Documentary Tackles Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

By Kerry Brewster
ABC
March 14, 2013

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3716097.htm

Transcript

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: The psychology of priestly abuse and how some offending priests seek to reconcile evil against holiness is at the heart of a controversial new documentary that explores the first-known protest against clerical sexual abuse in the United States.

Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa tells the story of four deaf men who were abused as children in the 1960s and sought to expose that abuse, encountering cover-up all the way to the Vatican. It opens next week in Australia.

Shortly we'll talk to the Oscar-winning director, Alex Gibney. First this report from Kerry Brewster.

KERRY BREWSTER, REPORTER: Oscar award-winning Alex Gibney makes films that scrutinise institutions he considers irredeemingly corrupt.

His latest, Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa, takes on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. He focuses on predatory priest Father Lawrence Murphy who systematically abused up to 200 deaf boys growing up in the 1960s at St John's School for the Deaf in the US city of Milwaukie.

TERRY KOHUT, SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIM (excerpt from Silence in the House of God): He told me to take off my pants. And I said, "Take off my pants?" I was shocked and I thought, "Why would I have to do that?" And I was looking at this man in a black suit and a white collar and I thought to myself, "He's a priest and I'm supposed to obey him." So I took my pants down and he molested me.

ARTHUR BUDINZSKI, SEXUAL ABUSE VICTIM (excerpt from Silence in the House of God): I started sweating like crazy. I was so nervous. I could just feel myself shaking. I just kept thinking, "Enough! Enough!" When Father Murphy stopped, I went to bed right away and I was just sick. I was just sick. And I laid in bed under the covers and I felt absolutely disgusted.

KERRY BREWSTER: Despite taking their claims of abuse all the way to the Vatican, the victims of Father Murphy were repeatedly rebuffed.

RICHARD SIPE, FORMER PRIEST (excerpt from Silence in the House of God): The higher you go, the more they know. The system of the Catholic clergy, for which I have great respect and to which I have given many years of my life, selects, cultivates, protects, defends and produces sexual abusers.

KERRY BREWSTER: Former priest Richard Sipe confirms what Alex Gibney believes lies at the heart of the Catholic Church, the lie of celibacy. Sipe's conducted a decades-long study of priests and sex. He identified a syndrome known to police as noble cause corruption, the belief that good intentions purify bad behaviour, turning a perversion into a holy act.

RICHARD SIPE (excerpt from Silence in the House of God): A priest who had an affair with this 12, 13-year-old girl brought to one of their encounters what he said was a consecrated host. And he touched it to her vagina and he said, "This is how God loves you." And then he raped her.

KERRY BREWSTER: Before he became Pope Benedict, Cardinal Ratzinger was responsible for ordering all reports of sex abuse be channelled through his office at the Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith. The documentary goes on to examine the complicity of the Vatican in the cover-ups of American and European abuse cases and the role of Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope.

JEFF ANDERSON, US ATTORNEY: What we need them to do is to act, that is, to discourage the secrets, the evidence of the crimes that they have, the identities of the offenders and the bishops, archbishops and cardinals that have been complicit in those crimes worldwide.

MARCO POLITI, VATICAN CORRESPONDENT, IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO (excerpt from Silence in the House of God): The organisations of the victims want full transparence about the past. They don't want only that the priests are defrocked. They want full transparence about the past.

KERRY BREWSTER: Kerry Brewster, Lateline.