Mea Maxima Culpa
Alex Gibney (2012)
If it came out tomorrow that McDonald's restaurant managers had been molesting and raping their employees throughout the world under the protection of their headquarters scores would find themselves in jail in a matter of weeks, including the top brass, and the company could realistically collapse. If the doctors of Médecins sans Frontières systematically abused their patients the NGO would likely not survive the accusations and the ensuing prosecutions, for all the good it does in the world. If the president of a Rome-based international bank was indirectly responsible for thousands of children being molested, at home and abroad, he would go to jail, no matter how powerful or how rich the bank.
When they write the moral history of democracy they will not conclude that our greatest sin was pride, or racism, or bloodlust, or cruelty. They shall write instead that our failing was apathy. Apathy in the face of horror and pain. Apathy for the sake of our comfort, for the preservation of our selfish interests and certainties. We ignore massacres as long as they happen far away. We elect racists as long as we belong to the majority. We disregard police brutality as long as we are not the ones being brutalised. We are content with women's place and treatment in society, as long as we're men.
The crimes are so much easier to ignore when they have allegedly been perpetrated by those we like, too. That comedian cannot be a deviant, he's so funny. My political candidate would not have groped those children, he believes the same things I do. There is no way headmaster touched those kids, he's a priest.
There is perhaps no race of people in the world we protect as much as we do priests. The Church doesn't even have to lift a finger. The victims rarely dare come forward, their parents tell them to shut up if they do and the police ignore them. Their communities shun them and they get death threats. I can almost understand the Church protecting its own and keeping matters under wraps. It is in the nature of systems to perpetuate. The attitude of the people towards these scandals however, is testament to our moral mediocrity as a species.
Catholics worldwide pretend nothing is happened or has happened every day of their lives, every time they go to church, every time a child is raped somewhere, and the church covers it up. We certainly don't need more evidence at this point to know the problem is endemic ; there were scandals coming out regularly when I wasn't even ten. Gibney's documentary's best quality is how it is able to shift scale, to move from individual cases to the global scope of the problem and the Church's treatment of it. It denounces the priests who rape, the bishops who protect them, the archbishops who back them up and the popes how do nothing at all about all of it - which doesn't stop many people from calling some of them the best pope of their lifetimes, because they didn't say homosexuals would go to hell.
Syria is far away. Police brutality is a complex issue that involves changing minds and attitudes. Jailing paedophiles should be a non issue. Criticising the church should not be controversial. But apathy is too powerful a force. Not just the apathy to do something and change the world. The apathy to change oneself and examine one's beliefs and allegiances.
Priests belong to a club of men who were born in the previous century and live in the one before that. They protect their riches and privileges and those of their club. They wield immense wealth and influence. They don't need our help. We will still give it to them.
8/10