Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM — Alex Gibney's 106-minute investigation into how the Catholic Church buried evidence of clerical sexual abuse for decades. Gibney previously took home the Oscar for Best Documentary with Taxi to the Dark Side.

The film starts at St. John's School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, where Father Lawrence Murphy abused students across more than two decades from the late 1950s onward. Four of those survivors — all deaf — staged one of the earliest public protests against clerical abuse in the United States, in the 1970s. Gibney then follows the paper trail: how reports moved up the Church hierarchy toward Rome, and where they quietly disappeared.

Narrated by Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke and John Slattery. The film picked up an Emmy Award and remains one of the most methodical examinations of how institutional silence operates from the parish level to the Vatican. Stream Mea Maxima Culpa online on iFILM.