Mosaic

We were not responsible says Sisters of Charity

For over a decade a group of children at St Joseph's industrial school in Kilkenny were abused. The Sisters of Charity and the then Minister for Education covered up that abuse and the order of nuns now refuses to take responsibility for what happened. By Mary Raftery

Some of the most startling revelations to have emerged from the recent public hearings of the Child Abuse Commission concern an industrial school in Kilkenny, St Joseph's, run by the Irish Sisters of Charity.

It is a story

• of a bishop writing coded notes
• of references to a mysterious Sister A
• of adult seminarians running around naked with young boys
• of a bishop too fragile to be told that children had been sexually abused
• of cover-up at government minister level
• and of a nun who today expresses sorrow on behalf of her order but refuses to apologise.

It is above all the tragic story of children subjected to an appalling litany of over a decade of abuse.

The Kilkenny saga also provides the only clue so far on how the courts might attribute responsibility between state and church for the abuse of children in institutions. The High Court ruled that in one case of abuse at St Joseph's the Sisters of Charity had full liability, with the state being held to bear no responsibility.

This has profound implications for the government and its negotiation of the notorious church/ state deal whereby the state is paying out over 90 per cent of the ?1bn cost of compensating victims of child abuse at institutions, with the religious orders contributing less than 10 per cent.

To understand what happened at St Joseph's in Kilkenny, one must go back to the mid-1960s. There exists a piece of old, black-and-white RTÉ footage which shows a group of about 20 small boys, all under six, gathered at the door of a large, institutional-type building. The boys look happy enough and some are clasping buckets and spades. They are inmates of St Patrick's industrial school in Kilkenny, also run by the Sisters of Charity. They are about to go on a trip to the seaside.

In the knowledge of the rape and torture to which several of these boys were shortly to be subjected over a number of years, the footage is searingly tragic.

Soon after this piece of film was shot, St Patrick's was shut down as an industrial school for boys under 10. Those children aged between four and six were transferred up the road to another Sisters of Charity industrial school, St Joseph's, which had previously catered only for girls. The boys, 32 of them, were initially accommodated in two large rooms, where they ate, slept and played.

At one stage, reports of the behaviour of a group of four students from St Kieran's seminary in Kilkenny came to the attention of the head nun at St Joseph's, Sr Joseph Conception O'Donoghue. These students had been brought into the industrial school to supervise the boys during the night.

In 1995, Sr Conception made a statement to gardaí as part of their investigations into a series of child abuse allegations against several individuals employed at St Joseph's during the 1960s and 1970s. One of the incidents Sr Conception deals with concerns this group of students. According to her statement, she was told that the students and the children they were supervising "were running around naked".

She reported the matter to a local garda who did occasional voluntary work with the children at St Joseph's. He told a local priest, who in turn informed the Dean of Students at St Kieran's. Sr Conception took no further action. She states that the students did not return to the industrial school, and adds, "I didn't mention this incident to anyone."

This was merely the first of a long list of incidents and reports of abuse or suspected abuse at St Joseph's. One of the boys' earliest carers at the institution, Teresa Connolly, assaulted them both physically and sexually. She was convicted for this abuse in 1999.

By 1971, with the boys getting older, the nuns were keen to employ a man to look after them. That year, the first childcare course in Ireland was organised. It took place in Kilkenny and was run by Sister of Charity Stanislaus Kennedy. Its first graduates emerged in 1972, and among them was David Murray. He was immediately employed by the nuns at St Joseph's. They were delighted that the boys would now have a father figure to look up to.

In 1997, Murray was sentenced to 10 years in prison for buggery and acts of gross indecency on a number of the boys. Judge Matthews stated at the trial: "Never in the history of childcare in this state has one childcare worker caused so much damage. If these sad facts teach us anything, it is that we must listen to those who cannot and have not in the past been heard."

