One spring afternoon in 1977, 15-year-old Rachel Mike tried to kill herself for the third time. An Alaska Native, Rachel was living in a tiny town called Stebbins on a remote island called St. Michael. She lived in a house with three bedrooms and nine siblings. Rachel was a drinker, depressed, and starving. “When my parents were drinking, we didn’t eat right,” she says. “I just wanted to get away from the drinking.”

Rachel walked to the bathroom to fetch the family rifle, propped in the bathtub with the dirty laundry (the house didn’t have running water). To make sure the gun worked, Rachel loaded a shell and blew a hole in her bedroom wall. Her father, passed out on his bed, didn’t hear the shot. Rachel walked behind their small house. Her arms were too short to put the rifle to her head, so she shot herself in her right leg instead.

Rachel was found screaming in a pool of blood by her Auntie Emily and flown 229 miles to a hospital in Nome. The doctor asked if she wanted to see a priest. She said yes. In walked Father James Poole—a popular priest, radio personality on KNOM, and, according to allegations in at least five lawsuits, serial child rapist. Father Poole has never been convicted of a crime, but the Jesuits have settled numerous sex-abuse claims against him since 2005, in excess of $5 million, according to an attorney involved in four of those five lawsuits. Exact figures aren’t available because some of the settlements involve confidentiality agreements. The Jesuits have never let a single case against Father Poole go to trial.

In a 2005 deposition, Rachel testified that she had been molested by Father Poole in 1975, while in Nome for her second suicide attempt, an attempted overdose of alcohol and pills. He’d come sit by her bed, put his hand under the hospital blanket, and fondle her, she said.

She traveled between Stebbins and Nome several times in the late 1970s, spending time in hospitals and receiving homes. By 1977, Rachel testified, Poole had given her gonorrhea, and by 1978 she was pregnant with his child. In an interview with The Stranger, she said Poole encouraged her to get an abortion and tell the doctors she had been raped by her father. She followed his advice. “He brainwashed me,” she said. “He messed up my head, man.”

Rachel Mike’s father died in 2004. A year later, she heard Elsie Boudreau, another survivor of Poole’s abuse, being interviewed on the radio. Listening to Boudreau, Rachel was moved to finally tell the truth.

“He’s gone, and I’ll never have a chance to tell him in person,” she said, talking about her father between heaving sobs. “I was scared. In a way he knew, but—he never even touched me.”

“This man,” says Anchorage-based attorney Ken Roosa, referring to Poole, “has left a trail of carnage behind him.”

The only reason Poole is not in jail, Roosa says, is the statute of limitations. And the reason he’s still a priest, being cared for by the church?

“Jim Poole is elderly,” answered Very Reverend Patrick J. Lee, head of the Northwest Jesuits, by e-mail. “He lives in a Jesuit community under an approved safety plan that includes 24-hour supervision.”

Roosa has another theory—that Poole knows too much. “They can’t put him on the street and take away his reason for keeping quiet,” Roosa says. “He knows all the secrets.”

F ather James Poole’s story is not an isolated case in Alaska. On the morning of January 14 in Seattle, Ken Roosa and a small group Alaska Natives stood on the sidewalk outside Seattle University to announce a new lawsuit against the Jesuits, claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in isolated Native villages where they could abuse children off the radar.

“They did it because there was no money there, no power, no police,” Roosa said to the assembled cameras and microphones. “It was a pedophile’s paradise.” He described a chain of poor Native villages where priests—many of them serial sex offenders—reigned supreme. “We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order.”

The suit, filed in the superior court of Bethel, Alaska, the day before, accuses several priests of being offenders and conspirators. Among the alleged conspirators is Father Stephen Sundborg, who is the current president of Seattle University and was Provincial of the Oregon Province of Jesuits from 1990 through 1996. (The Oregon Province includes Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska; as Provincial, Sundborg was head of the entire province.) The suit alleges that while Sundborg was head of the Northwest Jesuits, he had access to the personnel files of several pedophile priests, including one named Father Henry Hargreaves, whom he allowed to remain in the ministry. “As a direct result of Father Sundborg’s decision,” the suit alleges, “Father Hargreaves was able to continue molesting children, including but not limited to James Doe 94, who was raped by Father Hargreaves in 1992, when James Doe was approximately 6 years old.”

Roosa and his associate Patrick Wall (a former Benedictine monk who once worked as a sex-abuse fixer for the Catholic Church) said they knew of 345 cases of molestation in Alaska by 28 perpetrators who came from at least four different countries.

This concentration of abuses is orders of magnitude greater than Catholic sex-abuse cases in other parts of the United States. Today, Roosa said, there are 17,000 Catholics in the diocese of Fairbanks, though there was a much smaller number during the peak of the abuse. Roosa compared this lawsuit to the famous Los Angeles suits of 2001, which claimed 550 victims of abuse in a Catholic population of 3.4 million.

These abusers in Alaska, Wall said, were specifically sent to Alaska “to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage” to the church’s public image.

One by one, the Alaska Natives—including Elsie Boudreau, the woman whom Rachel Mike had heard on the radio—took their turns before the cameras and microphones, talking softly and nervously and choking back tears. “I am Flo Kenny,” a woman with a gray ponytail and sunglasses said carefully. “I am 74 years old. And I’ve kept silent for 60 years. I am here for all the ones who cannot speak—who are dead, who committed suicide, who are homeless, who are drug addicts. There’s always been a time, an end of secrets. This is the time.”

Alphonsus Abouchuk, wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses, talked about how poor his family was and how the priests used to give him quarters after abusing him.

Rena Abouchuk, his sister, cried while she read a letter to a Franciscan monk named Anton Smario (currently living in Concord, California) who taught her catechism classes. “You did so many evil things to young children,” she read, gripping her letter in one hand and an eagle feather tied to a small red sachet in the other. “God will never forgive you… You took a lot of lives.” Six of her cousins, she later said, committed suicide because of Brother Smario.

The lawsuit states that Brother Smario offered children food and juice to coax them to stay after class: “He then would unzip his pants, and completely expose his genitals to these children, and masturbate to ejaculation as he walked around the classroom. He would ask the girls to touch his penis and would rub his erect penis on their backs, necks, and arms. Sometimes he would wipe or rub his semen on the girls after he ejaculated.”

According to the allegations, Father Joseph Lundowski molested or raped James Does 29, 59–71, and 73–94, plus Janet Does 4–7—a total of 40 children—giving them “hard candy, money he stole from the collection plate, cooked food, baked goods, beer, sacramental wine, brandy, and/or better grades (silver, blue, or gold stars) on their catechism assignments in exchange for sexual favors.”

