Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, review 15 cert, 107 min. Dir Alex Gibney The resignation of Pope Benedict XVI earlier this week lends a dark new topicality to Mea Maxima Culpa, Alex Gibney's stomach-sinking documentary about the sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests and the cover-up that followed. Gibney is no stranger to tough subjects, as anyone who has seen Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), his unblinking probe into torture by the US military in Afghanistan, will know well. For his starting point he takes the case of Lawrence Murphy, a priest who raped around 200 boys at a boarding school for deaf children in Wisconsin. His victims, now adults, vividly and articulately describe their ordeal through sign language. Gibney translates this not with subtitles, but a shattering voiceover read by professional actors, including Ethan Hawke and Chris Cooper. From here, Mea Maxima Culpa maps a globe-encircling web of conspiracies and concealments, stemming from a decision taken by the Vatican in the 19th century to deal with its already-endemic sex abuse problem internally, and not in collaboration with the police. The film shocks you to the marrow, and every frame burns with a righteous fire, itself religious in its intensity.