Murray had spent over three years terrorising the children at St Joseph's. They describe how he would come to some boy's bed almost every night and anally rape him. He would set his Alsatian dog Thunder on the children. Even the nuns were terrified of the dog. He threatened to kill the boys if they told anyone what he was doing to them.

He took one boy, Raymond Noctor, out of his bed in the dead of night and brought him outside to a cabbage patch. He told Raymond that he would bury him there if he talked.

However, displaying remarkable courage, a number of the boys, including Raymond Noctor, did tell. They complained to the head nun, Sr Conception, among others. They have always maintained that they told her about the sexual abuse. She has repeatedly denied this, saying that her understanding of their complaints was that David Murray was merely being hard on them.

According to her Garda statement during the investigation of Murray's crimes 20 years later in 1995, she does accept that Raymond Noctor came to her in the mid-1970s and told her that Murray was "at the boys". She claims that she understood this to mean "nagging at them and giving them the odd slap".

In her Garda statement, Sr Conception describes children in severe distress, several of them running away, and all complaining about Murray. Her response was to tell him not to be so hard on the boys. It was only in 1976, when another individual told her that Murray was "abusing the boys", that she says she realised "something serious was going on".

David Murray was then fired by Sr Conception. However, it was revealed at the public hearings of the Child Abuse Commission last May that she did Murray one last service. The commission heard that in 1979 Murray secured a job looking after children at Scoil Ard Mhuire in Lusk, Co Dublin, a reformatory school for boys.

As a routine matter, the Lusk school asked Sr Conception for a reference for Murray, as she was a previous employer. The nun obliged, sending back the details of Murray's employment record at St Joseph's. She made no reference to him being fired for abusing the children.

Sr Una O'Neill, the current superior general of the Sisters of Charity was asked at the commission hearings why no attempt was made to warn the Lusk school about Murray's record of abuse. She was unable to provide a satisfactory answer.

What makes this particularly egregious is that David Murray continued his rampage of child rape at Lusk during 1980 and 1981. It was not until 20 years later, in 2001, that he was convicted for the buggery of one child at this institution and on six counts of indecent assault and three of gross indecency. Described by Justice McCartan on this occasion as "evil and dangerous", Murray received a further 10-year jail sentence.

Back at St Joseph's, Kilkenny, in 1976, Sr Conception set about hiring another male childcare worker to replace David Murray. She employed an Englishman by the name of Myles Brady.

Brady was an extraordinarily violent man and had a problem with drink. He was known as 'whiskey-breath' by the children. He beat them frequently with hurley sticks and anything else that came to hand. He also sexually abused several of the boys.

In early 1977, another childcare worker at St Joseph's, Edward Murphy, complained to Sr Conception about Brady's treatment of the children. He was fobbed off. The nun has since said that she did not take his complaint seriously as he was only a trainee at the time.

With a highly commendable dedication to the welfare of the boys, Edward Murphy took the matter further. He approached the most high-profile nun in Kilkenny at the time, Sr Stanislaus Kennedy. Sr Stan was then running both the childcare course and the Kilkenny social services programme, an enormously progressive operation organised in conjunction with the Diocese of Ossory and the local bishop Peter Birch.

Edward Murphy has said that he was not aware that Brady was sexually abusing the boys – his complaint related to physical abuse. Sr Stan has repeatedly stated that she knew nothing of sexual abuse at St Joseph's until she was contacted by gardaí during their 1995 investigation into the crimes of Myles Brady and David Murray.

In the 1970s Sr Stan was the country's leading expert in childcare. Her understanding of her meeting with Edward Murphy is expressed in the statement she made to gardaí in 1995.

In this statement, signed by her in the presence of her solicitor, she stated Edward Murphy "complained to me that Myles Brady was physically abusing the children. I picked up on it that he might have been sexually abusing them as well. I told Eddie Murphy to tell Sr Conception. Eddie Murphy came back to me and said the children were going to tell the guards. Eddie Murphy either [said] the children are going or have gone to the Guards. I can't be exactly sure of what Eddie Murphy said. Eddie Murphy left St Joseph's shortly after that and Myles Brady also left. Eddie Murphy was very upset when he told me about Myles Brady."

