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February 4, 2013 | By Jeff Pfeiffer
Sexual abuse of a child is one of the most heinous crimes imaginable. When that act is committed in the supposedly “safe” environment of a school or a church, and by an authority to whom the safety of the child has been entrusted, it becomes an even greater betrayal of the trust that should exist between adults and children. Further, when acts are committed upon children who are not only vulnerable to exploitation because of their age but also because they have a physical impairment, then those acts become truly enraging and saddening. Such acts are the subject of Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s (Taxi to the Dark Side) great new documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.
Mea Maxima Culpa is a look at the first known public protest against clerical sex abuse in the United States, focusing on the crimes of Father Lawrence Murphy, a Milwaukee priest who abused more than 200 deaf children in a school under his control. Murphy picked many of his victims because they were the children of parents who couldn’t “sign,” and therefore it would be even harder for the boys to tell their parents about any problems — beyond the issue of getting anyone to believe that a priest would do such things, anyway.
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