UNITED STATES
Film Journal
Nov 15, 2012
-By Daniel Eagan
The details of the crime were appalling. For years, the students of St. John’s School for the Deaf outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were systematically abused by the very person put in charge to protect them, Father Lawrence Murphy. The students appealed to teachers and eventually to the police for help, only to be turned away. As Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney shows in Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, this pattern of indifference and culpability leads from Milwaukee to the Vatican, the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church.
Raised a Catholic, Gibney reacted strongly to the issue of sexual abuse within the Church. “But a lot of people had done films about isolated tales of clerical abuse,” he says during an interview from HBO offices in New York. “I wanted to make sure that if I was going to do it, I could make a new contribution.”
Articles by New York Times national religion correspondent Laurie Goodstein about how deaf survivors took their story to the public brought national attention to the St. John’s incident. Gibney was drawn to the story because it linked Church abuse for the first time to the Vatican, giving him a canvas that was both intimate and panoramic. “This was a story about everyday heroes,” he adds. “Deaf survivors who had no voices, but still managed to make themselves be heard.”
In the film, Gibney builds the case against the Vatican gradually, first working backwards to explain the conditions at St. John’s. “We didn’t want to make a dogmatic film,” he explains. “We wanted to fan out from this case to something much bigger. Much as these survivors, who were just local kids from Milwaukee, suddenly got religion, so to speak, and started to try to raise their voices until they took their story all the way to the top. But honestly, the movie comes out of silence, and you have to learn to inhabit that world first, let it open up to you.”
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