UNITED STATES
The Nation
Jon Wiener on February 8, 2013
The Catholic Church cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests: the reports continue to develop. Now a powerful documentary is telling the whole story on TV: “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”–it’s playing on HBO for the month of February. The filmmaker is Alex Gibney–he won the Academy Award for best documentary for Taxi to the Dark Side, on torture in Afghanstan. His other films include Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer. I spoke with him recently for KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.
JON WIENER: You start your film at a Catholic school for the deaf in Milwaukee in 1972. The heroes of your film are a small group of deaf guys who went public as adults with the truth about what a priest had done to them when they were students at the school. You interview the deaf men, but they can’t talk – they speak in sign language. And yet they are wonderfully articulate. It’s amazing to watch them – as you translate in voice-over.
ALEX GIBNEY: The four guys had all been students at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. They had all been abused, and as young men, just post-college, they had banded together to see if they could stop this abuse from continuing. They were the first people in America to make a public protest about sex abuse of children by priests. They spent many years trying to have their voices “heard.” Yes they can’t speak, but they are so expressive – you can see on their faces and in their hands their testimony, which is at once horrible but also gripping. They maintain a sense of humanity and humor and idealism despite all of this.
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