Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Synopsis

The film follows documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney as he examines the abuse of power in the Catholic Church system through the story of four deaf men — Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Pat Kuehn and Arthur Budzinski — who set out to expose the priest who abused them during the mid-1960s at St. John's School for the Deaf. Each of the men brought forth the first known case of public protest against clerical sex abuse, which later led to the sex scandal case known as the Lawrence Murphy case. Through their case the film follows a cover-up that winds its way from the row houses of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, through Ireland's churches, all the way to the highest office of the Vatican.

Release

The film premiered on September 9, 2012 at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. It later opened in limited release on November 16, 2012, and premiered worldwide on HBO on February 4, 2013.

Critical response

The film received positive feedback from critics. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 98% based on reviews from 42 critics, with a rating average of 7.8 out of 10. Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, reports the film with a score of 73 based on 16 reviews.

Mark Jenkins of NPR called the film "Alex Gibney's most powerful film since the Oscar-winning 2007 Taxi to the Dark Side." A. O. Scott of The New York Times particularly praised the way that the interviews of the victims were shot writing, "Mr. Gibney films them, against dark backgrounds with soft, indirect light, emphasizes the expressivity of their faces and hands, and will remind hearing viewers of the richness and eloquence of American Sign Language." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times felt the film on a personal level writing, "To someone who was raised and educated in the Catholic school system, as I was, a film like this inspires shock and outrage." He went on to write that the film "is calm and steady, founded largely on the testimony of Murphy's victims."

Awards

In 2013, Mea Maxima Culpa was nominated for 6 Primetime Emmy Awards, and won in 3 categories, including Exceptional Merit In Documentary Filmmaking. It won a Peabody Award in 2013 "for providing a harrowing story of clerical sexual abuse, empowering long-silenced victims and unveiling clandestine Church practices around accusations."