UNITED STATES
New Statesman
Spotlight fans interested in a deeper, survivor-led exploration of the extent of abuse in the Church would do well to watch Alex Gibney’s documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.
BY ANNA LESZKIEWICZ
“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” These are the words of Stanley Tucci’s character, attorney Mitchell Garabedian, in the Oscar-nominated film Spotlight. It’s a sentiment that runs throughout the film, which centres on four journalists working at the Boston Globe in 2001, as they attempt to uncover the extent of sex abuse crimes committed by priests of the Catholic Church.
The film follows their mounting horror as they uncover more and more people were involved in the abuse, both directly and indirectly: their estimates of priests abusing children in the local area climb from seven to thirteen to ninety, their geographical understanding of the scope of the problem broadens from Boston, across the United States, all the way to the Vatican.
It focuses on the journalistic efforts involved in bringing this disturbing scandal to light, so while it deals sensitively with interviews with victims, it never fully explores the impact of abuse on the individual, or forensically explores the full extent of the Church’s crimes.
Audience members interested in a deeper, survivor-led exploration of the extent of abuse in the Church would do well to watch Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, available in the UK on Netflix. It focuses on the first known protest against clerical sex abuse, told primarily through a series of subtitled or dubbed interviews with four deaf men, Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn and Arthur Budzinski, all of whom were abused by their teacher Father Lawrence Murphy at St. John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee in the 1960s.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.