A documentary to be premiered in Dublin today tells of an Irish priest's trail of child sex abuse in the US and a cardinal's part in the cover-up, writes Patsy McGarryin Rome
Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles strutted his stuff - there is no other description - up the centre aisle of vast, crowded St Peter's Basilica as fellow cardinals put on vestments in a side-aisle sealed off by a screen.
They were preparing for a Mass that would mark a beginning to the conclave to elect a successor to the deceased Pope John Paul II. Through an opening in the screen, beneath a marble plaque to St Victor supported by struggling chubby cherubs, they could be seen chatting amiably and donning their vestments.
It was not clear why Cardinal Mahony was not among them. Tall, thin, bespectacled, he strolled alone and conspicuous, up and down the centre aisle, smiling, resplendent in scarlet, being greeted by and photographed with people in the congregation.
His demeanour was that of a politician on walkabout. Perhaps he was conscious that his dented reputation might have preceded him from the US and just wanted to show what a good egg, what a really cheery, decent chappie he was. Maybe he felt his injured image had been highlighted the week before in that controversy over his fellow US prelate, Cardinal Bernard Law - who, after being forced to resign in 2002 over his handling of clerical child sex abuse cases in Boston, wasn't stood down by Rome but was instead appointed archpriest of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, entitling him to celebrate one of the nine Masses of mourning following the death of Pope John Paul.
Cardinal Mahony's walkabout that morning puzzled many, not least since he was on nobody's list for a likely next Pope. But he is conscious of the value of a good image, something highlighted in the powerful and at times gut-wrenching documentary Deliver Us from Evil. It receives its international premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival this afternoon and has been nominated for an Oscar.
In it, Cardinal Mahony is damned by his own words and actions in the case of former priest Oliver O'Grady, who is from Limerick and currently resides in Dublin. O'Grady left a trail of devastation in California following decades of child sex abuse, as he was moved from parish to parish by church authorities who were aware of but blithely ignored his history. One of his victims was nine months old at the time of the abuse.
A KEY MOMENT in the documentary shows Cardinal Mahony, in a never-before-seen deposition given in November 2004 - just five months before his St Peter's walkabout - trying to explain why he once received a letter of gratitude from O'Grady.
As O'Grady explained in the documentary, the cardinal, also his bishop, had just helped him out of one child abuse crisis by moving him on to another parish, where another such crisis soon followed.
"I honestly don't know," was Cardinal Mahony's response, when asked what O'Grady was expressing gratitude for. He then went on to criticise the letter's style as "flowery" and "overstated".
John Manly, attorney for one of the victims, Ann Marie Jyono, observes at one point in the documentary that "Mahony picked power and glory over the gospel". Jeff Anderson, attorney for another of O'Grady's victims, discloses that in 23 years of dealing with clerical child sex abuse, "what I have encountered is deception, perjury, denial and deceit at the highest levels of the Catholic Church". Recalling Cardinal Mahony's apparently self-satisfied strut in St Peter's, and witnessing again his demeanour in Deliver Us From Evil during the deposition five months beforehand, it is difficult not to agree with Anderson's view.
And that is the "evil" at the heart of this powerful work. Not simply just the awful, by now all-too-familiar devastation a clerical child sex abuser - and by his own admission a sick man - leaves in his wake, but the evil of an institution that not only knew what he was doing to children but then moved him from parish to parish to do the same again and again rather than have any damage inflicted on itself.
Another all-too-familiar story.
THEY MIGHT HEED the words of their Church's founder, Jesus, when he said "woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites: you are like to whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear to men beautiful but within are full of dead men's bones and of all filthiness". If the issue of clerical child sex abuse and the scandal of how it has been handled by the church are no longer novel, what remains a constant and distressing surprise is the great trust and innocence of devout Catholic families sacrificed to both.
There is at the heart of this documentary a deeply affecting, incurable howl of anguish from a father whose very love for his little daughter prevented her telling him she was being raped by their priest-guest from when she was five until she was 12.
Bob Jyono told Ann Marie when she was a very small girl that if anyone ever did anything to her he would kill them. When her abuse by O'Grady began, she wondered whether to tell her dad. First she asked another little girl what would happen to her father if he killed someone and was told he would go to jail for life.
She told no one about the abuse until she was 27. Then, in 1993, her mother Maria rang her after seeing O'Grady splashed all over the papers in connection with other abuse cases. By then he had been a close friend of the family for 22 years.
IN THE DOCUMENTARY, and speaking to The Irish Times from the US this week, Maria recalled the niggling doubt she had after seeing the newspapers that day. She rang Ann Marie and asked whether O'Grady had ever interfered with her. Ann Marie went silent. She protested she had to see to her dog.
Maria then got her husband to ring Ann, as she knew he would be told the truth. Their daughter confirmed to him she had been abused. It was some time before the full truth emerged. In the documentary he expresses his guilt that "her love for her father prevented her telling" about the abuse when she was a little girl.
"Our whole world collapsed. He destroyed our lives, our family . . . raping her at five years old - for God's sake, how could that happen? There is no God. I do not believe in God," he says.
Maria is from Kanturk in Co Cork and met Bob while nursing in England. He is Japanese-American and was with the airforce. A Buddhist, he converted to Catholicism to marry her. They went to California in 1966 and had two children, a daughter and a son. Maria told The Irish Times she could not discuss whether their son was abused.
O'Grady arrived there in 1971. As he too was Irish, Maria was very pleased by his arrival. His accent was so strong Bob would help him with his sermons. He would sleep over. They never suspected a thing. Even when he was charged in 1993 they raised $4,000 (€3,050) for his bail.
Two of O'Grady's other victims, now adults, appear in the documentary, as he does himself, promising "the most honest confession I have ever made". He delivers, but it is clear he has no sense of the devastation he has left in his wake.
What emerges is a deluded man, who was abused by and himself abused family members growing up, and was also abused by visiting priests in his parish in Limerick.
He is not the villain of this piece.
Along with the three victims and their families there is oneother hero in this film - Fr Tom Doyle, a long-standing campaigner on the issue of clerical child sex abuse in the US, Ireland and elsewhere.
Of the clergy who appear in the documentary, he is the only one who meets an older understanding of what the word 'Christian' means.
Deliver Us From Evil will be screened today as part of the Dublin International Film Festival and will be going on cinema release later this year. Controversial scenes filmed at a Dublin school have been edited out of the documentary