The lawsuit also alleges Father George Endal raped and molested several boys—and, as Smario and Lundowski’s boss, was the person who put Lundowski in charge of the boys dormitory in the Holy Rosary Mission School in Dillingham, Alaska, where catechism classes were split between Smario (in charge of the girls) and Lundowski (in charge of the boys). On separate occasions, Father Endal and another priest named Norman E. Donohue—who allegedly raped James Doe 69—walked in on Lundowski while he was molesting children and either quietly left the room or did nothing to stop it.

Father Francis Fallert, principal of the Copper Valley School and head of the all the Alaska Jesuits from 1976 to 1982, is accused of molesting Janet Doe 6.

The sheer concentration of known sex offenders in these isolated communities begins to look less like an accident than a plan. Their institutional protection looks less like an embarrassed cover-up than aiding and abetting. And the way the church has settled case after case across the country, refusing to let most of them go to trial for a public airing, is starting to look like an admission of guilt.

W hen Patrick Wall wore monk’s robes, he must’ve looked like Friar Tuck. A former all-state football lineman, Wall has broad shoulders, a brawny neck, short reddish hair, and a habit of calling people “bro.”

We met last week in Sea-Tac Airport’s Alaska Airlines Board Room—a two-story business lounge, just past the security check, with conference tables, ergonomic chairs next to computer stations, and free espresso. He and Ken Roosa were there to meet with a client. Wall lives in California, Roosa lives in Anchorage, and many of their clients are on the West Coast, so they’ve done a lot of business in the Board Room. “I like to spend the night at home,” Wall says, setting his airplane reading—The Name of the Rose—on the conference-room table.

Wall’s first call as a sex-abuse fixer knocked on his door one morning in 1991, while he was brushing his teeth. Wall was not yet a priest, just a monk studying at St. John’s University in Minnesota. The abbot came to his room before class with an urgent matter regarding another monk and said Wall would be moving into the boy’s prep-school dormitory—immediately. The other monk “had an incident with a 14-year-old in the shower.” Wall was to take his place.

Taken aback, Wall threw up every objection he could think of. He didn’t own a computer and used the communal ones in the monastery. “We’ll buy you a laptop.” He helped with mass at a local parish. “We’ll reassign you to campus ministry.” He was on call for the volunteer fire department. “Not anymore.” The abbot wouldn’t take no for an answer.

So Wall packed up, moved into the boys dormitory, quickly intuited who else on the floor had been abused (5 out of the 90 residents), and coaxed them into talking about what had happened. Those cases never became public and were settled out of court. “If you’re good,” Wall says, “the assignments build.” Wall was so good, he was ordained a year early and kept busy, working as many as 13 cases per month.

The job was harrowing and frustrating. “If you’re the cleaner, you rarely find out the resolution to these things,” Wall says. “Because survivors had to sign confidentiality agreements.” The ultimate objective, for a cleaner, was to keep things quiet so the details never became public or went to trial. Wall slowly came to believe that his superiors were more concerned with protecting their public image than caring for survivors. It was, he says, a dark time, not least because he was struggling with his own vows of celibacy. In 1998, he asked to be laicized. By 2001, he was married to a ballet dancer and had a newborn daughter. By 2002, he was hired as a full-time researcher for the law firm Manly and Stewart investigating clerical sex-abuse cases.

Since then, he and Roosa—who often collaborate on cases with attorney John Manly—have worked over 250 cases together, all of them settled without going to trial. “I would like to see any of these cases go to trial to expose the corruption of the system,” Wall says. But the church would rather pay the money than subject itself to public scrutiny, and survivors generally prefer to avoid the increased emotional turmoil of a trial. “There was one survivor who went through 11 days of questioning, of deposition,” Roosa says. “The defense lawyers can make it so painful.”

“If you bend a young plant, it grows at an angle,” Roosa says. “Child sex abuse bends the character and maturation of a person—the abuse isn’t the injury as much as the effect it has on people.”

Father Poole’s alleged abuses are particularly egregious, earning him a special place in Roosa’s and Wall’s hearts. He is their archetypal bad guy, their Dr. Mengele of the clerical sex-abuse world: Their clients have described, in sworn testimony, Poole pressing his erections against girls during junior-high dances, being caught by his own mother while masturbating in front of young girls, and much worse. “The defense lawyers have been so disgusted with Poole,” Roosa says, “that they’ve told me off the record, ‘anything you tell me about Poole, I’d believe.'”

According to a victim identified as Jane Doe 5 in a 2006 complaint, Poole first raped her during a private catechism class when she was 6 years old. From a direct transcript of her testimony:

He started fidget—finger—started to touch me digitally with his fingers. And at that time, when he started getting closer to me, I—there’s a picture—I’m on the desk, a picture to the left of me is a picture of Jesus who’s at the rock praying, and to my left I look at the picture to my left, and I look into James Poole’s eyes. I turned away from the picture, looked into his eyes, and asked ‘Not in front of Jesus, please.’… He kept telling me that in order to be a good little girl for God, I had to do this. That God wanted me to do this. And I remember a burning…

Then, she says, he raped her.

Roosa tells a story about Poole molesting a 9-year-old girl in Portland, Oregon, while simultaneously having an affair with the girl’s mother. Poole supposedly told the girl’s mother he would quit the priesthood and marry her, but abruptly returned to Alaska. The girl’s mother committed suicide. According to Wall and Roosa, that same girl says she was molested by another priest, one who has been listed in at least three settlements in cases that reach back to the 1960s. They say that, in one incident, this priest was called to a house in Yakima to administer last rites to a dying woman in 1989. “He raped the woman on her deathbed,” Roosa says. “He told the family to go into the other room, the husband heard a weird noise, went into the bedroom, and caught him raping his unconscious wife.”

The woman didn’t die, and by the time Roosa and Wall caught up with her family last May, the church had offered the family half a million dollars. The family said they’d file a legal complaint if Roosa and Wall could guarantee more than half a million dollars in compensation.

“No,” Wall said. “Take it, bro.”

W ithin hours of the press conference on the sidewalk in front of Seattle University on January 14—which essentially alleges that Father Stephen Sundborg allowed molester priests to minister freely as members of the Northwest Jesuits when it was his responsibility, as Provincial, to keep them away from children—Sundborg denied having any information about the Jesuit “dumping ground” in Northwest Alaska:

The allegations brought against me are false. I firmly deny them. I want the victims and the entire community to know that. The complaint filed by the plaintiffs’ lawyers represents an unprincipled and irresponsible attack on my reputation. Let me be clear—my commitment to justice and reconciliation for all victims remains steadfast.

