Title – Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012)

Director – Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)

Cast – Terry Kohut, Gary Smith, Voices of – Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper

Plot – Alex Gibney’s insightful look into the corruption that runs rife through the Catholic Church. Silence in the House of God focusses its attention on 4 deaf men who were once students of a school for the deaf where abuse by a catholic priest ran rampant.

‘Deaf power!”

Review by Eddie on 31/07/2013

Alex Gibney is a master of the documentary genre. With Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron and countless other doco’s all providing fascinating looks at their respective subject matter House of God is no different. Here Gibney has focussed his attentive gaze onto the Catholic Church and their quite frankly outrageous dealings with the abuse suffered by those most vulnerable and most trusting in the system.

The centrepiece for all else that follows in the doco is based around 4 ex deaf students of a Minnesota School for the deaf who at the hands of the manipulative and evil Father Murphy endured years and years of torment and abuse despite there speaking to authority’s and figures high up in the church. The way in which these 4 men stood up against the system when no one else would is quite amazing, voicing their opinion when they were the least likely to.

Gibney’s documentary takes many different turns and looks into aspects of the Catholic Church never before perhaps dealt with in such a light. The film is very much the work of master story teller and is told in such a way that it never condemns religion or peoples beliefs yet portrays such a sad and anger inducing story that it’s likely fans of the Catholic Church may be turned away from such a evil institution. Like the 4 men at the centre of this sad true story, we need to voice to others the need to see such an insightful picture.

4 wanted posters out of 5