Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Father Lawrence Murphy, who worked at St. John's, a school for deaf children in Wisconsin, abused his pupils for decades: more than two hundred children. Four former students became, as adults, the first group to make it public. The documentary begins with their account. Alex Gibney directs. It is an HBO production. The decisive feature is form. The four men speak in sign language, and rather than subtitling them the film has actors voice them: John Slattery, Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper and Jamey Sheridan. The choice makes the testimony directly watchable. Its argument is not about individual perpetrators but about a system. The Murphy file reached the Vatican and stopped there, and Gibney tracks through documents how the church managed abuse, moved priests, and treated the crime as an administrative matter. A second line goes further back: how internal church discipline was established, and how this has been treated as an internal matter for centuries. That deaf children were chosen is emphasised. There was nobody they could tell; most of their parents did not sign. Who it is for: viewers who follow documentaries on institutional cover up and on religion. Who it is not for: the content is child sexual abuse, directly, the testimony is detailed, and the second half becomes heavy with documentation.