AUSTRALIA
WA Today
March 16, 2013
Paul Byrnes
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Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am old enough to remember those words as part of the Latin Mass. I learnt them growing up in the Catholic Church in Australia. We spoke them to ask forgiveness for our sins. ”Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault …”
As I was learning them, the Vatican was receiving the first reports of the extent of one priest’s sexual abuse of deaf children at St John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Father Lawrence Murphy, ordained in 1950, was a master of American Sign Language, a charismatic personality and a great fund-raiser. He may also have abused more than 200 deaf children in the three decades in which he was allowed to remain at St John’s, even after his activities were reported to the Vatican.
Father Murphy took a holiday in 1958. Father David Walsh came to the school. Some of the boys told him what Father Murphy was doing. Father Walsh reported the allegations to Archbishop Meyer of Milwaukee and to the Vatican’s apostolic delegate in Washington, DC. Walsh never came back. In 1963, Father Murphy was promoted to head of the school.
This setting gives extra meaning to the title of Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa. Many of these boys arrived at St John’s aged just four, from families in which they could not easily communicate. Many hearing parents never learnt to sign.
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