Accepting Evil

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
~Martin Luther King, Jr.

I watched a really upsetting documentary the other night. The documentary is called "Deliver Us From Evil," and it uses interviews, deposition tapes, letters, and so on to tell the true story of the priest Oliver O'Grady and his 100's of victims in California from the 1970s and 1980s. It was rather difficult to watch. It investigates O'Grady's pedophilia, the pain of the victims and their families, and the chain of command in the Catholic church.

I do think I'm better for watching it, but, though I rarely shed tears while watching television or films, I couldn't help but start crying at a certain part when a victim's father begins breaking down as he recounted the day he realized that his daughter had been abused and raped from when she was 5 years old till she was 12 years old. He asked her why she didn't tell him and she said that when she was very young, he had told her that if anyone hurt her, he would kill that person. When the abuse began, she asked a friend what would happen if someone's father killed someone and the friend told her that the father would go to jail for the rest of his life. She decided at that point to keep it a secret from her father to protect him. As he explained this, he tearfully expressed remorse for saying such a thing. Watching this loving father under the weight of so much undeserved regret and guilt was, at the least, heart-wrenching.

What was more astonishing than the sheer sociopathic behavior of O'Grady was and is the blatant covering up and shirking of responsibility of his overseers and authority figures in the church. The director of the movie asks, on the film's website:

What must the 100,000 survivors of clergy abuse (and the vast number of survivors who have yet to come forward) feel like seeing the government officials who are supposed to protect, represent and serve them behave in this way, and seeing a trailer for a film that honestly depicts their ordeal and the very fact of their abuse be treated by the MPAA as unacceptable for mainstream Americans to view and understand?

I agree. While I understand the want of an organization of individual people to want to project a "good image" and control or neutralize negative information, there is also responsibility to protect those who trust and support the institution. I don't think the Catholic church is "evil," but I do agree that it is made up of human beings and if each person does not take responsibility to do what's right, the creation of a nightmare situation is all too easy.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people."



You can watch the full film here: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/deliver-us-from-evil/