http://www.jsonline.com/features/religion/milwaukee-archdiocese-victims-fail-to-reach-bankruptcy-settlement-ii77put-174278861.html

By Annysa Johnson

The court-ordered mediation between the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and victims of sexual abuse has failed, sending the parties back to U.S. Bankruptcy Court to resume what one court official has called a scorched earth legal battle.

The church and victims – at 575, they represent the largest class of creditors in the bankruptcy – have been in court-ordered mediation since July 20.

Both sides confirmed Monday that the settlement talks had failed, but they declined to elaborate on the sticking points, citing the confidentiality of the proceedings.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNT1JuyOILU

http://fox6now.com/2012/10/15/mediation-talks-break-down-between-archdiocese-victims-of-priest-sex-abuse/

By Jenna Sachs

MILWAUKEE — A break down in talks between Milwaukee’s Archdiocese and victims of sex abuse by priests means they’re all headed back to court — as the Archdiocese approaches its second year of bankruptcy.

The church and its 575 victims have been in court-ordered mediation since July, trying to hammer out what one judge called “astronomical costs.”

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http://mkefilm.org/theblog/2012-audience-winner-mea-maxima-culpa

The Milwaukee Film festival is proud to announce the 2012 Allan H. (Bud) and Suzanne L. Selig Audience Award Winners:

Best Feature Film: Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God (dir. Alex Gibney)

Best Short Film: Magic Piano (dir. Martin Clapp)

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October 4, 2012

Weakland misses his last chance to tell the truth

Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director

CONTACT: 414.429.7259

W. H. Auden wrote in his famous poem “September 1, 1939”, the terrible day the German army invaded Poland, that “all I have is a voice to undo the folded lie.”

The brave survivors of childhood rape and sexual assault of the Milwaukee Archdiocese from St. John’s School for the Deaf have been undoing the folded lies of the Milwaukee Catholic hierarchy and their Vatican overseers for a very long time: nearly four decades. Now these beautiful voices—which are really the single voice of justice for all victims of clergy sex crimes—will be heard and seen by a worldwide audience thanks to Oscar winning director Alex Gibney’s powerful new film, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God”, which will make its U.S. premier in Milwaukee on Friday.

Survivors and family members of priest predators of the Milwaukee Archdiocese are expected to be in attendance at the premier to welcome Gibney and his film, and will once again embrace these deaf survivor champions and advocates, several of whom are long-time local SNAP leaders.

Unfortunately, Fr. Lawrence Murphy, the predator priest who is the focus of Gibney’s film, is only one of literally dozens of clerics and church workers in the Milwaukee Archdiocese—at least as many as 144, according to recent filings in U.S. Federal Court—alleged to have raped and assaulted children and minors. And most of these recorded crimes against children, over 8,000 according to the court records, took place during a 25 year period from 1976 to 2002 when the Milwaukee Archdiocese was under the control of one man: Archbishop Rembert Weakland.
The Pope might have been in Rome but it was Weakland who was in Milwaukee. During his entire tenure as archbishop, Weakland concealed and transferred child molesting clerics from one parish and school to another without alerting police or notifying the public. In fact, Weakland knew there were so many priests assaulting children under his supervision that, according to his 2008 deposition, he never informed parishes with offender priests assigned, or once assigned to them, because, as he put it, that would entail notifying “nearly all” of the 300 parishes of the archdiocese and presumably, that’s the only job he would be doing. Exactly.

In another deposition, Weakland says he didn’t tell parents and families that he had secretly assigned a known diagnosed pedophile, Fr. Peter Burns, to their parish because they would have been OK with it. Tell that to the parents of the child who was raped by Burns after Weakland reassigned him and then the youngster killed himself several months later. On it goes, predator priest after predator priest.
And this is why Weakland is the chief defendant today in the fraud cases which have brought the archdiocese into Federal Bankruptcy Court.

That is why it is frustrating and fatiguing to have to once again see and hear the now admittedly softer spoken Weakland still peddling his self-serving, mostly fictional account of how he was the insider “good guy” who tried to do “something” about Murphy. This, of course, is nonsense, and very like the same excuse that defenders of the current Pope, Benedict XVI, use to explain Benedict’s inaction and favoritism for child molesting priests when he was in charge of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was in this role that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was eventually put in charge of Murphy’s case and, as is well documented in Murphy’s once secret church file, pretty much did what Weakland had been doing with Murphy, along with nearly all of the other abusive priests of the Milwaukee archdiocese: nothing.
Weakland’s basic defense is what we hear from those who never reported Jerry Sandusky at Penn State to the police or the public: “I told Coach Paterno. He told me he knew best how to handle it and not to tell anyone else.” Apparently, Weakland too couldn’t tell anyone about Murphy because Ratzinger told him not to. So, like Sandusky, he had no choice but to allow Murphy continued free and unsupervised access to the boy’s locker room. There is no evidence, however, that Cardinal Ratzinger ever prohibited Weakland from informing the public, alerting parishes, or ordering Murphy into a secure facility with supervision.

