NEW YORK
New York Post
By FARRAN SMITH NEHME
November 16, 2012
MEA MAXIMA CULPA: SILENCE IN THE HOUSE OF GOD
Strong, deeply moving. Running time: 107 minutes. Not rated (explicit discussion of sexual abuse). At the Film Forum, Houston and Varick streets.
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.
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