"Mea Maxima Culpa': Those Who Prey
By Marsha Mccreadie
It's a good thing documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney is an ex-Catholic; it takes the rage of the disillusioned to so zealously rip the veil as he does in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God. Yet even non-believers will get angry deciding which is worse: the sexual abuse of deaf children (mostly, though not exclusively, boys) at St. John's School for the Deaf in Milwaukee from the 1950s through the early '70s, or that the Church worked so hard to hide it. Putting a face on misery, as he did in his Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Gibney begins with four of the 200 boys abused by Father Lawrence Murphy—Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn and Arthur Budzinski—all as brave today for being filmed as they were when they first tried to out Murphy in 1973, handing out fliers proclaiming, "Serial Child Abuser Is Loose in Milwaukee" and turning him in to the police to no avail. (The men's stories are given voice by actors including Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke and John Slattery.) Terry describes Murphy as wolf-like; in one of the movie's re-enactments, we watch his nightly visitations stalking the dorm, looking especially for boys whose parents didn't sign and couldn't be told. Though Murphy admitted to some wrongdoing in a Church-supervised internal investigation, defending himself by saying he was taking the sexual sins of adolescents upon himself, he was, as with so many abusive priests, simply moved to another diocese. The film also exposes secret million-dollar settlement funds, even an attempt to buy an island in the Caribbean for pederastic priests. Cute, but instead, they were also recycled, not expelled. A ratatat spray of documents and expert testimony from sex counselors, priests with and without collars, and journalists including religion reporter Laurie Goldstein demonstrates who knew what and when they knew it. Vatican chronicler Marco Politi asserts that Church archives date child abuse to the 4th century. Gibney climbs the ladder of blame right to the top, arguing that the Pope—the priest formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger—had knowledge of all sex-abuse cases. Mea Maxima Culpa (translation: "my most grievous fault") reminds us that Mussolini empowered the Vatican by making it a country, that canon law has ways around prosecution, and that the priesthood is considered at least partly divine. The film is one-sided, of course—church officials ignored interview requests, but their version has been around for a couple of millennia anyway. Despite its message, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In the House of God has witty moments: footage of a corrupt priest, Father Maciel, is set to "The Devil In Disguise"; a serio-comic sequence features Ireland's popular "Singing Priest," Tony Walsh, also a molester. Silence may be the most perfect expression of scorn, as the saying goes, but as with Edvard Munch's The Scream, you don't have to hear it to get the horror.
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