"Mea Maxima Culpa" Review: Devastating
By David Wiegand
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God: Documentary. 9 p.m. Monday HBO. What did the Vatican know and when did it know it? That's the first question posed in Oscar winner Alex Gibney's new documentary, "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God," airing Monday on HBO. The second question is when did the church start covering it up? While we have become aware of multiple cases of priests molesting children in recent years, the church received its first abuse complaint against a Spanish priest in the fourth century. In more recent times, Gibney contends, the Vatican knew about pedophilic priests for decades and engaged in a campaign to sweep the matter under the rug. What was once seen as primarily an American issue is now viewed, sadly, as universal. Ever since the Boston Globe reported extensively in 2002 on the magnitude of the problem and the church's elaborate and highly effective campaign to cover it up, we have been given a steady stream of reminders in the media of what the church is doing to defend itself, how much it is costing the church to settle various legal cases and, most of all, how many lives have been affected. Gibney gets to the big picture, but his real focus is what sets "Mea Culpa" apart from other films about pedophile priests: A group of men who, as deaf students at St. John's School in Milwaukee, were routinely molested by a deceptively genial priest named the Rev. Lawrence Murphy in the 1950s and '60s. It is estimated that he molested more than 200 children at the school before persistent complaints by the former students prompted the church to do what it did too often with pedophile priests: move them away in the hope the complaints would stop. Nothing was done Murphy began working at St. John's in 1950. By 1958, complaints about him reached the local archbishop and the Vatican's Apostolic Delegate in Washington, D.C., but nothing was done. Murphy was promoted to head of the school in 1963. A decade later, student Bob Bolger complained to Milwaukee Archbishop William Edward Cousins that he had been molested by Murphy. Later, Bolger and former classmates Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith filed police reports of abuse, but no charges were brought against Murphy. Understandably frustrated, Bolger, Budzinski and Smith passed out crudely lettered flyers at Archbishop Cousins' 25th-anniversary Mass, identifying Murphy as a pedophile and asking what the church was going to do about him. Their actions eventually resulted in Murphy being removed from the school. The psychological scars of those horrific attacks are unmistakable as the former students, now grown men with children and grandchildren of their own, tell their stories in Gibney's film without uttering a single word. With voice-overs supplied by actors Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper, Jamey Sheridan and John Slattery, the men sign their own narratives, with visceral pain and passion. The irony cannot be lost: In the 1970s, young men who could not speak made themselves heard by staging the first public protest against clerical child abuse in the U.S. Although Murphy was removed from St. John's, the actions by the former students didn't exactly blow the lid off the scandal, in Milwaukee or nationally. Far from it. It took years before the extent of the issue became known, and that was because of the effectiveness of the church in keeping the lid sealed. As far back as the 1860s, the Vatican adopted a policy of keeping complaints secret through canon law. In more recent times, many pedophile priests were sent to special centers for counseling and treatment created by the Servants of the Paraclete. Others were just shifted from parish to parish, never being forced to take responsibility for their actions. In 1965, the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, who had co-founded the Servants of the Paraclete, advanced a plan to have the church buy the Caribbean island of Carriacou and even put a down payment on the island. His plan was to move all the pedophilic priests to the island to keep them from harming other children - like some kind of sexual deviant version of an old-fashioned leper colony. While the idea seems absurd, the fact that it was even considered shows how committed the church was to the cover-up. Problem is global Much has happened since the Globe reports, but Gibney maintains that despite convictions, lawsuits, enormous payouts by the church and the realization that the problem is global, "the church is still sitting on the largest collection of correspondence and data regarding non-incarcerated sex abusers in the world." The year before the Globe story, then-German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was designated to oversee complaints against priests from all over the world. In that job, he ordered that every sex abuse case in the church be brought to his attention, which means that the man who is now the head of the Roman Catholic Church was once in a position to know more than any other single individual in the church about the extent of the issue of pedophilic priests. Gibney's film becomes almost overwhelming as it parachutes in on specific cases around the world, including the Rev. Tony Walsh in Ireland, known for his Elvis Presley impersonations, and the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Vatican insider, close to Pope John Paul II and a friend of powerful Americans such as Rick Santorum and Jeb Bush. A morphine addict who abused boys and fathered several children, Maciel was removed from priestly duties by Pope Benedict in 2006 after an investigation. He retired to Jacksonville, Fla., where he died two years later. Gibney probably errs on the side of ambition in trying to cover too much territory beyond the focus on the former students of St. John's. At the same time, all of that is necessary for us to grasp the magnitude of what these brave men did when they were young and no one would listen to them. For years, their unspoken voices fell on intentionally deaf ears in the church and in law enforcement. But they never gave up, simply because they knew right from wrong. David Wiegand is The San Francisco Chronicle's executive features editor and TV critic. E-mail: dwiegand@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @WaitWhat_TV
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