IRELAND
Irish Times
Donald Clarke
Alex Gibney’s latest film, on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, alleges a direct link between the outgoing pope and the abuse of children in the US
It seems redundant to note that Alex Gibney’s documentary on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has emerged at an appropriate time. After all, given the endless torrent of grim revelations, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God would, if released at any random point in the last two decades, have chimed with contemporaneous headlines.
The recent resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has, however, provided the American documentarist with an interesting afterword. The picture focuses closely on the abuse of deaf children in a Wisconsin school from the mid-1960s onwards, who later courageously blew the whistle. The film also implicates the former Joseph Ratzinger in a complex cover-up. Gibney has subsequently suggested that Benedict’s unexpected retirement was linked to the child-abuse scandal.
Visiting Dublin for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Gibney, a taut, bald man with a serious demeanour, backtracks only slightly. “Maybe it would have been better to say that I hoped his resignation was connected to the child-abuse case,” he says. “I hope that for myself and hope that for him. I think it would be sad if it was just that he was tired. That’s what the church was saying.”
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