UNITED STATES
Pop Matters
By Sarah Boslaugh 23 December 2013
On 4 February 2013, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, a documentary by Alex Gibney about the clerical sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, aired worldwide on HBO. On 11 February 2013, Pope Benedict XVI (formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) resigned from the papacy, the first pope to do so in 600 years. The timing of these two events could have been a coincidence, but there’s good reason to believe otherwise.
Although the abuse had been regularly covered in the news media since the ‘90s, Gibney’s film delivers convincing proof to a wide audience that the Vatican had known about it for decades, and had refused to take effective action against the offending priests. Even more damning, Mea Maxima Culpa convincingly establishes that, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005, Ratzinger repeatedly chose not to investigate cases of reported abuse, instead advising that compassion be shown the accused priests.
The heroes of Mea Maxima Culpa are four students who attended St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee and were among the numerous sexual abuse victims of Father Lawrence Murphy, a priest at the school: Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn, and Arthur Budzinski. They speak (in sign language, with voiceovers by Jamey Sheridan, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke, and John Slattery) about how much they loved the school and how beautiful it was (“like a castle,” says one)—and also how pervasive and systematic was the sexual abuse perpetrated by Father Murphy.
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