Sr Stan also stated that she had a "vague recollection" of another individual, a local man from the town, complaining to her about the treatment of the children at St Joseph's. However, she adds later in her Garda statement that "with regard to what happened in St Joseph's you simply did not ask. I knew nothing about the running of St Joseph's."

We know that Sr Stan did not at any stage discuss these complaints with the head nun of St Joseph's, Sr Conception, not even after Edward Murphy's resignation in protest. His resignation letter stated that the situation concerning Myles Brady was "highly undesirable and unsafe".

We also know that Murphy informed Bishop Birch of the abuse of children at St Joseph's. The Child Abuse Commission was told that a copy of Murphy's resignation letter was found in diocesan files. The commission also discovered a cryptic note in the files, handwritten by Bishop Birch. This was displayed on screen at the commission hearings. It read as follows:

1. Ed approached Sr. A to talk to boys re drunkenness etc. She promised to look into it.
2. She talked to boys one and a half hours, was shocked by what heard.
3. She asked B to stay off when off.
4. Some days later off duty beat a boy badly.
5. Ed threatened to resign. Offer of alternative job. Ed wants investigation, offer withdrawn.
6. Mr Granville investigating (Ed told) and had seen Ed's letter.
7. Phoned Mr. Granville – knew nothing of it.

A number of aspects of this note are intriguing. Firstly, it is interesting that the bishop should have felt the need to be so coded in his references to particular individuals. The Child Abuse Commission appeared satisfied that the "Ed" referred to is Edward Murphy, and that "B" is Myles Brady. The identity of "Sister A", however, remains unknown. It was stated that she is not Sr Conception. Since we are aware of only one other nun who was informed of Brady's abuse of the children, namely Sr Stanislaus Kennedy, it is possible that she is the "Sister A" referred to here. It is also interesting that Bishop Birch should record that Brady "beat a boy badly". There is nothing to show that either the bishop or the mysterious Sister A took any serious action on foot of this or any other complaint made to them.

Finally, the reference to "Mr Granville". He was the Department of Education's inspector of industrial schools at the time. He has consistently denied that he was ever informed of the abuse of children at St Joseph's, despite claims from Sr Conception that she told him. Bishop Birch's note would appear to support Mr Granville in this. However, it is not recorded if Granville took any action on foot of the bishop's own phone call on the matter, although we have no knowledge so far of what exactly the bishop told him.

And there matters lay for a few months. Edward Murphy had resigned, but from the point of view of the nuns and the bishop, the situation had been contained. Myles Brady continued exactly as before. There was no relief for the boys from his beatings and sexual assaults.

Then, in June of 1977, five months after Murphy's resignation, all hell broke loose. One of the boys of St Joseph's invited a classmate back to the institution for tea one evening. Myles Brady brought this boy, then aged 12, into his room and sexually assaulted him.

Some weeks after the abuse, the boy was found by his mother sticking pins into a photograph of Brady. He then told his family what had happened. Sr Conception was informed shortly afterwards. She persists in her claim that she did not understand the complaint she received to refer to sexual abuse. She nonetheless took immediate action.

Myles Brady had gone to Dublin for the weekend. Sr Conception contacted local garda John Tuohy, and together they went to Dublin to confront Brady. The Child Abuse Commission heard that Tuohy unambiguously informed Brady that the allegation against him was one of sexual assault of a child. Brady admitted the abuse, was fired on the spot and told never to return to Kilkenny.

Tuohy made a report to his superiors on the matter, but no prosecution was taken against Brady at the time as there was no direct complaint from the victim. It is, however, interesting to note that Tuohy, who later became a sergeant, was central to the 1995-1997 investigation and conviction of the succession of paedophiles who worked at St Joseph's.

Myles Brady pleaded guilty in 1997 to several counts of sexually assaulting a number of children and received a four-year prison sentence. He died in 1999.

