Milwaukee’s Deaf Survivors of Fr. Murphy at Heart of Oscar Winning Filmmaker’s New Documentary

By Peter Isely
SNAP Wisconsin
September 20, 2012

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Milwaukee’s deaf survivors of Fr. Murphy at heart of Oscar winning filmmaker’s new documentary

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” to make its US premier in Milwaukee October 5

CONTACT: Peter Isely SNAP Midwest Director, 414.429.7259, John Pilmaier SNAP Wisconsin Director, 414.336.8575

In what is being called by critics as an “explosive” new documentary by Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney about child sex crimes and cover up in the Catholic Church, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” will make its US premier October 5 at the Milwaukee Film Festival.

The film (see trailer) will be shown at the Oriental Theater Friday October 5th at 7:00 p.m. Information about purchasing tickets can be found online at the Milwaukee Film Festival website. HBO is scheduled to air the documentary on cable next year.

Gibney’s film alternates between the story of child sex crimes by Fr. Lawrence Murphy at Milwaukee’s St. John’s School for the Deaf, the cover up of those crimes by the Vatican and officials at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and the vast, unfolding dimensions and implications resulting from the still continuing revelations of tens of thousands of such crimes from around the globe.

Critics are calling the film “chilling”, “eye-opening” and “a powerful movie which could galvanize audiences “around the world.” Variety says the film weaves” a “meticulously researched” and “staggering arsenal” of interviews, documents, and archival materials into a “uniquely devastating account of priestly pedophilia into an excoriating indictment of the entire Vatican power structure.”

At the center of “Silence in the House of God” are accounts and interviews of deaf men who were repeatedly sexually assaulted by Murphy, a career pedophile who operated a boarding school for children for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee located in St. Francis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. A secret church investigation and evaluation of Murphy during his career concluded that he had sexually assaulted at least 200 deaf children.

Several survivors of Murphy featured in the film are expected to join Gibney in Milwaukee for a “talk-back” after the premier.

“Several of the survivors of St. John’s are today well known to the Milwaukee community as admired public advocates for victims of childhood sex crimes by clergy,” says Peter Isely, a founder and the longtime Midwest Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who was interviewed by Gibney. “The survivors of St. John’s,” according to Isely, “were the first known childhood victims of priest sex crimes anywhere in the world to publically step forward and expose the dangerous cover up of child abuse in the Catholic Church. The film shows the extraordinary courage of these survivors and pioneer advocates who warned the world of predators like Murphy and in doing so openly defied the seemingly unassailable cover up machinery of the Catholic Church.”

The film chronicles how Murphy’s thousands of crimes were concealed by top church officials, including the current Pope Benedict XVI, in his previous post as head of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), relying upon the investigative work of reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the New York Times. The Times obtained the most damning evidence against the Vatican in secret internal church documents directly linking Murphy’s cover up to the Vatican and the current Pope. The Murphy documents were brought to the doors of the Vatican itself by SNAP leaders, in the first public exposure of the extensive Vatican involvement in child sex crimes, resulting in the eruption and acceleration of revelations of child sexual assaults by clergy in Europe and around the world.

In September of 2011, leading human rights attorneys from the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) included the Murphy documents with 50,000 pages of criminal evidence in a historic filing at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague on behalf of 12,000 victims of childhood sex crimes by clergy from around the world. The filing, which is currently under review by the court, calls for a complete criminal investigation of Pope Benedict and several top Vatican officials for orchestrating and maintaining a world-wide system of cover up of child sex crimes by clerics.

Several of Murphy’s victims belong to a group of nearly 600 victims of priest child molesters who have recently filed claims for restitution with the federal bankruptcy court after the Archdiocese of Milwaukee filed for Chapter 11 protection claiming it could not cover judgments for fraud related to concealing and transferring dozens of known child sex offending clerics into churches and schools.

Victim/survivors are calling upon the court to release 60,000 pages of secret church documents concerning dozens of abusive clerics from the archdiocese and the sealed depositions of church leaders, including former Archbishop Rembert Weakland, who is likely asked under oath about the Vatican’s involvement in Murphy and other cases.

“Incredibly,” says John Pilmaier, SNAP’s Wisconsin Director, “the story Gibney so powerfully tells in his film is far from over, especially for the survivors of St. John’s. Sadly, lawyers from the Archdiocese right now are attempting to throw their claims out of court, along with the majority of other victim claims from the Milwaukee Archdiocese, based on legal technicalities and the statute of limitations. Hopefully Catholics across the archdiocese will watch this film when it airs and learn exactly why the Milwaukee Archdiocese needs to stop attacking victims in court, make restitution, accept responsibility, and stop fighting to keep criminal acts against children secret.”

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 23 years and have more than 12,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our national website is SNAPnetwork.org. The local Wisconsin website is SNAPwisconsin.com.