dea mentions one (sexual retardation by virtue of early admission to minor seminary) but the issue of marriage is also touched upon by a theologian, Patrick Wall. Wall mentions that celibacy is a 4th century addition to the rules for a priest and was mainly monetarily motivated; that is, any monies or lands owned by a priest passed to his eldest son upon his death. Celibacy was passed around as a solution to consolidate his lands in the hands of the Church (which at that point was simply the church, the major schisms had not yet occurred). In DVD special features, he quotes from the bible (generally from 1 Timothy) about how bishops are supposed to have a wife, be able to manage his household finances, have children who obey him, and not love money (1 Timothy 3:2-4); and about how people who preach celibacy are a sign of the anti-Christ (1 Timothy 4:3).

This ultimately makes me ask what the solution is. Healing is obviously necessary on both sides of the issue: victims need healing to come to terms with what happened to them and to move on with their lives; perpetrators & the Church needs to acknowledge was is happening and take steps to solve it in a concrete way. Perhaps Sloan is correct that men should not be accepted into the priesthood who have not yet sown their wild oats, or at least who are sexually mature before they swear to be spiritual eunuchs. Perhaps Wall is correct and priests should be encouraged to have healthy relationships, rather than being told that there is no way to satisfy the urges God built into the human body.

What surprised me about the film is that I came out so sympathetic to the Church. The bureaucrats who seemed to simply want the victims to shut up, but there were Church-citizens, people who still believed and wanted to heal the rift, solve the problem, and admit culpability of the Church who made the Church a sympathetic character in the film. In no way am I trying to minimize the crimes that were committed against the victims, but they have organizations and avenues of healing that they are utilizing. Perhaps not to the fullest, but I feel that the major impediment to the complete healing of the victims is the denial of a need for healing within the Church. This kind of healing would involve what I outlined above and so would necessitate allowing healing of the victims as well.

The prayers of this atheist are with all the victims: those who were abused, molested, and raped; those who attended their churches and felt that they should have seen what was happening around them sooner; those who abused, molested, and raped; those who have lost their faith because of the abusers, molesters, and rapists; and those who have kept their faith despite the abusers, molesters, and rapists. May they all be healed.