"Deliver Us From Evil": The Amorality of the Catholic Church

By Greta Christina, Greta Christina's Blog. Posted July 4, 2009.

I mean, the whole institution is founded on the idea that priests are special, holy men of God with an exceptional spiritual power, and that the authority they wield comes not from human beings but from a divine command. Of course they're going to protect those priests at the expense of protecting children. To do otherwise wouldn't just make their organization look bad. It would undermine the very foundation that their church is built on. It would force them to rethink everything they believe, everything they've centered their lives on.

And people aren't very good at doing that.

So instead, they circled the wagons. And in doing so, they made themselves more monstrous than the child molesters they were protecting. O'Grady's actions, abhorrent as they were, were almost understandable in the context of mental illness. The actions of the Church officials who protected him and countless other priests like him, not out of uncontrollable impulse, but consciously, thoughtfully, with a cool evaluation of the pros and cons, are beyond moral comprehension.

This is a hard movie to watch. And I certainly understand the impulse to not go to movies that are hard to watch. (I've never been sorry that I went to see a movie that was brilliant but hard to watch... but I always have to remind myself of that, and the impulse to just see something smart and funny at the end of a long week is a strong one.) But I'm completely glad I saw "Deliver Us From Evil," and I recommend it highly. It made both the full magnitude and the full emotional depth of this scandal clear to me, and personal to me, in a way that it hadn't been before. And it made clear in an entirely new way just how deeply religion can twist the moral compass, creating an institution that loudly and publicly cries its outrage over the desecration of a cracker... but that whispers and stonewalls, turns a blind eye and covers it up, when thousands upon thousands of children are being molested by its most trusted representatives.

If you can't see it in a theater or at an atheist film festival, "Deliver Us From Evil" is also available on DVD.

See more stories tagged with: religion, priests, catholic church, vatican, movie, atheism, child molestation, deliver us from evil, beleif, atheist film festival

Read more of Greta Christina at her blog.

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