By Joan Bolger

A DOCUMENTARY film featuring a deeply disturbing interview with a defrocked Irish priest who was moved around California in an alleged cover -up of his pedophile ways may lead to the prosecution of a U.S. cardinal.

U.S. law enforcement officials are now considering a criminal case against Cardinal Roger Mahony, according to William Hodgman, the top deputy in the target crimes division of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office.

The lawyer for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, Michael Hennigan, refuted that claim Friday saying, “If Mr. Hodgman is suggesting in any way that the cardinal is the subject of a criminal investigation, he is being irresponsible and in our judgment is committing prosecutorial misconduct.”

But Hodgman said officials in the district attorney’s office believed that former priest Oliver O’Grady’s revelations in the documentary, along with documents obtained from the archdiocese through subpoena, had given weight to a case that criminal acts were committed in handling pedophile priests.

Hodgman, who was also featured in the documentary, declined to comment about the content of the documents, but said his office had spent several years trying to obtain them from the diocese.

In the film, entitled, Deliver Us From Evil, O’Grady, a native of Tipperary, confessed to abusing boys and girls as young as nine months old.

‘’Basically, what I want to say to them is, you know, it should not have happened. It should not have happened,” O’Grady says in the film.

During his time in Stockton during the 1980s, O’Grady says that Cardinal Mahony, then the Bishop of Stockton, was aware of the abuse. “I should have been removed,” he said.

Instead he was moved to California’s rural community of San Andreas, until in 1993 he was convicted on four counts of “lewd and lascivious” acts with two pre teen brothers and sentenced to a seven-year jail sentence.

The documentary features a taped deposition from 1997 stemming from a civil trial in Stockton in which the brothers in the criminal case against O’Grady brought suit against the local diocese.

In the deposition, it is alleged that bishops, including Cardinal Mahony, failed to prevent O’Grady from having contact with children having full knowledge about the history of his conviction. In the deposition Cardinal Mahony denied having known that O’Grady was a pedophile.

O’Grady, who has lived in Ireland since his deportation there in 2001, when his prison sentence was complete, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times that he informed Cardinal Mahony of his “situation” during the period from 1980-1985 in Stockton, when the Cardinal was his bishop.

“I told him I would go to counseling and he said fine,” O’Grady said. “We thought I had resolved it.”

However, in 1984, the cardinal had transferred him to the village of San Andreas after O’Grady admitted to his therapist that he had molested a nine-year-old boy.

In the movie, O’Grady, who has already cost the Diocese of Stockton millions of dollars to settle civil sexual abuse lawsuits, maintains that Mahony called him personally at that time to reassure him no charges would be filed.

‘’He was very supportive. You know, he was very compassionate,’’ O’ Grady said. ‘’I felt at the time he was merely calling to check how I was doing because he obviously knew I had been very stressed out over the situation.’’

Mahony, who now heads the country’s largest Roman Catholic archdiocese, in Los Angeles, is among the church’s most influential American leaders. He disputes O’Grady’s account of events. His spokesman, Tod Tamberg, went further this week to say O’Grady is lying.

“The film rests on the credibility of a convicted child molester who lied to his bishop, to his therapists, to the families of the young people he abused and to law enforcement,” Tamberg said. “He is the classic pedophile. He lies to conceal his activity from public view.”

The unrated film opens in Los Angeles and New York on Friday.