In 2003, in what became known as 'The Visitor Case', the boy (now an adult) from the town who had been sexually abused by Brady took a civil action against both the Sisters of Charity and the Department of Education. He had emigrated to Spain and had been deeply traumatised by the abuse. He had at one stage attempted to take his own life.

Unlike most victims of abuse at children's institutions, this man was not entitled to seek compensation from the Residential Institutions Redress Board, as he was only a visitor to the school and not an inmate.

Equally, the case did not come within the definition of the state indemnity provided to religious orders as part of the church/state deal. Consequently, this was to be the first time a court would be able to assess the relative responsibilities of the state and the religious orders who ran the industrial schools.

Although the Department of Education and the Sisters of Charity were co-defendants in the action, they fought hard to attach as much blame as possible to each other. Justice Kevin O'Higgins' judgement in the High Court was startling. He found the Sisters of Charity, as managers of the institution concerned and as the employer of Myles Brady, to be 100 per cent liable for the damages of ?75,000 awarded to the plaintiff. The judge's conclusion that the state had zero liability flies directly in the face of the church/state deal, in which the government (ie the taxpayer) has shouldered 90 per cent of the compensation payout to abuse victims.

While it has been pointed out that there are certain unique features to this case, most notably that the victim was not in the care of the state as a child, it is worth examining exactly what Justice O'Higgins said in his lengthy and carefully argued judgement. His conclusions have much wider implications in terms of defining the relationship between state and church in the running of the industrial schools:

"The roles of the department and of the managers [ie the religious orders] are clearly delineated in the Children's Act, 1908. Although Sr Joseph Conception stated: 'We were totally accountable to the Department of Education,' this does not accurately reflect the large level of autonomy in the running of the institution given to the managers and provided for in the statutory framework. The role of the department... 'to certify, to inspect, and to advise' more accurately describes the reality of the situation. In those circumstances... I do not think that in the context of this particular case the Minister [for Education] can be made liable for the assault, the subject matter of these proceedings."

In the light of the deeply shocking litany of abuse suffered by the boys of St Joseph's, it is difficult to comprehend the attitude of Sr Una O'Neill in her testimony to the Child Abuse Commission in May. As head of the Sisters of Charity, she appeared unwilling to commit herself to an apology to the children so grievously injured while in the care of her order.

"If an apology were in anyway to link us with the David Murrays and Myles Bradys of this world then in no way would an apology be given," she told the commission. She added that her order expressed regret and sorrow that children were abused, but she did not accept that the nuns shared any responsibility for that abuse.

A constant refrain of the Sisters of Charity has been that they had no knowledge or awareness prior to the late 1980s of even the existence of such a phenomenon as child sexual abuse. They repeated this as recently as the 1990s, when evidence emerged that several of the children at Madonna House in Dublin, run by the order, had been abused by a maintenance man employed by the nuns. In fact, as a result of evidence presented at the Child Abuse Commission's public hearings, it is now possible to trace this order's detailed knowledge of child sex abuse back as far as the mid-1950s.

Sr Una O'Neill was questioned at the commission about an extraordinary incident which occurred at St Joseph's Kilkenny in 1954. The nun in charge at the time had applied to the Department of Education for permission to transfer a number of girls to a reformatory in Limerick. The children were described as having misbehaved.

The department's medical inspector of industrial schools, Anna McCabe, became curious and paid a visit to St Joseph's in Kilkenny. She interviewed the girls and discovered that nine of them had been sexually abused by a house-painter employed by the nuns. When the head nun was confronted with this by Anna McCabe, she admitted it was true.

Up to this point, the Department of Education cannot be faulted – it did its job properly by unearthing serious crimes against children, crimes which had not been reported to anyone by the nuns in charge. However, what followed can only be construed as a clear obstruction of justice.