On January 31, Father Sundborg, through his spokesperson, responded to questions from The Stranger with this statement:

I want to be very clear: As Provincial of the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus, I would never have put a child at risk. I was never aware of any claim of child abuse concerning either Fr. James Poole or Fr. Henry Hargreaves.
As I have said repeatedly in the past, as a member of the Society of Jesus, I personally and sincerely apologize for the pain that has been suffered through the actions of some members of our order.
I am disappointed that the plaintiffs’ attorneys are attempting to use falsehoods and innuendo to fuel a media campaign. Their attack on my reputation is unprincipled and irresponsible.
Nonetheless, I remain firm in my resolve to seek justice and reconciliation for all victims.

With the exception of Father Hargreaves allegedly raping James Doe 94 in 1992, no abuses—at least none that have been reported—occurred while Sundborg was Provincial.

Still, Wall says, “Stevie has a little problem.”

Hargreaves, Poole, and other problem priests continued to work in the ministry during Sundborg’s tenure between 1990 and 1996 and, in Elsie Boudreau’s words, “We know that he knew.”

Father Poole came under scrutiny as early as 1961, when complaints about his behavior reached Rome and the Father-General of the Jesuits initiated an investigation.

In 1994, Poole was sent to the Servants of the Paraclete—a Jesuit-run psychiatric facility for troubled priests in Jemez Springs, New Mexico—where, he later testified in a 2004 deposition, he learned that he had boundary issues, that he “wasn’t this great king and lover,” and that “French-kissing” a 12-year-old girl is “wrong.”

Poole denies raping anyone but admits to “French-kissing” Boudreau—and emphatically denies that French-kissing her was in any way sexual. “With Elsie, I have never had any sexual impulse,” he said in the 2004 deposition, “never had any sexual temptation.” Later in this same testimony, John Manly asked Poole whether he had ever French-kissed his own niece.

“No,” Poole replied.

“Why?” Manly asked.

Poole hesitated.

“Why not?” Manly insisted. “I think I know the answer, but I want you to say it.”

“We were not that close, for one thing,” Poole replied. “My brother had always lived away from us.”

“Any other reason?” Manly asked.

“No,” Poole said.

Monthly progress reports were sent to Sundborg during Poole’s treatment in Jemez Springs. After his release, Poole continued to work as a hospital chaplain in Alaska until November of 2003, when Roosa threatened to sue the Bishop of Fairbanks over the childhood abuse of Elsie Boudreau. Poole retired shortly thereafter and was sent to Spokane, to live in an apartment near Gonzaga University. (Attempts to contact Father Poole for comment were unsuccessful.)

Father Sundborg testified in 2005 that he sent at least eight priests—including Father Poole, Father James Laudwein, and Father Craig Boly—for psychiatric evaluation by Dr. Stuart Greenberg, a leading consultant on clerical sex abuse for the Northwest Jesuits. After their visits with Dr. Greenberg, Poole, Laudwein, and Boly were returned to active ministry.

At the time of Sundborg’s 2005 testimony, Father Laudwein was a defendant in a sex-abuse suit that ended in 2007 with a $50 million settlement, according to the Anchorage Daily News. And, in 1992, Father Boly wrote an essay for a book called Jesuits in Profile: Alive and Well in the U.S. about his attraction to high-school girls:

I remember being reprimanded more than once for spending too much time with visiting coeds from other local high schools. My rationalization was that if attractive young women brought their problems to me, it must be an opportunity for apostolic service. What I neglected to consider was what needs of my own the interactions with the women students were meeting.

Sundborg also contributed an essay to Jesuits in Profile, but testified in 2005 that he had no recollection of reading the book.

Dr. Greenberg—the counselor to whom Sundborg had sent Poole, Laudwein, Boly, and others for evaluation—was arrested in the summer of 2007 for surreptitiously filming staff members and patients using the bathroom at his office and, according to Roosa, filming himself masturbating while watching the films. A few weeks later, he rented a room at a motel in Renton, where he committed suicide. Police found him with a bunch of bottles of prescription pills and two slashed wrists.

“I wish I could offer you some adequate explanation,” his suicide note read. “I just don’t know. I deeply and profoundly apologize.”

T his isn’t Sundborg’s first go-around with fending off a sex-abuse case. In 2006, the Jesuits settled a $350,000 suit against Father Michael Toulouse, a philosophy professor at Seattle University accused of abusing a 12-year-old boy in his residence in 1968. At the time of the settlement, Father Sundborg argued that Seattle University wasn’t liable, even though the abuse happened on campus, because the abuse occurred outside of his official duties as a teacher—a rare Catholic argument for the separation of church and sex.

Complaints against Toulouse (who died in 1976) date from 1950, when a Spokane father threatened to shoot Toulouse, who was then teaching at Gonzaga High School. Toulouse was transferred to Seattle, where he allegedly molested several boys, including the son of a widow in 1967. The widow and another Jesuit wrote to the province in 1968 requesting action. (Father Toulouse continued teaching at Seattle University until 1976.) When the widow’s son sought compensation in 1993, Sundborg wrote back, according to the Seattle Times: “There is nothing about this matter in the provincial files, in the personnel files of Fr. Toulouse, or in the files of Seattle University.”

That may be. But Father Thomas Royce, Provincial of the Northwest Jesuits from 1980 to 1986, just four years before Sundborg became Provincial, has testified that similar information about Jesuits does exist in the personnel files—that they contain information that is “special,” “not public,” and “not good.”

He called them “the hell files.”

E lsie Bourdreau is a Yu’pik Eskimo with short brown hair, plump cheeks, and, when she is not testifying at grim press conferences, a radiant smile. As Janet Doe 1, Boudreau was the first person to speak publicly about being abused by Father Poole. She kept silent about her abuse until 2005, when her daughter turned 10. “I was 10 when the abuse started,” she says. “And I just couldn’t shield it from my consciousness anymore.” She’s now employed as a consultant to law firms pursuing clerical sex-abuse cases, including the firms where Wall and Roosa work.

When Boudreau was a child, the villages of Northwest Alaska were only accessible by plane, boat, or dog sled. Many still are. For the most part, they didn’t have public schools, cops, or telephones. Many of the houses were one room and lacked food and consistent heat in the below-zero weather. “The perps would soften up their victims with food and warmth,” Wall says, “because that’s what the kids didn’t have. ‘It was always warmer in the rectory,’ they say. ‘There was always food in the rectory. There was always candy.'”

In those villages, the priests had unusual authority. “In the village, our elders loved the church and the priests so much,” Boudreau says. “They were like honored guests in our land. The priest had the utmost power, power that historically the village shaman would have had.” If children complained about the priests, it was tantamount to complaining about the village shaman. “I’ve talked to hundreds of victims in Alaska,” Boudreau says, “and many were physically hurt by parents for speaking about this.”

