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	The Big Question: 'What Are You Hiding?' By Liz Braun Toronto Sun October 27, 2006 http://torontosun.com/Entertainment/Movies/2006/10/27/2144887-sun.html His Eminence, Roger Cardinal Mahony of California, has a large Roman Catholic flock to oversee. Over the years, that flock has included some 550 priests who molested children -- just one of the jaw-dropping items you learn from journalist Amy Berg, the filmmaker behind the documentary, Deliver Us From Evil. Berg's devastating film centres on interviews with defrocked priest Oliver O'Grady, a man who abused children in California for 20 years while the Catholic Church moved him from diocese to diocese. The film is about the abuse, the victims, and the cover-up by the church. (Deliver Us From Evil shows that the cover-up in the Catholic Church goes all the way to Rome and the current Pope; so does the evidence presented in a BBC TV Panorama special aired last month called Sex Crimes And The Vatican.) Pedophile priests is a subject Berg, 36, knows well. The former producer created several segments on the clergy scandals in the past during her news stints at CNN and CBS. Berg was at the Toronto filmfest last month to promote Deliver Us From Evil . She says it's the journalist in her that led her to the film. "It was the question of why, every time I do a story about the Church, they won't be interviewed. Why are they different from all other institutions we do stories on? "Why do they always manage to move the air date at least a month back with the legal department? "That was the big question: What are you hiding? Why should I give you all the questions I'm going to ask before you've even decided if you're going to be interviewed? And that's the kind of thing the Church typically does. It's not allowing you to be a journalist. "I guess it's similar to the way they obey canon law versus civil law. It's kind of like they make their own rules for everything." Once Berg knew that convicted pedophile Oliver O'Grady -- who now lives in Ireland -- would talk to her on camera, the idea for a movie became a certainty. "Four years I was working on that story, and then this interview came to be. I just went and did the interview and decided: It's a documentary film." Making Deliver Us From Evil has not left Berg unscathed. She dug deep to understand all the issues, the lasting effects upon victims and the extent of the cover-up by the Catholic Church. It's been an intense couple of years, she says. "(When you) take these people on, you have to understand and make sure you're depicting things accurately, and that's a really big responsibility." Many survivors' groups have seen Berg's film and are supportive. She is donating some of the movie's profits to those groups. According to a recent article in the New York Times, the Catholic Church continues to face many lawsuits related to sexual abuse by clergy. There are still several criminal investigations underway against priests in Los Angeles County and more than 500 civil suits on the books.
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