Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Never a film-maker to shy away from trying to make sense of a somewhat catastrophic event or subject matter, Academy Award winning documentary film-maker Alex Gibney tackles the subject of paedophilia in the Catholic church. From the bottom, where apparently celibate priests have free reign over their own church relatively unsupervised to take confessions inside a broom cupboard and prey on children while they sleep, to the very top, where cardinals cover-up or ignore the problem, and the Pope fails to acknowledge the many flaws in their beloved system. It's a film of two halves, each powerful and expertly crafted in their own right, but failing to come together into a cohesive narrative.

The first half is the most powerful and heart-breaking. Throughout the 1960's, priest Lawrence Murphy sexually molested in the region of 200 young boys. At the St. John School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, four men tell their own unique and frightening stories of the abuse they suffered and the lack of help available. Similar to many families in this period, their families could not sign and therefore could not understand their cries for help. Signing to the camera and narrated by actors Jamey Sheridan, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke and John Slattery, the four men's disabilities become a metaphor for the years of silence endured by other victims of no handicap, who over the course of time have heard their cries fall on closed ears, especially when it came to calling out for justice or at least an explanation from the Vatican itself.

When the film shifts into its second phase, it becomes more conspirational and less human, throwing us facts and archive imagery as Gibney looks under every rock he can find. What he uncovers is hardly surprising - a huge Vatican cover-up and the relocation of many priests finding themselves under scrutiny from the locals were covered in somewhat less detail in Amy Berg's unsettling Deliver Us From Evil (2006) - but he is searching for some kind of explanation. Hearing of abuse cases dating back hundreds of years among the priesthood, it seems the Vatican see the problem more as an inevitability. It often feels like Gibney is clutching at straws, trying to find a link to every corner of the corridors of power, and the absence of any spokesperson from the Vatican is an admittedly unsurprising disappointment. But it avoids the pitch-fork waving approach, and tells us of a very real problem for which we have few answers for.

If Dan Brown had written a novel about a cover-up in the Catholic Church on the scale depicted in this film, it would be treated as a great work of fiction. The trouble is, it's all true and that's the most shocking thing about it. It is a very well made film that has a compelling flow to the narrative and this is helped with some nicely chosen musical backdrops. The only thing that lets it down is a lack of balance, but then, as it says in the film, the Vatican refused to be interviewed for this film. Not that they could have put up any defence. I found it a gripping watch that did get a little emotional at times. Well worth a look whatever religion (or not) you are.

SteelMonster's verdict: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

My score: 8.8/10

You can find an expanded version of this review on my blog: Thoughts of a SteelMonster.

I only heard about this film recently, although at the time of his resignation I had heard that the Pope had gone in relation to revelations within a film. This was just a suggestion of course and it may not even have been this film but what made me come to this was mainly that I heard it mentioned in a list of documentaries from Gibney. His documentaries have been well worth watching and on that basis I wanted to watch this one. The film looks at the child abuse scandal within the catholic church, focusing specifically on a handful of cases involving deaf children and slowly working its way up to the highest positions within the organization of the church.

As a journey it is one that is hard to watch from start to end. The details of the abuse are very difficult to listen to – not just the words but the realization of how completely alone these boys were, how utterly predatory their abuser was; we all know it occurred but to hear it from these victims made it all the realer to me and all the more sickening. As the film goes on we continue to get details, not so much over the abuse but over the action (or rather, inaction) of the church. It moves key players into the frame, discussing the structure of treatment centers, protection of priests and really doesn't leave much doubt about how much was known and by contrast how little was done. It is very hard to watch and it is mostly structured very well to not only build the story so effectively but also to shock and upset even after so much of this issue is known.

It doesn't totally manage to close the loop and once it reaches the top and loops round to the original story again, it doesn't quite have the structural impact as a whole that it did in specific moments. This is a very minor failing in comparison to how effective it is for the majority of the running time, but it does leave the film feeling that the final knockout punch is missing – which of course it is. The footage is well edited together and Gibney's narrator is mostly restrained and well pitched. It is a very hard watch at times though, but the subject matter is well worth the feeling of anger, injustice and sense of total exploitation that it will leave you with.

Very well constructed documentary.

Its first half focuses in detail on a notorious, localised case - the second half reveals a global picture that provides unsettling perspective.

A vivid, compelling exposé that I only wished lasted longer than its already near-two-hour runtime.

Absolutely recommended.

After looking at the world of NHL pugilists in last year's outstanding The Last Gladiators, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God finds director Alex Gibney returning to investigating abuses of power, a theme that has served him well in past efforts like Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and the Oscar-winning Taxi To The Dark Side. This disturbing exposé on the problem of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church focuses partly on the stories of five deaf men who are thought to be the first individuals to ever publicly protest abuses by clergy in the United States, after they were victimized by Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John's School for the Deaf in the suburbs of Milwaukee during the 60s and 70s. Gibney also takes a broader view of the subject by looking at other cases of clergy abuse (notably in Ireland) and the systematic cover-ups of these crimes by the Catholic Church's top officials, whose unofficial policy on the matter is to "deny, minimize, and blame", according to one journalist interviewed. "Mea Maxima Culpa's" Latin translation is "my most grievous fault".

Although the five St. John's victims have been working for over three decades to call attention to the issue and seek justice for their suffering, their story gained traction after New York Times writer Laurie Goodstein wrote an article in 2010 about the Vatican's failure to defrock Murphy, despite the fact that they were presented with undeniable evidence of his crimes and received strong warnings from some American church officials. Murphy is believed to have molested over 200 boys at the boarding school from the 50s until 1974, when he was transferred to another parish. The Vatican was alerted of Murphy's behaviour in 1963 and did nothing. Actors Jamey Sheridan, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke, and John Slattery give voice to the victims, who use sign language with punctuated hand slaps to express the horrors they endured at the hand of Murphy and the shame that followed. Murphy's textbook predatory behaviour found him singling out what he perceived as the weaker students and further exploiting the fact that they faced an obvious barrier in communicating over the phone with their families. Three of the victims, including Terry Kohut, who sued the Catholic Church and named the current Pope in his lawsuit, were on hand for the world premiere TIFF screening I attended and gave their emotional reaction to it afterwards at the Q & A through a sign language interpreter. Just knowing that they were in the audience and reliving their pain while seeing the finished film for the first time added an extra significance and weight to the proceedings.

The investigations resulting from the Kohut lawsuit ended up leading to the discovery of secret Vatican documents that detailed many instances of sexual abuse cover-ups that reach to the highest levels of the Catholic Church, with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) substantially implicated. In the years before being anointed Pope, Ratzinger oversaw a Vatican council that monitored sexual abuse cases in the Church, so his post-anointment claims of being unaware of most of what was occurring seem highly unlikely. How his and his predecessor's culpability and mishandling of these tragic cases hasn't been a much larger media story is difficult to understand.

That aside, overall media coverage of child and youth sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has, sadly, become an all-too-familiar story that one almost becomes numb to. Gibney rises to the challenge of presenting a fresh take on a much-discussed important subject with this well-researched and powerful film. My only real negative about it are the re-enactments that Gibney employs, even if they are artfully composed and beautifully shot, using plenty of religious imagery. Re-enactments are a staple of Gibney's work (not to mention Errol Morris'), but the stories he tells are usually compelling enough and, in my opinion, the end results are slightly diminished with this gimmicky device that feels like an imagination crutch for the audience.