The priests came to occupy the role of shamans by a weird confluence of history and microbiology. In the early 1900s, a Spanish-influenza epidemic ripped through Northwest Alaska, sometimes killing entire villages. They called it “the Big Sickness” or “the Big Death.”

Winton Weyapuk was a child in Wales, Alaska, and was orphaned by the epidemic. In an interview from 1997, he recalled that the flu came on a dog sled. The mailman, on his monthly delivery, brought the corpse of a man who’d died on the way to Wales. Curious villagers crowded around the corpse. “The men, women, and children who came to see this body went home, and many got sick and most of them died before the next morning.”

Weyapuk’s father died that first night, so the family moved into an uncle’s house. Most everyone in the uncle’s house died, and Weyapuk and his brother Dwight lived in a one-room sod house with four corpses until someone found them. He recalls seeing white men building tripods over the sod houses, using block and tackle to pull frozen bodies up through the skylights, then blasting holes in the frozen ground with dynamite for mass graves. Family sled dogs, neglected and starving, roamed the streets and fought over human remains.

The shamans, normally counted on as healers, were helpless. The population was decimated, and the social structure had to be created from nothing: Another Wales resident remembers that, in the aftermath, so many families had been destroyed that an official from Nome came to the village with a stack of notarized wedding licenses. He lined up all the surviving men, all the surviving women, and all the surviving children, and built families at random.

Catholic missionaries made major inroads into these communities in the aftermath of the Big Sickness. (Along with the Baptists and Orthodox churches. The major churches had a summit in Sitka years prior and divided up their geographical spheres of influence.) The missionaries brought flour and coffee, built orphanages and schools. “They looked at the shamans as evil and of the devil,” Boudreau says. A new social order was created. In the villages of Northwest Alaska, the Jesuits stepped into a tailor-made power vacuum.

T he history of child molestation in the Catholic Church goes back centuries. The first official decree on the subject was written at the Council of Elvira, held around A.D. 305 near Granada, Spain. The precise history is complicated, but the council is traditionally believed to have set down 81 rules for behavior, the 71st of which is: “Those who sexually abuse boys may not commune even when death approaches.” It was the harshest one-strike policy: If you’re caught abusing a child, you are not only laicized, but permanently excommunicated—damned for all time.

The other major condemnation of clerical sex abuse was The Book of Gomorrah, completed by radical church reformer Father Peter Damian (a Benedictine monk, as it happens, who became a cardinal) in 1051. He appealed directly to the pope about the abuse of children, as well as consensual sex among clergy—in howling language: “O unheard of crime! O outrage to be mourned with a whole fountain of tears!… What fruitfulness can still be found in the flocks when the shepherd is so deeply sunk in the belly of the devil!”

In the 1930s, a priest-psychiatrist—and also a Benedictine—named Reverend Thomas Verner Moore researched the higher-than-usual rates of insanity and alcoholism among Catholic clergy. He suggested the church build an asylum for priests. The U.S. Catholic Bishops turned down his request in 1936. Father Moore became a Carthusian hermit.

In 1947, Father Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez, New Mexico—the same institution Father Poole was to visit almost 50 years later.

In a 1957 letter to the Bishop of Manchester, Father Fitzgerald wrote that predatory priests (who he euphemistically refers to as “schizophrenic”) cannot be effectively treated and should not be allowed to continue in the ministry:

Their repentance and amendment is superficial and, if not formally at least subconsciously, is motivated by a desire to be again in a position where they can continue their wonted activity. A new diocese means only green pastures… We are amazed to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the cura animarum [the cure, or care, of souls].

By the early 1960s, Father Fitzgerald had seen enough chronic pedophiles that he did not want to treat them and have them rereleased into the ministry, but, as he proposed in a letter to Archbishop Davis, to build an “island retreat… but even an island is too good for these vipers.”

In 16 centuries, church policy had evolved from one strike you’re out to 30 strikes and you’re sent to an island in the Caribbean.

In 1965, according to an affidavit from Fitzgerald successor Father Joseph McNamara: “Father Gerald purchased an island in [the Caribbean], near Carriacou, which had an abandoned hotel, damaged by fire, on it. This hotel was entirely removed from any civilization… This was to be Father Gerald’s long sought after ‘island refuge,’ but it did not come to be. As is described below, Archbishop Davis ordered Father Gerald to sell the island.”

Shortly thereafter, Father Fitzgerald was asked to step down. “It all became too public,” Wall says. “The Holy See would never be able to explain Father Fitzgerald’s leper island for pedophile priests.”

In 1985, two priests and a lawyer—Father Michael Peterson, Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, and Ray Mouton—presented a report to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. The report, which reads more like concerned advice than a condemnation, warns that high rates of abuse and high rates of recidivism for “treated” priests could cost the church over $1 billion and a major loss of credibility in the coming decade.

Later that year, in the first highly publicized case of a pedophile priest in the United States, Father Gilbert Gauthe admitted to abusing 37 boys in Louisiana. He accepted a plea bargain, was sentenced to 20 years, and served 10. By 1997, according to the New York Times, he had moved to Texas, where he was “arrested for fondling a 3-year-old boy” and put on supervised probation. (According to the Times, “Texas authorities did not know of his criminal record in Louisiana.”) In April 2008, he was arrested again for failing to register as a sex offender.

In 1993, Canice Connors, the director of St. Luke’s, a psychiatric institute for troubled clergy, told the Los Angeles Times: “The Catholic Church in North America possesses the greatest data bank of evaluation and treatment of nonincarcerated pedophiles on the continent. That data should be analyzed scientifically and shared with others studying the problem.” He was in Milwaukee to present his findings to the U.S. Conference of Bishops.

In 2003, the Archdiocese of Boston agreed to pay out $85 million to 552 victims of clerical sex abuse.

Also in 2003, in the midst of negotiations to settle four claims of clerical sex abuse with the Diocese of Fairbanks, one of the church’s mediators told Ken Roosa that the dioceses didn’t want to offer more than $10,000. “They said they couldn’t offer more money to an Alaska Native because they’d just get drunk and hurt each other,” Roosa said. “And it would just encourage more victims to come forward. Unbelievable.”

In September 2005, former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—who’d just become the pope—asked the justice department of the Bush administration to grant him immunity from prosecution in sex-abuse cases in the United States. Ratzinger, the onetime head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was accused of “conspiring to cover up the sexual molestation of three boys by a seminarian” in Texas, according to the Associated Press. Ratzinger had “written in Latin to bishops around the world, explaining that ‘grave’ crimes such as the sexual abuse of minors would be handled by his congregation. The proceedings of special church tribunals handling the cases were subject to ‘pontifical secret,'” Ratzinger’s letter said. The Bush administration granted Ratzinger the immunity.

