UNITED STATES
Real Screen
Kelly Anderson
Academy Award-winning doc director Alex Gibney (pictured) returns to the Toronto International Film Festival this year, with a film telling the story of a group of deaf men who launched one of the first clerical sex abuse protests in the U.S.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, which was recently announced as a London Film Festival selection, delves into the controversial subject matter of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, focusing on a case first opened by a group of men coming forward after years had passed since they’d been allegedly abused at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin.
The alleged abuse by Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy of more than 100 children over two decades at the school is at the center of Gibney’s doc, which argues that there was a systematic cover up that went all the way to the current Pope, who had received letters concerning Murphy when he’d headed a council overseeing child sex abuse cases as a cardinal. Murphy was never defrocked as a priest and was never criminally charged for sexual abuse, although the priest did admit to abusing children.
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