A comprehensive cover-up was organised. A meeting was arranged, attended by the superior general of the Sisters of Charity, two senior Department of Education officials, the local parish priest Fr O'Keefe, and the nun in charge of St Joseph's. At the urging of Fr O'Keefe, it was agreed that the matter would not be reported to gardaí. It was also decided not to inform the bishop, who was apparently too old, too frail and too deaf to be told. The cover-up was sanctioned at the highest level by the Minister for Education, Fine Gael's Richard Mulcahy.

The Kilkenny paedophile was simply dismissed from his post. He was never charged with any offence. As to the girls, some were transferred, others remained in Kilkenny. There was no evidence presented at the Child Abuse Commission public hearings of any particular concern being evinced for their welfare or for the trauma they had suffered.

It seems that no child protection measures were put in place by the Sisters of Charity on foot of their direct experience of such a serious occurrence of child sexual abuse in the 1950s. Instead, every effort was made to suppress all knowledge of the incident. By burying their heads in the sand with such single-minded determination, the nuns were destined to repeat their appalling mistakes throughout the 1970s in Kilkenny and during the 1980s and 1990s in Madonna House, with tragic consequences for the dozens of boys and girls so savagely robbed of their innocence and their childhoods by a seemingly endless succession of paedophiles employed by these religious sisters.

By refusing even today to acknowledge their share of responsibility for this abuse, the Sisters of Charity continue to abuse those they failed to protect as vulnerable children in their care. And through its extraordinarily generous indemnity deal, the state continues to protect the nuns from the consequences of their negligence.

Sr Stan responds

I didn't know and I didn't know anybody else who knew either

Obey

Breakfast at the Vatican

Breakfast At The Vatican

Deliver Us from Evil

When Amy Berg decided to hang out a shingle and produce feature documentaries two years ago, she wasn't quite sure what subject might both consume her interest and hit a nerve with audiences. Berg, a Los Angeles native, began her career in local radio, moved into local news at KCBS and segued to a gig producing investagative reports for CNN. She received Emmys for a sports documentary and a social profile set in South Central L.A. In those jobs, she'd also done close to a dozen reports on the sex scandals that wracked California's Catholic dioceses over the past decade.

"The subject had become like mother's milk to me," said Berg. "It's just so complex and despite this wall of silence, or at least lack of cooperation from the church, the leaks continue to reveal details that are shocking and alarming." An associate had given Berg a phone number for one Father Oliver O'Grady and she decided to make a blind call to him. A convicted pedophile, he had moved back to Ireland to escape scrutiny. She knew him only from criminal records and imagined him as some sort of monster preying on the vulnerability of children.

"That first call still sticks with me," she says. "He answers the phone, 'hello and good evening,' with such warmth, you'd think you were encountering some delightful, impish leprechaun."

If not precisely a profile of O'Grady, her feature documentary Deliver Us from Evil - which premiered Saturday at the Los Angeles Film Festival - situates him at its center. For good and ill, he is its soul. Berg puts it more simply: "There would be no film without O'Grady."

There's no denying that the priest, who worked in several North California parishes, has a seductive personality and the filmmaker admits she had to watch that she didn't fall under his spell. Berg points out that he honed a well-craft rationalization for his predatory behavior but was not blind to the fact that he relished the attention; perhaps even gloried in it. "He'd ask me questions about Cardinal (Roger) Mahoney (of Los Angeles) and other things to test the waters," she recalls. "He feels safely away from it all in Ireland and besides, he keeps a low profile.

Berg personally financed a trip to see meet O'Grady. Months later, she made another trip and in eight days shot the interview footage. Armed with that material she proceeded to secure the private financing that allowed her to make the movie. The rest of the film is culled from available news material and extensive interviews with three of O'Grady's victims, their families, and their emotional and legal support teams. Deliver Us from Evil's emotional potency derives largely from putting a human face on decades of looking away from this crisis by the church.