In 2007, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $660 million to more than 500 victims of clerical sex abuse.

Why does the church keep sending these priests, who have come to be such a major liability, back into ministry? “It’s all about keeping the stores open, keeping the revenue rolling,” Wall says. The Alaskan provinces in particular, Wall says, were a source of revenue—not from the Native population living there, but from parishioners in the lower 48 who were encouraged to donate for the Native ministry up north. “You could raise thousands to fund a mission that cost very little to run,” Wall says. “The profit margin is huge.”

T he lawsuits against the Northwest Jesuits regarding abuses of Alaska Natives are not over. Within the coming weeks, Roosa and Wall say, more claims will be filed, more press conferences will be held, and more stories will come out.

“We talk about how we feel like we’re doing God’s work,” says Boudreau. “It’s something bigger than all of us. We’re working to reveal the truth of what happened.” recommended

This story has been updated since it was originally published, and a photo caption has been corrected to properly identify Father George Endal.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

124 replies on “The “Pedophile’s Paradise””

  2. The church’s actions clearly show that it is in touch with something other than the god the people expect or the god this failed religion speaks of. When perverted incomplete men such as these fail as they have and as they will blindly continue there is a need to see them exposed as the frauds they are. Gods representative? What a perverse joke these abusers and users have played on society for centuries. Let their futile struggles to defend the indefensible crime of child rape be long, painful and maddening for them. Bringing these social monsters to account provides hope for all those deceived and abused by these incomplete men. There is no halfway point on this, the safety of children from sexual abusers and their enablers says that if you fail to speak out against these atrocities then you are as incomplete as the perpetrators, enablers and deniers. Let justice rain down on the heads of these pedophiles and their enablers and supporters.

    My most recent letter to Vatican officials including the Pope:

    24/01/2009

    Dear Benedict,

    I find the opportunity to communicate via Vatican radio, YouTube and other avenues recently established as a breath of fresh air which can only lead to a better understanding and a more peaceful and just world.

    On your recent visit to Australia you spoke of the clergy abuse issue; it is that matter which causes me to write.

    At the head of your Vatican Radio it reads “The voice of the Pope and the Church in dialogue with the world”. As a past victim of clergy abuse I would like to take the opportunity afforded to establish an avenue of communication with the church in both my own regard and in regards others who have experienced similar abuses. We find that on a universal and on a global basis that we as individuals and very often our families and our children are denied our human rights and our right to justice and fair treatment under the laws of our respective lands as well as in the manner taught by your Church. That this does occur is plain and obvious for all who care to look, to all who attempt to understand or to those who seek a just, humanitarian or Christian response from your Church.

    The litany of these abuses and the subsequent failures are found across our entire planet and in each instance where there is some public debate the Church and your bishops are regularly condemned due to their inabilty to provide either a legally just outcome, a morally just outcome as taught by your Church or a Christian outcome. This as you are aware causes all who are involved endless pain and the very existence of these circumstances permits the greatest degree of harm on an individual and on a global basis to continue and singularly engenders the greatest degree of social discordance and human rights abuses experienced on a country level and is the greatest single cause of the significant anger, disgust and at times hatred expressed against your Church, your bishops and Catholics in general. Hatred and anger and disgust which your Church brings upon itself through its own universal failures.

    Since your visits to the United States and Australia where you raised the subject of the failure of your bishops to deal with this issue in an appropriate and humane manner they have steadfastly refused to release documentation (except when demanded under the law of the country) which can firstly tell us all of the extent of the problem and provide the basis of the understanding required to develop and implement a Christian and humanitarian response. They have failed to act in accord with the teachings of the Church, the teachings of Jesus Christ and very often in defiance of the spirit of the laws of a country as well as continuing to fail on a human rights level.

    As you would well be aware the numbers are staggering despite the majority of victims remaining silent about their abuse due to the lack of support and the injurious manner in which the Church responds to their claims.

    In the United States estimates take the number there beyond 100,000 children with a cost against your Church of some $10,000,000,000 to $15,000,000,000 in that country with only a small percentage of outstanding cases having been heard. In Canada the Church has been implicated in the genocide of some 50,000 Native American children as well as tens of thousands of non-Native American children; these as in all other countries are mostly children raised within your own Catholic faith.

    In Ireland your Church is unable to ensure the safety of children, your bishops are unable to provide and implement proper safety standards nor is it able to provide the justice and healing your bishops and priests preach of from their pulpits nor does it provide the just and compassionate outcomes sought by countless of your own Catholic people.

    It seems that in each locality examined; Canada, Mexico, United States, The Philipines, Australia, New Zealand, Europe the failure is universal and comprehensive and plainly in opposition to the teachings of your Church.

    Your Church has failed in the past and continues to fail on a global basis in regards the treatment of those abused by your clergy. While such a state continues to exist around the globe it can be clearly said that this is not in the manner of the teaching of Jesus Christ and as such your Churchs’ representation of itself as a follower of the teachings of Jesus Christ must be brought into question as no Christian respects the current response of the Catholic Church to the clergy abuse issue.

    Countless people across the globe petition and beg your leaders, priests and bishops for a change and for your Church to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ yet your princes of God ignore them and deny them faith, justice and peace.

    Benedict, your Church, for the sake of humanity must act humanely and justly or forever move on and be seen as the greatest religious failure in the history of mankind.

    I have made many attempts to establish a dialogue in regards this matter with bishops and priest across the globe only to be met with silence and the failures inherent in the above. My attempts to communicate and to establish a proper representative dialogue with the Church or instruments of the Church have failed to progress and I am left with this global and public plea for you to take the lead in Christs name and begin that dialogue and communication.

    I look forward to being a participant in that process and to taking a role in helping to establish the restoration of dignity and the provision of healing and a sense of justice to all those affected by these atrocities.

    with regards

    John A Brown

    john@mybrokensociety.com

    Online reference http://www.mybrokensociety.com/index.php…

  6. A depressing article but, sadly, not shocking.

    A suggestion about using black bars in the print edition: if your intent was truly to protect the identity of the children, next time delete the space beneath before you add the black bar as a layer. The process the Stranger uses isn’t truly opaque.

  8. And primarily line the pockets of plaintiff’s lawyers. Wall is a grandstanding leech. His condescending referral to Fr. Sundborg as “Stevie” and his adolescent dramatization of his being a “cleaner” belie his for-profit efforts to gloss over his own failure as a priest.

  9. And line the pockets of plaintiff’s lawyers. Wall is a grandstanding leech. His condescending referral to Fr.Sunborg as “Stevie” and his adolescent characterization of himself as “a cleaner” belie his for-profit efforts to gloss over his own failure as a priest.

