Just got through watching the award-winning HBO documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, looking at sexual abuse of children. The film examines the abuse of power in the Catholic Church system via the story of four men who fought to expose the priest, Father Lawrence Murphy who abused them during the mid 1960s. Fr. Murphy taught at the St. John School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin from 1950 until 1974 when he was moved to St. Anne’s Church, Boulder Junction in the north of Wisconsin, following repeated allegations from students and a priest, Fr. Walsh, who visited the school in 1963. However, Murphy was not removed from contact with children and continued to abuse boys in Boulder Junction and other parishes, schools, and a juvenile correction facility, for the next 24 years. During his time at the St. John School, Murphy was believed to have molested as many as 200 boys.

The film peels back the layers of secrecy, obfuscation and deception that characterised the church’s response to allegations in this case and that of another charismatic priest in Ireland, Fr. Tony Walsh, a member of the popular “The Singing Priests”, who was revealed as Ireland’s most notorious pedophile in 2010. However, it was also revealed that the church had been aware of his activities for more than 20 years but took no practical action to protect children. What the film-makers reveal is that, far from these cases being isolated, there are thousands of similar stories all over the world, and that secrecy and cover-up has been the policy of the church for centuries.

There have been several good films that have exposed this issue in recent years, including Deliver Us From Evil (2006) and Twist of Faith (2004).
Perhaps what’s different about this film, is that the film-makers follow each case through the upward hierarchy of the Church before pointing the finger directly at then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who in 2001 took over responsibility for the personal review of all child sexual abuse cases involving Catholic clergy, world-wide. In 2005, he became Pope Benedict XVI. Now I think I have a clearer idea of one of the main reasons why he had to resign his office. Prominent human rights lawyer Sir Geoffrey Robertson QC, says it could be argued that the man’s degree of negligence over the child abuse scandals “involves him in a crime against humanity”.

World renowned film reviewer, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote a very personal review, saying, “To someone who was raised and educated in the Catholic school system, as I was, a film like this inspires shock and outrage.” He also wrote that the film “is calm and steady, founded largely on the testimony of Murphy’s victims.”

I came away after seeing this with such a feeling of outrage that I think it’s time to call the Catholic Church what it is, a systematically evil organisation. There are a lot of good people trying to do good work in the name of this church but I think the stench of the management of this global corporation has infected them all. If this were any other non-religious organisation, the leadership would probably be in prison and the business would almost certainly have been forced into liquidation. Imagine the good that would come from the distribution of the sale of the hundreds of billions in assets, owned by this extraordinarily wealthy exemplar for the man who walked in a simple cloth and owned nothing, Jesus (I think people might be shocked by the staggering quantity of properties, you didn’t know were owned and rented out by the Roman Catholic Church and its various holding trusts world-wide).

At the very least, the church needs to stop the legal stonewalling of the kind that rendered the recent Irish Child Abuse Commission, so ineffectual that not a single criminal priest was charged as a result.

It’s one thing for a secular corporation to use every legal and P.R. tactic they can, in an adversarial legal system, to delay or avoid justice; that’s expected of such amoral entities. However, for The Roman Catholic Church to use such amoral tactics in support of accused clergy, flies in the face of their avowed moral role in society. The Church needs to accept that the welfare of victims of sex-abuse by clergy, comes before that of the perpetrators, and that they are liable for compensation that is going to cost tens of billions. If authorities need a non-confrontational model for the adjudication and distribution of settlements to victims, perhaps they could look at the Danish Public Health Service Complaints Board for inspiration.

The people who protected these criminal clergy, like Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law (who resigned in 2002, after church documents were revealed which suggested he had covered up sexual abuse committed by priests in his archdiocese) need to be ‘hung out to dry’ when their heinous actions are exposed, rather than promoted to palaces in the Vatican as was Law.

Church records also need to be opened to allow for the discovery of criminal priests and brothers so they can be prosecuted, giving victims some justice and closure.

It’s time to end this!

I’d welcome your comments on this very tough subject.

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