Documentary Commentary: 'Mea Maxima Culpa'

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is a compelling 2012 documentary by director Gibney that explores the issue of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. A not altogether illegitimate response to yet another documentary on child sex abuse in the Catholic church might be "Yeah, yeah, we've heard all that before!" It is in itself unfortunate, of course, that people should become inured to horror because it has become commonplace. Mea Maxima Culpa, however, includes a great deal of newly revealed material, and explores the subject in some ways that have not been widely done previously.

Mea Maxima Culpa explores its subject matter through the eyes of four deaf adult men who as children were molested by priest Father Lawrence Murphy at the church boarding school in Wisconsin where they each lived for a number of years. It then goes into a broader examination of the worldwide phenomena of pedophile priests; how this has manifested in other countries, such as Ireland; and the complicity of the Catholic Church in covering up the problem and its monumental efforts to suppress public knowledge of it.

One focus of the documentary I found fascinating was the number of priests and church officials who heroically struggled to expose and combat the problem of pedophile priests but who were suppressed and silenced by the institution of which they were part. This aspect of the film, however, points out the importance of acknowledging the efforts of these clergy and remembering that the issue of child sexual molestation was not universally approved of or covered up even within the church.

An obstacle faced by victims faced by such abuse, the documentary points out, was that even people outside the church were not interested in helping them and were thus at least passively complicit in the problem. Parents told their children how terrible it was to say such horrible things about priests, police dismissed victims as troublemakers, newspaper editors suppressed relevant details from published articles. Some of this resonated with me personally, because my parents taught me when I was growing up to never criticize people in authority, no matter who they were or what they had done. This, they said, would reflect badly on me, not on the people in question. I was never molested by a priest and, despite being raised Catholic never even knowingly met a pedophile priest, but it is profoundly disturbing to consider that I was told in advance that I simply needed to keep things like that to myself. This was not because my parents wanted me to be molested, of course, but simply because they were products of a Rust Belt factory town culture where everyone was part of a strict hierarchy and "knew their place"; in that world, there was nothing worse than being the outsider or the person who stood out, and so they were trying to protect me from the threat they perceived as being most palpable.

Mea Maxima Culpa will likely also resonate with other viewers for any number of reasons. It began showing on HBO in 2013 and will likely become available through other venues as well over the coming months, and I would encourage anyone who is interested to check it out.