O'Grady hasn't seen the film and, in fact, he's had no contact with Berg since shortly after conducting the interviews. After finding out about O'Grady's participation, his brother - an Irish entertainer - advised him in no uncertain terms not to speak again with the filmmaker. She's been told that he's now taking computer training, but to what end remains a msytery.

Berg couldn't be more pleased about the audience response during the opening weekend of the festival. She says that she wrestled with bowing the film at the Tribeca fest or in Ireland but the public and industry reaction at LAFF more than validated her decision to premiere the film where the story would have the greatest resonance.

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By Gina Piccalo, Times Staff Writer
As he describes his pedophilic urges, Oliver O'Grady, a former priest who for about 20 years fondled and raped children from his Central California parishes, stands in a Dublin, Ireland, park smiling, noting casually as a small red-headed boy walks right behind him. He lives nearby, alone and unchecked by police, though O'Grady served seven years in a California prison for sexually assaulting a 9-year-old boy in the mid-1990s. Nearby, a playground is visible.

This is just one of many chilling moments from "Deliver Us From Evil," a new documentary directed by investigative news producer Amy Berg that premiered Saturday to a sellout crowd at the Los Angeles Film Festival and screens again tonight. Chilling too are the reasons that O'Grady agreed to be interviewed on camera: He wants to force L.A. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and other church officials to acknowledge they knew of his abuse and transferred him to a new parish every time a family complained — allegations that Berg tries to substantiate with victim and police interviews and church correspondence — despite their promises to keep O'Grady away from kids.

"I should have been removed and attended to and [Mahony] then should also have followed up by attending to the people I had harmed," O'Grady tells Berg in the film.

"Deliver Us" comes years after the priest sex abuse scandals broke in Los Angeles and other cities, but Berg feels there's too little said about the church's reluctance to take responsibility for the crimes. As an investigative news producer, Berg spent four years on the story for CBS News and CNN Investigations. In her film, she uses personal letters, police reports and as yet unaired deposition footage to suggest Mahony has not been forthcoming and show what she believes is the criminal neglect — what one psychologist from the film called "spiritual abuse" — by Roman Catholic Church officials.

During the last two years, she traveled to Ireland twice to interview O'Grady and followed two of his victims to Rome in their failed attempt to get an apology from the pope. She sifted through hours of videotaped testimony from Mahony and other church officials, footage in which they deny any knowledge of the abuse despite an increasingly thick church file of complaints against the priest. It was just one of many moments during the screening that elicited loud reaction from the audience — in this case, groans.

"Deliver Us" is one of the 15 documentaries the International Documentary Assn. will help qualify for Oscar consideration. There's much interest in Ireland, where O'Grady was born and raised. It will screen at the Cork Film Festival this year, and Berg hopes to bring it to Rome. The last time she spoke to O'Grady, six months ago, Berg said he was terrified of the fallout the film would bring to his life.

During a Q&A session after the screening, the director was asked what reaction, if any, she had gotten from Mahony or the church. "His attorneys came to my attorneys' office and watched it last week," she said. "I was told they were somber when they left."

In the film, Mahony appears in a November 2004 videotaped deposition denying, under oath, any knowledge of O'Grady's crimes, contending he hardly knew the man. Though Mahony hasn't seen the documentary, spokesman Tod Tamberg confirmed that he and attorneys for Mahony and the church viewed it Thursday. Tamberg in a statement said Berg's film "quickly loses its bearing in a squall of anti-church tirades by lawyers who have a huge financial stake in sex abuse litigation against the church." He accuses Berg of staging O'Grady's actions and allowing him "self-serving comments" until "one begins to get the uneasy feeling that the molester-as-master-manipulator is having one last sick and twisted joke at everyone's expense."

Berg says the film is just her way of circumventing the church's stonewalling to get the story out.

"I don't consider myself an activist," said Berg. "I'm not Catholic. And I wasn't raped by a priest. The reason I did this film is that it was one of those stories that every time it was about to air [on TV], somehow the church convinced the lawyers to stall it from airing.... I was interested in that. And the more I researched it, the more I investigated it, the more of a story it was."

