Mea Maxima Culpa Essay

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” is the first known documentary that shows the protest against clerical sex abuse in the United States by four deaf men. The film is based the case of Father Lawrence Murphy, a serial abuser at a deaf school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was eventually called to account by the boys in his care. This documental is one of many break points from the Catholic Church, questioning the current importance and power of it. Nowadays the Vatican still is an independent government and is capable of governing under their own laws.

Mea Maxima Culpa shows that the abuses´ penalty processes are very slow and that leads to paedophiles to continue abusing. Therefore it is important to analyse if the Catholic Church should be self-regulated or should it be submitted to an external regulation.

Nowadays, paedophiles priest are only banned in the Vatican, therefore the country’s where they offer mass and other religious positions can not send them to jail or punish them as normal citizens. The problem is that the abused kids aren´t protected by the Church. They stay vulnerable, because they are only protected by their own government. This way, paedophiles aren´t punished as hard as normal citizen for these types of crime.

Another important argument is that the church considers the high costs of this kind of actions. They take care of the economic implications, but are away from taking care of the abused and their psychological problems. The Church recognizes their mistakes, but until now there isn´t a clear action process about these situations.

Mea Maxima Culpa shows an extreme case, however it opens the debate about about the unpunished abuses committed by the Catholic Church. There is a big economic power behind, which manages to keep hidden this and other topics.

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