  12. The described conduct may seem like BS to some, however, not to victims. My experiences at Catholic boarding schools is similar. These clergy are truly perverted, cruel, sadistic and vindictive. Catholicism is a twisted criminal organization that has a history of suppressing knowledge, education and civilization’s advancement. It is estimated by some that without the church, we may have been able to land on the moon in the late 13th century and that man would be in complete control of his destiny by now.

  13. Organized religion is just a cover for greedy heinous individuals looking for cover to gain power, money, and ability to commit crime undetected.
    This sickens me so much.
    If there is a god out there, he/she needs to make a reservation in hell for these individuals.
    But, I rather see them suffer in this life time if that is possible.

  15. Kip Schoning, it would seem that you have been abandoned by “Mr. Dictionary”. And, sorry if the truth hurts, “KIP”. In the past 7 years, it has been widely reported that priests, with GOD on their lips, not only raped and sodomized children, but also used religious oils and articles as sex toys. One priest even had victims urinate in his mouth. I know these things seem incomprehensible in a civilized, sane society, but they are true and they did happen. And don’t beat that dead horse about how this happens in other religions. Our Ordained/Anointed were supposed to be held to a higher standard. We’re the only religion that claims their priests are the Anointed Representatives of Christ on Earth. Well, Jesus promised HIS Apostles that HE would make them, “Fishers of Men”; Not Rapers of Children. The Faithful are going to have to come to grips with these TRUTHS, if the Roman Catholic Church is to survive; and the church will not survive until there is change.

  16. An amazing story. Thank you for enduring the difficult task of digesting the details.

    As a practical matter, I like that your article allowed the plaintiffs’ legal team to expose the evidence they’d amassed over years of investigation and discovery. I suppose highlighting these allegations puts more pressure on the defendants to settle as the suits roll in, but the article itself is a real public service.

    With newspapers’ declining ability to fund the kind of months-long investigations articles like these usually require, it’s a tiny ray of hope to believe we might learn about big problems at least occasionally. Private lawyers like Poole who fund their own years of evidence-gathering can sometimes pass the information on to the public like this in a way that doesn’t compromise their clients’ claims.

  20. War Tactics Should Be Applied to Abusers and to Those Who Offered Protection
    By Mike Ference

    Every day brings new evidence that we no longer live in a civilized and principled society. The worst part, it usually concerns another case of sexual misconduct involving a Catholic priest, young children and a church hierarchy that helped to cover up the case.

    The recently unveiled federal grand jury investigation into the Los Angeles Archdiocese and it’s leader, Cardinal Mahony clearly suggests that a regime change should have been made long ago.

    To be sure, media pressure and public outrage and a billion dollars in pr fees, legal fees and settlements have inspired displays of contrition from Mahony But as more and more cases of abuse — and cover-up — come to light, one begins to wonder whether Mahony should be considered any more trustworthy than, say, Saddam Hussein.

    So — what should be done if the grand jury finds Mahony to be just another member of the hierarchy more concerned with protecting dysfunctional sex freaks than innocent children? Given the level of wreckage and anguish caused in the lives of so many people, it seems appropriate to look to the war on terror for a model strategy.

    A first prong of attack might involve a Special Forces unit made up of highly skilled and trained military personnel capable of tracking down and obtaining confessions from any current or former priests accused of acts of sexual abuse against children. If rights are violated, if military personnel sometimes go a little too far, so be it. The Catholic Church had ample opportunity to fess up and repent. Those incapable of civilized behavior shouldn’t expect the rights and privileges of civilization.

    A deck of cards can be created to help identify hard-to-find priests as well as the disgraceful church leaders who permitted, and in essence, condoned the sexual abuse of young children. Photos of the most deviant and reprehensible church officials accompanied by a list of their offenses will encourage us all to do our patriotic duty in helping the authorities track down suspected priest-terrorists or at least be able to identify the culprits as they come and go freely because their sins where covered up and the time to criminally prosecute has expired.

    Another option would be to divide the nation into territories. A color-code warning system would be established, alerting parents about abusive priests being transferred into their respective regions. Depending on the designated color for a particular region, parents would know whether their children should serve at Mass, go on field trips, or even attend Catholic school that day.

    To aid this unique war on terror, a pool of money should be collected, not involuntarily from taxpayers, but voluntarily from those decent human beings who believe crimes committed against our children are sins that God takes very seriously. Some of the funds raised could then be turned into outrageously tempting reward sums for information leading to the capture of our targeted criminals. Once the rogue clerics have been imprisoned and forced to talk, I recommend that their confessions be given to someone like Steven Spielberg or George Romero. Hollywood writers and producers could create a blockbuster movie like Roots or Schindler’s List to serve as a bitter reminder that these crimes should never again be permitted to occur. Tom Savini could be hired to recreate the horror on the faces of child actors chosen to play parts.

    Proceeds from the movie could go to victims of abuse and their families. And no matter how old the crime, compensation would be available. There should be no statute of limitations when the rights of children have been violated by those who lived much of their adult lives perched on a pedestal heightened by the trust of innocent and vulnerable believers. In fact, I would extend compensation to the second and perhaps even third generation of sufferers. It would certainly include siblings denied the experience of growing up with a brother or sister untraumatized by such abuse. And since crimes of abuse tend to echo, it would extend to the victims of the victims as well.

    If all else fails, is it any less rational to declare war on the Catholic Church as part of a war on child abuse than it was to declare war on Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al-Qaeda and apparently had no weapons of mass destruction) as part of a war on terror? How many innocent children have been verifiably lost to this menace — and how many more will be lost if we don’t make a preemptive strike?

    As horrific as sexual abuse by priests may be, the perpetrators might merit a more forgiving place if only their superiors had the courage to do the right thing. For a few, counseling and close supervision might have been enough to prevent future abuses. Others clearly required something more intensive — a mental hospital or a prison.

    But repeated abuse, as well as willfully hiding the crimes and the criminals — as far as I can see, this brings us much closer to the realm of mortal sin. And the sinners include not just the church hierarchy, but also attorneys who ill-advised parents not to buck the system and take on the Catholic Church, or may even have provided inside information to thwart legitimate cases against the church, law enforcement officials who may have thought it best to warn church officials of pending investigations, and janitors, housekeepers, teachers, and employees of the Catholic Church who kept silent because of concerns about a paycheck, a 401K, a pension, or a fear of standing up to church authorities. God has a place for everyone — and if you abuse children or protect the abusers of children, we can only hope that your place is called hell.

  25. tomasyalba wrote:
    “Private lawyers like Poole…”

    James Poole is allegedly one of the worst offenders, not a private lawyer.