Weakland also claims that both the criminal and church statutes and laws had expired on Murphy’s crimes. As for church “statutes” or so called “canon law,” these are not actual “laws” but internal church rules. American citizens are not required under the constitution to obey canon law. They are morally required to obey civil and criminal law, however, and contrary to Weakland’s assertion, Murphy could have been prosecuted, at least in Minnesota, but likely elsewhere, if he had been reported to police in those states because the criminal statutes on those crimes were, in fact, still active, right up until Murphy’s death.

Even more incriminatory are the notations in the Murphy file that the archdiocese was concerned that Murphy’s case might get into civil court or find its way into the press. That is why Weakland finally decided to “act” with Rome, after waiting nearly 20 years to do so. Weakland misleadingly writes Ratzinger that he had just “learned” about Murphy’s crimes when, in fact, he had left Murphy working in ministry and parishes in another Wisconsin diocese for years.

Ironically, Weakland says in the film that he had met Murphy “once” and found him “childlike”. This meeting took place after Weakland’s own church hired criminologist had told him that Murphy had likely sexually molested 200 deaf children and his pedophilia was so profound it was “untreatable” by mental health experts. What did Weakland do with this dangerous predator after meeting with him? Send him right back unsupervised into communities, parishes and schools in Northern Wisconsin.

But most damning of all are Weakland’s own private words on the subject. Soon after Murphy’s death in 1998, in response to a nun who has written Weakland asking him why Murphy’s funeral had not been publically advertised, Weakland explains: “I talked in Rome at great length about how to handle all of this,” he writes, “to protect Father Murphy’s good name I had to do what I did and keep this as quiet as possible.”
What’s more credible: Weakland’s interview for an HBO documentary or his own words in a private letter he wrote at the time of Murphy’s death?

As for Weakland’s further claim about how “painful” it was for him to tell the deaf community that Rome would not defrock Murphy, when the pedophile priest died, Weakland dispatched his auxiliary bishop Richard Sklba (who Weakland calls his “go to guy” on abuse cases in his deposition) to personally perform the service. Why is this significant? Because the secret church file shows that deaf victims of Murphy were begging Weakland and the archdiocese not to allow Murphy to be buried as a priest. Not only did Bishop Sklba perform the service and praise Murphy’s life and work, he dressed Murphy in full priestly vestments and the casket was open. And to this day, Murphy’s gravestone reads: “Reverend Lawrence Murphy.”

Fortunately, Weakland’s actual involvement in Murphy’s case and many other serial child molesting priest cases in the Milwaukee Archdiocese have been widely reported, especially in the Milwaukee area but also in the national media. Today anyone can examine for themselves the mountains of evidence—even with 60,000 pages of documents still to be released—of Weakland’s direct involvement in covering up for several high profile serial child molesting priests besides Murphy—such as Frs. Becker, Widera , McArthur, Burns, Effinger, Hanser and many, many others. (Click on this link, select Wisconsin, and click on Archdiocese of Milwaukee for a complete listing of substantiated offenders http://bishop-accountability.org/priestdb/PriestDBbydiocese.html; for a detailed history of Weakland’s involvement with predator priests, including religious order clerics, up until more recent document releases, click here.)

Finally, as if more evidence of Weakland’s character and conduct is required, when Weakland’s lawyers won an unprecedented Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in the 1990’s that immunized pedophile priests and bishops from any and all lawsuits against them—based on a controversial interpretation of the 1^st amendment, the only such ruling in U.S. history—Weakland went after victims who had filed cases for court costs, even where the priest admitted to Weakland that he had sexually assaulted the plaintiff as a child and where Weakland had transferred that priest into that child’s parish with a prior history of known crimes.

