A documentary on the pathology of power in the Catholic Church

Pope Benedict XVI arrives to lead an Ash Wednesday Mass at the Vatican on February 13th this year. photograph: reuters/ alessandro bianchi

Alex Gibney's latest film, on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, alleges a direct link between the outgoing pope and the abuse of children in the US

It seems redundant to note that Alex Gibney’s documentary on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has emerged at an appropriate time. After all, given the endless torrent of grim revelations, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God would, if released at any random point in the last two decades, have chimed with contemporaneous headlines.

The recent resignation of Pope Benedict XVI has, however, provided the American documentarist with an interesting afterword. The picture focuses closely on the abuse of deaf children in a Wisconsin school from the mid-1960s onwards, who later courageously blew the whistle. The film also implicates the former Joseph Ratzinger in a complex cover-up. Gibney has subsequently suggested that Benedict’s unexpected retirement was linked to the child-abuse scandal.

Visiting Dublin for the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Gibney, a taut, bald man with a serious demeanour, backtracks only slightly. “Maybe it would have been better to say that I hoped his resignation was connected to the child-abuse case,” he says. “I hope that for myself and hope that for him. I think it would be sad if it was just that he was tired. That’s what the church was saying.”

The film alleges that Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, halted the canonical trial of a priest named Lawrence Murphy. A teacher at St John School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Fr Murphy is alleged to have molested up to 200 boys.

“That is the connection to the top,” Gibney says. “There are documents connecting the Milwaukee case to Joseph Ratzinger, who as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, oversaw this canonical trial of Lawrence Murphy. He intervenes and he stops the canonical trial. That taught us a lot – in a documented way.”

Gibney, an Oscar-winner for Taxi to the Dark Side, is one of America’s most prolific and highly garlanded documentary film-makers. His other movies include studies of such diverse subjects as the Enron scandal, writer Hunter S Thompson, lobbyist Jack Abramoff and – coming our way soon – the enigma that is Julian Assange.

If the current film has a problem it is that it tries to pack too much in. The Milwaukee case leads on to a study of clerical sexual abuse in every corner of the globe. At one point, he touches down in Ireland to ponder the ghastly case of Fr Tony Walsh, the former Elvis impersonator sentenced in December 2010 for abusing hundreds of children.

Such is the mire the Irish church finds itself in that Gibney must have had to choose between a vast array of possible subjects.

“To be honest, at the beginning, we weren’t sure there was going to be an Irish component,” he says. “But what interested me was how quickly the political landscape had changed in Ireland. Civil society was taking charge on a way that was very profound. We came here and decided quite quickly that Tony Walsh was the one. It had a lot of connection to the story in Wisconsin. They were both charismatic priests who used that charisma to get close to their victims. They didn’t lurk in the shadows. It had happened some time ago. But the revelations in the Murphy Report made it relevant again. There were resonances with the past and the present.”