The documentary Mea Maxima Culpasheds light on the silence in the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church has taken some hard knocks over the years for the systemic cover-up of child sexual abuse by priests. Once you watch HBO’s documentary Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God, you'll likely conclude the Church deserves every scandal, lawsuit and embarrassment it has endured.
In the film, director Alex Gibney dug deep to find out about a number of travesties that occurred in the Church, from the streets of Milwaukee all the way to the Vatican, where it seems silence was the golden rule, even in the face of the most horrific injustices.
One of the biggest crimes featured in the film is that of Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused over 200 deaf children in a Milwaukee school that he was in charge of. The victims, years later as adults, brought the first public protest against clerical abuse in the United States. It ended up becoming a lawsuit against the pontiff himself.
We sat down with Gibney recently to talk about the film, which airs Monday at 9pm on HBO.
AfterElton:Tell us about the origins of the project and how you found the men we see in the film.
Alex Gibney: It was Laurie Goodstein’s piece [in the New York Times] that got me into it. I saw it there and then I began to pursue it. Todd and Jedd Wider encouraged me and said that they felt they could raise money, and of course we went to HBO. Once we decided to do it then it was all about finding out who would talk, as it always is. I think for us the two big scores were Terry [Kohut, one of the victims], who really hadn’t come forward before, and Arch Bishop Weakland. Those were really important interviews.
AE: You say in the film that you did try to get somebody from the Vatican to speak…
AG: We tried often. And not just the Vatican, we also went to Cardinal Dolan over and over again to try to get him to say something because he had just been interviewed for 60 Minutes, but no. And I think in a way it guided us in our title, Silence in the House of God. So, it’s the silence that’s the criminal part.
AE: The sad thing is what you find out in the course of the story in your film is how this was not a secret to a lot of these people.
AG: They’ve known for a long, long time and that’s really the scary part. That’s the other reason why this story I thought was so important. Because these guys, as far as we can figure, were the first people to publicly protest this in the United States, in 1974. And it was going on before that and the Vatican knew, and the Vatican knew about these things all over the world. They were collecting these stories. Well, what were they doing about it? They weren’t doing anything, so that silence, obviously there’s this silence in the deaf community, which then demands to be heard, but the silence of the church is the crime.
AE:And it actually takes another layer to it with the fact that these boys were deaf. It’s almost like they were even more victims because it sounds like Father Murphy preyed on a lot of that. Like telling them that their parents didn’t want them, for example.
AG: Or abusing kids whose parents couldn’t sign. You know what I’ve discovered? I’ve discovered, I mean, it’s horrible. There’s just no doubt how horrible it is, but it’s the m.o. of a predator. That’s what they do. They seek out situations where they have helpless victims, and they seek out situations where they have access to those helpless victims. So, really, in a way, you can’t blame the church for Father Murphy. You can blame the church as we should blame the church for covering up for Father Murphy.
AE:In the course of your investigation through all the years up to the present, is this something that’s still going on as far as you can tell?
AG: Yes. The American Bishops have taken steps, so yes, it’s better. But we already see in the response of the church to a lot of the more recent scandals and there was a scandal recently in St. Louis, and also for the way that the church is going after victims' organizations from the legal perspective that their m.o. is not, ‘Okay, we did wrong. Here’s the evidence of what we did wrong. We’re going to get it all out and so everybody can see.’ No, it’s just the opposite. It’s like, ‘It’s all over. No, there was never a problem. There may have been a little bit of a problem, but it’s all solved now and we’re moving on.’ It’s still the same impulse, which is to sweep it under the rug.
The documentary's director Alex Gibney was surprised by what he found in his research.
AE:With some of the victims, do they ever not want to revisit that time in their minds, or was it very freeing for them?
AG: It was freeing for them. I think it was hard, but it was very freeing for them, and that’s one of the things that Terry talks about so eloquently is that he…I think a lot of his problems, his problems with his marriage and other issues were caused by the fact that he was keeping this secret inside. You know, a lot of the story is about secrets and how corrupting secrets are. I think it was corrupting Terry’s soul. And finally he let it out. Terry, of course, has this incredibly powerful and graceful way of talking.
AE:What was the biggest surprise for you as you went into this whole project?
AG: There’s two things: the archival material and the way these patterns are replicated all over the world. So, for a long time the Vatican’s defense of some of these abuses in America was, ‘Oh, it’s an American problem.’ What’s clear now is that the same pattern happens over and over again. It’s the same pattern of cover-up because they were being instructed from the top down.
But the archival material we found was so stunning, and it really painted a portrait first of the innocence and then of the corruption of that innocence at St. Johns, and then to find that video which is so powerful of those guys going up to confront Murphy in his country place. To me, you just watch that it says it all particularly that woman, that housekeeper of Murphy’s, whose shouting back, I mean, shouting back in sign at Bob Bolger and saying, ‘You are a Catholic. You are a Catholic.’ As if she’s saying, ‘Take one for the team.’ And Bob is saying, ‘No, this is not about religion. This is about a crime.’ It’s so powerful.
Father Murphy and Pat Kuehn at St John's School For The Deaf
AE:In your research of Father Murphy, would you consider him gay, or was it really just about control? Not necessarily sexuality.
AG: He apparently did abuse a child, I mean, a woman, a girl. So it wasn’t strictly boys, but it was mostly boys. So, that’s a hard question to answer. I think one of the things we realized is that he had a compulsion. One of the things that Richard Sipe talks about is a lot priests are psychosexually immature. Murphy, I think, was beyond that. I think he was sick. He had a real compulsion, and that compulsion was something that, because he felt he couldn’t control it, he had to find a way to rationalize that.
AE: In the film, Murphy is described as ‘childlike.’
AG: Actually, [Arch Bishop] Weakland says it. To me, it is one of the most chilling moments in the film. Because it’s as though that’s where he was arrested, his development was arrested, and so he’s obsessed with getting his hands on these children because he’s a grown man, he has all this power, but somehow, some way he feels or strikes people as childlike. That was just chilling to me.
Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God airs Monday at 9pm on HBO.
