{"id":15307,"date":"2013-06-25T23:57:27","date_gmt":"2013-06-25T22:57:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=15307"},"modified":"2013-06-26T00:03:47","modified_gmt":"2013-06-25T23:03:47","slug":"dvd-mea-maxima-culpa-silence-in-the-house-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2013\/06\/25\/dvd-mea-maxima-culpa-silence-in-the-house-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"DVD: Mea Maxima Culpa – Silence in the House of God"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mea<\/a><\/p>\n

A haunting and frequently shocking expose of child abuse in the Catholic Church<\/a>, Alex Gibney’s latest film explores an insidious web of corruption and cover up.<\/p>\n

Gibney has explored corruption in institutions before (e.g. Enron<\/a>, the US military<\/a>) and here he examines the story of four deaf men who were abused by priests in the 1960s before travelling higher up the church.<\/p>\n

Interweaving it with other stories, a devastating portrait quickly emerges of a bankrupt institution that has not only shattered people’s lives, but actively sought to conceal wrongdoing at the highest levels.<\/p>\n

Intriguingly, Pope Benedict XVI<\/a> stood down in February around the UK theatrical release and in doing so he became the first Pope to resign in 600 years. Many have speculated that the abuse scandals (that this film partly explores) gave him a good reason to retire.<\/p>\n

When he took over in 2005, he immediately had to deal with a situation that led to an explosion of abuse claims and law suits against the church and accusations that the Vatican was complicit in the cover up.<\/p>\n

Although films such as\u00a0Deliver Us From Evil<\/a>\u00a0(2006) have covered this subject by focusing on a single figure,\u00a0Gibney’s film adopts an unusual approach in starting out with\u00a0Father Lawrence Murphy<\/a>\u00a0abusing his pupils at the St John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.<\/p>\n