One St. John’s survivor extensively interviewed in Gibney’s film, Gary Smith, was forced to sign a legal release with the archdiocese in the late 1970’s when then Archbishop Cousins required him to apologize to church officials in order to receive $5,000 for counseling. The film notes it took 20 years before Smith received the money. What it doesn’t mention is that it is Weakland who paid the check, but only after Smith was forced to sign yet another legal release. When Smith approached Weakland’s successor, Timothy Dolan, after Dolan offered small financial settlements of $20,000 to $50,000 to victims in exchange for—you guessed it—legal releases, Dolan’s lawyers told Smith he could not be helped because he had already signed a release under Weakland. All three archbishops acted exactly the same way in their treatment of Smith. And you can now add a fourth to this ignoble list, Archbishop Jerome Listecki, who is currently attempting to throw out Smith and over 550 other victim claims from federal bankruptcy court. As far as Smith is concerned, and all victims from the Milwaukee Archdiocese–whether its Cousins, Weakland, Dolan or Listecki–what’s the difference which archbishop it is when the results are pretty much the same?

Finally, Weakland has never apologized publically to victim/survivors and their families, and he could have used the interview with Gibney to perform this one decent gesture, knowing victims of priests he was responsible for would be undoubtedly watching the film. He could have apologized for his written remarks he once made in the Catholic newspaper that not all victims of priests “are so innocent” and that some victims are “street wise and savvy.” He could have apologized when in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal, around the very time he was sending secret reports about Murphy to Ratzinger, he opines that once a priest loses sexual interest in a child that is “when the squealing starts” and “you have to deal with it.” Perhaps he had in mind some of the deaf victims of Murphy who were causing him so much consternation. And he could apologize as to why he commissioned a bronze relief of himself in the cathedral, which is still there, depicting himself in the place of Christ shepherding little children, when so many children’s lives were destroyed under his care.

Victim/survivors in the Milwaukee Archdiocese wrongly assumed that when Weakland released his “memoirs” in 2008–where he makes the laughable defense that he didn’t know that when he became archbishop that sex with children was a crime–it would be, mercifully, the last we would have to hear from him. We were wrong. But at least this time all the folded lies of Weakland are ultimately reduced to sheer insignificance in Gibney’s epic and sweeping documentary because we finally get to hear for ourselves the words of the St. John’s survivors.

And we can never hear enough from these brave men. Ever.

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 23 years and have more than 12,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our national website is SNAPnetwork.org. The local Wisconsin website is SNAPwisconsin.com.

http://urbanmilwaukee.com/2012/10/04/film-fest-a-cry-for-justice/

By Marie Rohde

What does it take for a deaf man to be heard? That’s the question asked by the documentary film “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” which will be shown by the Milwaukee Film Festival Friday night.

Long before the waves of the Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal surged across America, three young men, molested as children at the St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, tried to tell their stories and stop one of the Milwaukee Archdiocese’s most prolific — and horrifying — pedophiles.

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From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://www.jsonline.com/features/religion/deal-could-be-near-between-archdiocese-sex-abuse-victims-cb6vo69-171058261.html

By Annysa Johnson

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee and victims of sex abuse by priests and others in authority have extended their court-ordered mediation into next week, prompting speculation that one of the Catholic Church’s largest bankruptcies could be nearing a close.

Lawyers for both sides met for another session Monday with the mediator, retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Randall J. Newsome of San Francisco, in hopes of hammering out a settlement that would compensate victims and allow the archdiocese to continue its mission.

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SNAPwisconsin.com

Milwaukee’s deaf survivors of Fr. Murphy at heart of Oscar winning filmmaker’s new documentary

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” to make its US premier in Milwaukee October 5

CONTACT: Peter Isely SNAP Midwest Director, 414.429.7259, John Pilmaier SNAP Wisconsin Director, 414.336.8575

In what is being called by critics as an “explosive” new documentary by Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney about child sex crimes and cover up in the Catholic Church, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God,” will make its US premier October 5 at the Milwaukee Film Festival.

The film (see trailer) will be shown at the Oriental Theater Friday October 5^th at 7:00 p.m. Information about purchasing tickets can be found online at the Milwaukee Film Festival website. HBO is scheduled to air the documentary on cable next year.

Gibney’s film alternates between the story of child sex crimes by Fr. Lawrence Murphy at Milwaukee’s St. John’s School for the Deaf, the cover up of those crimes by the Vatican and officials at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and the vast, unfolding dimensions and implications resulting from the still continuing revelations of tens of thousands of such crimes from around the globe.

Critics are calling the film “chilling”, “eye-opening” and “a powerful movie which could galvanize audiences “around the world.” Variety says the film weaves” a “meticulously researched” and “staggering arsenal” of interviews, documents, and archival materials into a “uniquely devastating account of priestly pedophilia into an excoriating indictment of the entire Vatican power structure.”

At the center of “Silence in the House of God” are accounts and interviews of deaf men who were repeatedly sexually assaulted by Murphy, a career pedophile who operated a boarding school for children for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee located in St. Francis, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. A secret church investigation and evaluation of Murphy during his career concluded that he had sexually assaulted at least 200 deaf children.