  27. If you are catholic, you are livestock, sheep of a malevolent shepherd and the shepherds he “hires” to be his minions through the priesthood of RCC Inc. The sheep/shepherd metaphor is interesting because it *seems* to convey something good and positive, but the true relationship of the shepherd to the sheep is – fleece ’em (deprive them of all their resources), screw ’em (use them for sex and other pleasures), kill ’em (slaughter them or sell them to be slaughtered, destroying every one), and eat ’em (consume their flesh, allow others to do so). Rams not wanted for reproduction have a band put around their bits until they turn black and fall off. Shepherds only “care* about their sheep long enough to keep them alive to take to market to sell for food. That catholics and other christians want to make themselves into livestock for their god is appalling and disgusting. That’s even lower than being a slave.

    What catholics and christians don’t know also is that their central myth *begins* with the ****rape**** of a little girl who had been pimped by her parents to work as a temple “dove”, a servant who was there to provide more services than just cleaning and dusting – her function was to be a temple prostitute as was the function of *all* children in religious temples in that part of the world at the time (not unusual at all). Even if sex wasn’t her primary job, don’t think that pedophiles of the day weren’t in those temples taking full advantage of children that were given to those temples in order to enrich their parents financially, religiously, and socially. Thing is, the story has been prettied up with birdies, angels, and bright lights – and a rape victim who is said to have said, “What? God raped me? And now I’m going to bear God’s child? How wonderful!” So, pedophilia is not only something promoted throughout the old testament, but it’s something the bible god did to make a clone of himself on earth to cure a non-existent disease, and his minions thereafter have felt the holy obligation to emulate this god at every opportunity and rape every child available that has been pimped by their parents through baptism – a turning over of ownership to RCC Inc to do with their children as RCC Inc chooses. The conspiracy has existed since the time of Abraham, it has never stopped, and it never will.

    All of this evil disguised as goodness and holiness must be stopped for the good of all children and vulnerable adults. It starts by as many people leaving as possible. It starts by not putting a penny in collection baskets any more.

    It stops by prosecuting abusers and their protectors to the fullest extent of the law.

  28. How can ANYONE on this planet accept ANY RELIGION or GOVERNMENT that does these deeds? In U.S. there is supposed to be SEPERATION of CHURCH and STATE, yet President and Pope make agreement to let Churches protect PEDOPHILES (and who knows what other CRIMINALS!!)! Sounds to me like EVERYONE knows that IT IS ALL A SHAM except the LOST SOULS that have been CONNED FOR CENTURIES to GIVE,GIVE,GIVE to get to a HEAVEN that THE CHURCH knows DOES NOT EXIST!! If there is a GOD – Why would HE allow this to happen for so many centuries? Makes a person WONDER !!

  32. organized religion is a terrible thing.taking advantage of the weak is their specialty. in one way or another they prey on people. weather it is the young starving children in this article or the starving old people that give the church the money they should be using for necessities. it saddens me to think that so many people have fallen for the biggest scam the world has ever known.

  33. This story is timely – and more evidence that Jews in media manipulate news to meet their various wars on interest groups.

    Let’s see some stories about pedophile Rabbis…. ain’t gonna happen.

    Just a wake up call to you dumb goy who think news is fair and balanced… it’s not.

    It’s JEWISH>

  34. Catholic priests are fucking disgusting. How can anyone even consider being Catholic after reading this crap. I feel dirty just reading this. These priests are complete failures as human beings. Stop worshiping these degenerates. Catholicism is a lie anyway- grow up and act like adults. stop believing the fairytale- and these priests will have no jobs. Some of my family is catholic- and I still think you’re all idiots. WAKE UP dumbass catholics.

  35. Well, to be fair, a bunch of Catholic priests are disgusting, but, honestly, not all. I was Catholic when I was little and I loved all my priests. One of them I know was gay, not a pedophile, and I don’t know about the others. The ones I remember were all really awesome. Anyway, one of my priests knew there was a pedophile priest in a nearby church. He talked with his superior to get the police involved. He eventually called the police himself, and I never saw the brave priest again. Not all of them are assholes, and not every Catholic is a brainless schmuck. This article broke my heart. I hope something can be done, and, honestly, ordaining women and allowing married people would certainly help. Why? Those people are less likely to be pedos. Why can’t the Church just kill the pedophile priests? They seem to be able to get away with everything else.

  36. Thanks for the close reading candylittlegirl!

    Now this morning I gotta say this is the first Stranger comments thread to mash up Foucault’s Pendulum with a “priest and a rabbi” joke.

  38. Any more information about Father Boly? Is that the same person who was the head of Saint Joe’s in Seattle for so many years? If so, I’m feeling a little sicker than I already was…

  39. to helprvictimsnot$$$$lawyers
    Helping the victims is important, but your effort leaves the offenders and those who support them without punishment, consequence, or accountability. $$$$ is the only language these people seem to understand.

    Signed: one of the victims mentioned in the article above

  40. Or they could allow priests to marry…..

    Plenty of pedophiles are married men, unfortunately.

    As Dan’s youth pastor series shows, pedophiles seek jobs that give them authority over children.

  41. another story not picked up by most media was that 13 international grandmother went to italy and sent a paper asking the current pope to recind the papal bulls of the late 1400s that largely to blame the on slaught of natives in the americas with the start of the spanish conuest of the middle americas, and shortly thereafter, everyone with power followed.

  42. gus: i’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the most plausible reason why you don’t see articles on pedophile rabbis is because it’s not a widespread issue like it is for the catholic church. likely because rabbis are allowed to marry instead of festering in a fantasyland of temptation that inevitably leads to abuse. clergy abuse is a real and tragic problem, not a paranoid, perceived war on interest groups by jews. haven’t you figured out that jews aren’t responsible for everything wrong with the world, including the self-induced downfalls of other religions?

  43. I’m appalled that even the churches have their own conspiracies and are actually paying for their own selfish members’ mistakes by paying off affected families with money that is supposed to go towards building a greater church and place of worship.

  44. I don’t give a shit if “some” priests are great. They believe in, and perpetuate, a LIE. Christianity lost its path hundreds of years ago. All that exists now of true “christians” is a joke. And Catholics are a complete waste of space. The bible is a fairytale. Sorry if you people are too weak to give up your “faith”. You’re just brainwashed and you make me sick. Stop making up excuses for your immaturity and weakness. Take some responsibility for your “leaders” or better yet- stop being a Christian. And most of all- QUIT PUTTING YOUR CHILDREN IN POSITIONS WHERE THEY CAN BE ABUSED. Just because your a pathetic “adult” that needs to believe in this crap to be strong enough to live your lives- doesn’t mean your children deserve to be potentially hurt.

    But you’ll just blow me off and go suck some more fluoride. This is a nation of adult children.

