‘mea Maxima Culpa" Review

By Farran Smith Nehme
New York Post
November 16, 2012

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/movies/silence_emboldens_i2tfR7NJr4FBB8fWaHVM7H

Public revulsion over the sex-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is already so widespread that a filmmaker bold enough to retell this tragedy had better be purposeful about it — and Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) definitely is that.

“Mea Maxima Culpa” is a fire-breathing set of theses nailed on the Vatican’s door.

Gibney structures the film with care, beginning with the depredations of one Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. The priest abused the men in the film when they were schoolboys in the 1950s and ’60s, favoring with horrendous cunning the ones whose parents couldn’t speak to their sons in sign language.

As the boys grew into men they began to communicate with one another, and eventually became some of the first to go public, in the 1970s, with accusations against a priest.

From this group Gibney spirals outward, to those who tried — and failed — to get Murphy away from the school, to the higher-ups who protected the church’s image but not the victims, across the ocean to similar cases in Ireland and Italy, and finally to the Vatican itself. The film builds to a ringing demand that the church open completely its archives on sexual abuse.

Gibney makes it clear that he considers the church’s hierarchy, all the way to Pope Benedict XVI, to be directly responsible for the shattered lives he shows.

Every witness here is testifying for the prosecution, unless you count a TV clip of the Catholic League’s William Donohue in typical high dudgeon about criticism of the church. The Vatican refused all interview requests, but some other voice to speak on the church’s behalf wouldn’t have diminished the movie, and might have strengthened it.

Some of the film’s flourishes are ill-judged. Re-enactments of Murphy slithering between rows of cots, or looming over a kneeling child, don’t have a 10th of the impact of simply watching the priest’s victims testify, their hands slicing the air as they discuss their pain and rage.

In the end, decades of such crimes going undetected and undeterred under the aegis of one employer — any employer — speaks for itself. And the extraordinary perseverance and courage of the men from St. John’s speaks louder still.