Berg lives in a modest Santa Monica apartment with her son Spencer and a little dog named Lucy. One of her Emmys for a CBS-2 segment on extreme sports sits atop a dresser in the center of her living room. On the inside of her front door, a small note reminds her to "pay rent." She's an L.A. native, though reluctant to share too much personal information, she said, so as not to give the Catholic Church any ammunition.

Berg said she realized the story was too big for a TV segment after the L.A. Diocese's repeated resistance to a 12-minute CNN piece in 2004. She got O'Grady's phone number from a researcher for one of the victim's attorneys and cold-called him. He was jovial and candid, she said, and so they spent months talking weekly, conversations that O'Grady let Berg record.

"He seemed to be very upset about the fact that the people who covered up his abuse were still in such powerful positions while he was basically defrocked and abandoned," said Berg.

After initial reservations, O'Grady agreed to go on camera, and in early 2005, Berg went to Ireland, where she spent eight days — six hours each day — listening as he detailed his sexual abuse. In the film, O'Grady appears to be enjoying himself, smiling brightly as he describes confessing to another priest his attraction to children. When it was over, Berg said, the horror of what she'd heard finally hit her.

"The last two days of my trip I stayed in my hotel room in Dublin, and I couldn't get out of bed," said Berg. "I was like achy and sweaty. It was like a physical and emotional breakdown."

Three of O'Grady's victims, Ann Jyono, Nancy Sloan and a young man identified as "Adam," agreed to share their stories on camera. They describe their families as devout Catholics who trusted O'Grady implicitly. He regularly spent the night with the Jyonos and took Sloan on unsupervised trips. In Adam's case, he became romantically involved with his mother before he began molesting Adam. "He had total control of us because he was at our school, he was at home, he was at church," said Jyono in the film. "In a Catholic lifestyle, what else is left? What areas of my life was he not at?"

O'Grady's transfers began in the mid-1970s after Sloan's mother confronted Stockton Bishop Joseph Guilfoyle, who is now deceased. Guilfoyle, Sloan said, promised the family he would relocate O'Grady to a monastery, so the Sloans didn't press charges. Instead, O'Grady was transferred to another parish.

Two years later, when Mahony was made bishop of Stockton, another family, identified in the film as the "Howards," threatened to sue the church for O'Grady's abuse of their sons. Mahony has said he had no idea of the nature of the abuse. "I told him he was to cease and desist any more contact with Mrs. Howard or the Howard family," testified Mahony in November 2004. "He promised to do so, and I never had another report about him and the Howards."

O'Grady was transferred again, this time to Stockton. In 1984, O'Grady's therapist reported him to the Stockton police, alleging sexual contact with a 9-year-old boy. When the police threatened to press charges, Berg's film asserts, church officials promised to relocate O'Grady to a job that kept him away from children. Instead, O'Grady was transferred to a San Andreas parish where he was the sole priest in charge. At the time, church authorities didn't tell police of the abuse reported years earlier. Mahony said in deposition footage in the film that he had no knowledge of the incident.

In a March 2005 deposition, Msgr. James Cain, the former vicar general of Stockton, explained the church's reasons for withholding information by saying, "One was a girl. It was inappropriate touching. The other was a boy, [O'Grady] said. So I just didn't hook them up in my own mind."

Cain was asked by the Jyonos' attorney John Manly during the same deposition: "If it had come to your attention that Father O'Grady told your vicar general that he had sexual urges toward a 9-year-old boy or a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old — is that cause to remove him from ministry?"

"No," responded Cain.

Berg tried, without success, for more than a year to get an interview with Mahony. And she said she made it a point not to editorialize, though it's hard to walk away from the film with a positive feeling toward the church's actions.

"Everyone's words speak to their merits and detriments on their own," she said.

The film, which went into the festival without a distributor, had sparked interest by Sunday, Berg said, although no deal had been finalized by press time.

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DELIVER US FROM EVIL