  45. hm…gus…i actually heard a story on NPR about pedophile rabbis in new york’s ultra-orthodox jewish community a couple days ago.

    i guess no group is exempt.

    imho a big part of the blame lies not on the content of the catholic beliefs but in the way the power structure is set up. any time the power is held in the hands of a few men, you are going to have trouble b/c they are going to want to hush up anything that would disrupt their power structure.

    it is so sad that these children were allowed to suffer because those in charge wanted to save face.

  46. May the offenders find themselves in a special kind of hell. May the survivors find peace. I lived in New England when the scandal broke out there. I lived in the next town over from one of the “retreat” camps for the Boston area churches. It was still up and running last time I checked. Nothing like hearing family friends talk about father ‘so and so’ and his odd behaviours.

  47. The difficulties of keeping secrets in a post-Internet world makes for interesting headlines indeed. I suppose a comment is warranted. I am not, nor have I ever been, a Catholic, but I do attend Seattle University, and I have been receiving press releases from Father Sullivan on a fairly regular basis.

    I know there are many Catholic priests out there who are horrible people and who have committed terrible acts. There are around 500,000 members of the Catholic priesthood around the world. In a population sample that large, a given amount of pedophiles is sure to occur; other factors, certainly including celibacy, likely account for a higher than statistically average occurrence.

    To complicate the problem, the church does have the largest religious infrastructure and coffers in the world; it is, or at least has been, more than capable of smoothing over problems to protect its image and work.

    The abuses imposed on these and other victims are heinous and unforgivable, and should not be smoothed over by the church, or any other religion or organization. These men are mentally ill criminals, who deserve treatment for their diseases and punishment for their crimes, to the same extent that would be faced by a member of the laity.

    With that said, I hesitate to wholly condemn the church. The Holy See has been remarkably negligent, this is true. The church, however, is the charge of the See, not the sum of it. The church is composed of millions of people who have chosen, at various levels of conformity and adherence to doctrine, to believe in and participate in something they believe can bring them peace, hope, and healing.

    Let us condemn the perpetrators of these crimes. Let us condemn those who allowed the crimes to continue. Condemn the systems that permit things to be swept under the rug or shuffled somewhere ‘safer’. Let us hope and pray that these poor victims may find peace and healing, and let us actively work with them to accomplish that. Let us change these truths rather than simply be outraged at them.

    A broad condemnation of the church, however, hurts more people than it helps. Mother Teresa, St. Francis of Assi, and countless others who did and do incalculable amounts of good in this world counted and count themselves as members of the church. Many people I know view their lives as being richer for being Catholic, and I am glad for them.

    Tragedies like these can and do occur anywhere. As a Jew, I can say that the mention in a previous comment of Hasidic abuse is sadly familiar. Indeed, the nature of cloistered religious communities of all types lends itself to this type of abuse. The Catholic church is especially vulnerable due to its size, resources, and history. This is something people of all walks of life need to be vigilant about.

    I hope that justice is meted out to those responsible, and I hope that all sides can find peace and healing. If you are a victim of these crimes, or those like them, my prayers are with you.

    I hope this discussion, on this page and across the world, can generate more than mere vitriol and trolling. I hope.

  48. Hey Kip-
    You have never lived with Native American children, or in Alaska- that’s obvious from your scathing rebuke. I can DEFINITELY see this happening with those kids in these isolated places. Having gone to elementary school on Tulalip’s res, I know that native american kids are different by culture, environment and parenting. Add to that complete village isolation, all-powerful priests with pedophilic ‘needs’ and this is exactly what you get.
    Shut the f**k up about issues you know nothing about.
    As for the Catholic church- I hope Benedict and his host of pervs burn in their Hell for eternity. SICK, SICK, SICK.

  49. Logos,

    Some people honestly believe that organized religion should be abolished. I think that organized religion has done more good than harm, but I think I understand why some people think otherwise.

    I was googling for a Bible verse that I couldn’t quite remember when I came across a webpage that I think is perfect as a comment for this article. It is titled “The Christian Deists: Christians Without Churches:”
    http://www.onr.com/user/bejo/withoutchur…

  50. For those of you bringing up the tired old saw about victims just being after money, keep in mind that for every dollar a victim receives, RCC Inc spends another dollar paying high priced lawyers to work to destroy the plaintiffs *by any means necessary* (additional rapes on top of rapes by predopriests) and to high powered PR firms used to publicly discredit victims, their advocacy groups, and anyone who speaks out for abuse survivors (the poster trashing Patrick Wall is probably a spokeshole from a PR firm). Lawyers who take the cases of abuse victims are paid *on contingency* – for those too ignorant to know, this means that the lawyer must make sure he has a *very good* case because if he loses, he gets exactly NOTHING for all of his time and billable hours, as most survivors are too poor to pay the hourly fee that the dioceses have no problem coughing up for *their* $500-1000/hour lawyers that they use (and even have on continuous retainer). A lawyer for survivors only gets 1/3 of the settlement IF THEY WIN (which is fair considering billable hours used to take the case – we got more than $2000 in services from a lawyer who took a worker’s comp case, which was his 1/3, and it was a bargain for what we got in return). So, if $2 billion has been paid out to survivors (public estimate), then ***at least $2 billion*** has been paid by RCC Inc to lawyers and PR firms and their spokesholes to keep the truth that they’re an organized criminal child rape cult *COVERED UP*. BTW, RCC Inc employs PR firms such as those that tried to spin the crimes of Enron and Arthur Andersen, among others. It isn’t the survivors and their lawyers making tons of money, it’s the lawyers and PR spokesholes who are making all the money.

    BTW, there are *insurance companies* suing RCC Inc for fraud regarding their anti-abuse insurance because bishops *knew* they had abuse problems when they were getting insurance and LIED to the insurance companies that there was no abuse and that they’d obey the law in reporting it. They did neither, so now insurance companies are against RCC because they’re losing money by insuring them. There’s some evidence that corporations are suing RCC Inc, not just abuse survivors.

    For details on all kinds of clergy abuse, including christian ministers and rabbis, check out Bishop Accountability’s Abuse Tracker page for credible mainstream media news (including from RCC sources) on the ongoing abuse issue. It hasn’t stopped – it never will. Not when you have a pope who rehabilitates the antisemitic SSPX and its bishops and priests (at least three of which have made *public* statements denying the holocaust) and appoints a bishop in Austria who said Hurricane Katrina was punishment for gay-positive New Orleans and because NOLA has the fanciest brothels and most beautiful prostitutes, among his other idiotic moves, like saying Maciel didn’t abuse anyone or do anything wrong and protecting him.

    Note to self and everyone: religion freaky. It certainly isn’t a friend to Native American people, who have all but been genocided by the “kind” ministrations of christian churches.

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