Culpable

A few years back, I watched a film called Deliver Us From Evil, a documentary on the subject of pedophilia in the Catholic church. Though that film did delve some into the institutional practices that plague the church at large, it was mostly focused on a particular priest and his numerous crimes.

This month, HBO has begun running a new documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God. From filmmaker Alex Gibney, this film is a new examination of the same subject. I wouldn't quite call it a "fresh" take, though, as this film feels rather derivative of the earlier work.

Once again, a particular case of a particular priest is the vehicle to lead into a discussion of the church as a whole. This is a particularly horrific case (if indeed there is such a thing as degrees of horror in such matters), of a priest who ran a school for deaf children and repeatedly abused the boys there sexually. He would target the children of hearing parents who did not sign fluently, leaving the kids no real way to talk about what had happened even if they were ever inclined to do so.

Where this newer documentary differs most from the earlier one is how it then expands to the issue of the church at large. Where Deliver Us From Evil spoke in general terms, Mea Maxima Culpa finds fault mostly with one man: Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. In an interesting bit of timing, this film began running on HBO just one week before the Pope announced he would be stepping down, and it was partly that confluence of events that spurred me to watch this documentary and see what it had to say.

Ultimately though, I find myself comparing the two documentaries a great deal. And generally, I found this one to be inferior to the other. I have to clarify that broad statement by saying that both films provide insight into a horrible facilitation of crime by the Catholic church. If you can stomach watching such a film, it would be better to see this movie than none at all. But that said, Deliver Us From Evil tells the story in a more... artistic(?) way. (On some level, it makes my skin crawl to talk about the sense of art in films on this subject.)

Mea Maxima Culpa doesn't quite have all its narrative ducks in a row. The opening 20 minutes or so are a compelling series of interviews with deaf men who were all abused as young boys. But then a narrator jumps into the film to segue into the broader matter of the church, and the documentary starts firing more wildly. It hops back and forth between the personal stories and the general "thesis," too scattershot on the general level and too diluted on the personal level. Add all that on top of a movie that's just inherently hard to watch anyway, given its subject matter, and it's a bit hard to stick with this one.

The rage the filmmaker seems to feel here is clearly appropriate, but it also detracts from his ability to make his movie. That's understandable, but in the end, I think I can only give Mea Maxima Culpa a C.