Several survivors of Murphy featured in the film are expected to join Gibney in Milwaukee for a “talk-back” after the premier.

“Several of the survivors of St. John’s are today well known to the Milwaukee community as admired public advocates for victims of childhood sex crimes by clergy,” says Peter Isely, a founder and the longtime Midwest Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, who was interviewed by Gibney. “The survivors of St. John’s,” according to Isely, “were the first known childhood victims of priest sex crimes anywhere in the world to publically step forward and expose the dangerous cover up of child abuse in the Catholic Church. The film shows the extraordinary courage of these survivors and pioneer advocates who warned the world of predators like Murphy and in doing so openly defied the seemingly unassailable cover up machinery of the Catholic Church.”

The film chronicles how Murphy’s thousands of crimes were concealed by top church officials, including the current Pope Benedict XVI, in his previous post as head of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), relying upon the investigative work of reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the New York Times. The Times obtained the most damning evidence against the Vatican in secret internal church documents directly linking Murphy’s cover up to the Vatican and the current Pope. The Murphy documents were brought to the doors of the Vatican itself by SNAP leaders, in the first public exposure of the extensive Vatican involvement in child sex crimes, resulting in the eruption and acceleration of revelations of child sexual assaults by clergy in Europe and around the world.

In September of 2011, leading human rights attorneys from the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) included the Murphy documents with 50,000 pages of criminal evidence in a historic filing at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague on behalf of 12,000 victims of childhood sex crimes by clergy from around the world. The filing, which is currently under review by the court, calls for a complete criminal investigation of Pope Benedict and several top Vatican officials for orchestrating and maintaining a world-wide system of cover up of child sex crimes by clerics.

Several of Murphy’s victims belong to a group of nearly 600 victims of priest child molesters who have recently filed claims for restitution with the federal bankruptcy court after the Archdiocese of Milwaukee filed for Chapter 11 protection claiming it could not cover judgments for fraud related to concealing and transferring dozens of known child sex offending clerics into churches and schools.

Victim/survivors are calling upon the court to release 60,000 pages of secret church documents concerning dozens of abusive clerics from the archdiocese and the sealed depositions of church leaders, including former Archbishop Rembert Weakland, who is likely asked under oath about the Vatican’s involvement in Murphy and other cases.

“Incredibly,” says John Pilmaier, SNAP’s Wisconsin Director, “the story Gibney so powerfully tells in his film is far from over, especially for the survivors of St. John’s. Sadly, lawyers from the Archdiocese right now are attempting to throw their claims out of court, along with the majority of other victim claims from the Milwaukee Archdiocese, based on legal technicalities and the statute of limitations. Hopefully Catholics across the archdiocese will watch this film when it airs and learn exactly why the Milwaukee Archdiocese needs to stop attacking victims in court, make restitution, accept responsibility, and stop fighting to keep criminal acts against children secret.”

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 23 years and have more than 12,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our national website is SNAPnetwork.org. The local Wisconsin website is SNAPwisconsin.com.

From Real Screen

http://realscreen.com/2012/09/13/tiff-12-gibney-on-truth-and-justice-in-mea-maxima-culpa/

By Kelly Anderson

Academy Award-winning doc director Alex Gibney (pictured) returns to the  Toronto International Film Festival this year, with a film telling the story  of a group of deaf men who launched one of the first clerical sex  abuse protests in the U.S.

Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, which was recently  announced as a London  Film Festival selection, delves into the controversial subject matter  of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, focusing on a case first opened by a  group of men coming forward after years had passed since they’d been allegedly  abused at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin.

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http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117948316/

By Justin Chang

Weaving a uniquely devastating account of priestly pedophilia into an excoriating indictment of the entire Vatican power structure, “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” is an expansive and authoritative study of the widespread practice and concealment of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. Alex Gibney’s typically well-assembled, meticulously researched docu occasionally falters with over-aestheticized reconstructions of his subjects’ experiences, an unnecessary touch in light of their brave, chilling testimony and the horrific scope of the personal and institutional corruption conveyed here. Hard-hitting synthesis of established facts and new interviews merits theatrical exposure before its 2013 HBO airings.

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From the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/09/mea-maxima-culpa-reveals-what-the-catholic-church-knew.html

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

A chilling documentary about the Vatican’s sexual-abuse scandal gives voice to its victims. Barbie Latza Nadeau got an early look at the film the Holy See doesn’t want you to see.

Even if you think you know the sordid details of the sex scandal concerning predatory priests in the Roman Catholic Church, director Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is eye-opening.

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