UNITED STATES
San Francisco Chronicle
David Wiegand
Published 4:35 pm, Friday, February 1, 2013
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God: Documentary. 9 p.m. Monday HBO.
What did the Vatican know and when did it know it?
That’s the first question posed in Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” airing Monday on HBO. The second question is when did the church start covering it up?
While we have become aware of multiple cases of priests molesting children in recent years, the church received its first abuse complaint against a Spanish priest in the fourth century. In more recent times, Gibney contends, the Vatican knew about pedophilic priests for decades and engaged in a campaign to sweep the matter under the rug.
What was once seen as primarily an American issue is now viewed, sadly, as universal. Ever since the Boston Globe reported extensively in 2002 on the magnitude of the problem and the church’s elaborate and highly effective campaign to cover it up, we have been given a steady stream of reminders in the media of what the church is doing to defend itself, how much it is costing the church to settle various legal cases and, most of all, how many lives have been affected.
Gibney gets to the big picture, but his real focus is what sets “Mea Culpa” apart from other films about pedophile priests: A group of men who, as deaf students at St. John’s School in Milwaukee, were routinely molested by a deceptively genial priest named the Rev. Lawrence Murphy in the 1950s and ’60s. It is estimated that he molested more than 200 children at the school before persistent complaints by the former students prompted the church to do what it did too often with pedophile priests: move them away in the hope the complaints would stop.
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