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.” 
This story has been updated since it was originally published, and a photo caption has been corrected to properly identify Father George Endal.
Very well researched article on how the Alaskan Natives were sacrificed. The article could have been more complete if it had drawn the global connections on how the Catholic Church in many countries has allowed its sex offenders free reign amongst populations who were living in poverty. In Canada a parellel situation was happening with our First Nations people on reserves across the country.
It would appear that this organization responds only to the loss of the almighty dollars in its coffers. The data is in for all who are strong enough to stomach it – this church is morally bankrupt and the average Catholic in churches around the world are too brainwashed to put their religion back on a strong moral footing. Until they do – consider doing what is necessary – withholding funds and continued lawsuits.
Kip – I find your outrageous comments laughable. Look at the face of that girl, she is not lying.
There is only one question you need to answer “KIP” – With all the damage and the millions paid they should come clean and get this behind them. They don’t -why.
I give you the answer – its worse than they want everyone to know.
This is sick! I wouldn’t have been able to cope with all of this, if i were one of the victims. I pray that these women get through this. I wonder if they will ever trust a religious leader again, i hope so. Suprised no. Mortified, yes.
How unique, a homosexual periodical attacking the Catholic Church.
Perhaps you boys and girls should write about your LGBT comrades and clean your own house first:
The Journal of Homosexuality recently published a special double-issue entitled, “Male Intergenerational Intimacy,” containing many articles portraying sex between men and minor boys as loving relationships. One article said parents should look upon the pedophile who loves their son “not as a rival or competitor, not as a theft of their property, but as a partner in the boy’s upbringing, someone to be welcomed into their home.”
In 1995 the homosexual magazine “Guide” said, “We can be proud that the gay movement has been home to the few voices who have had the courage to say out loud that children are naturally sexual” and “deserve the right to sexual expression with whoever they choose. …” The article went on to say: “Instead of fearing being labeled pedophiles, we must proudly proclaim that sex is good, including children’s sexuality … we must do it for the children’s sake.”
Larry Kramer, the founder of ACT-UP, a noted homosexual activist group, wrote in his book, “Report from the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist”: “In those instances where children do have sex with their homosexual elders, be they teachers or anyone else, I submit that often, very often, the child desires the activity, and perhaps even solicits it.”
In a study of advertisements in the influential homosexual newspaper, The Advocate, Reisman found ads for a “Penetrable Boy Doll … available in three provocative positions. She also found that the number of erotic boy images in each issue of The Advocate averaged 14.
Homosexual newspapers and travel publications advertise prominently for countries where boy prostitution is heavy, such as Burma, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
If you going to mock the Catholic Church, at least show pictures of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence mocking the nuns that have given their life to Christ.
Candylittlegirl,
Of course many people believe organized religions should be abolished or otherwise dispersed. People believe many things should be abolished, or diminished, or expanded, depending on their perception of them; this is their right. Personally, I’ve never found what I need in organized religion, but clearly many people have.
I think many of these organizations or movements warrant a serious reevaluation of some of their basic frameworks (an issue that becomes a secular one as soon as crimes such as these are committed). But I’m more interested in hearing a considered debate among secular and religious leaders as to the roots of these issues (including, perhaps, the existence of organized religions in the first place) than I am in hearing yet another “LOL STUPID CHRISTIAN SHEEPLE REDNECKS” type of comment, or in listening to the frankly overbearing smugness of many vocal anti-theist leaders such as Hitchens or Dawkins. Many of the smartest people I’ve known have been deeply religious, while the converse holds true as well. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Measured and thoughtful debate is the answer here. The reduction of it to staple “Dumb rapist Christians/godless heathen intelligentsia” lines makes progress, of any kind, impossible. Worse, it takes the debate dangerously off-topic: finding and solving the root causes here will be the only way to prevent such tragedies in the future.
aSeattleConservative, and others who have written a response to this article pointing fingers elsewhere, why do you do that?
I absolutely agree that the Catholic church is not the only host for pedophiles in the world. We all know that… so my question to you is this: Do you not think shining a spotlight on a problem of this size within a very powerful organization is important?
Pedophilia and abuse within the catholic church is happening… has been happening for as long as there has been the power and position to abuse, I’m sure. So why are you trying to distract from this problem, why the negativity toward the Stranger for speaking out in this way?
What surprises me here is that everyone who reads this article can’t simply agree that what happened to those children is horrible, that those responsible need to be held accountable, and that changes need to be made to ensure that the same will be prevented from happening in the future whenever possible. Is that so hard to agree on?
Why do we all hold onto our reactive natures in these instances? Conservative vs. liberal, non-Christian vs. Christian… At the end of the day, am I wrong in thinking that there should be *some* things that we can agree on? Unless you simply enjoy evil, and want to perpetuate it, why not lend your support to something that is trying to address an issue that needs addressing? Even if the venue (in this case the Stranger) is one that you may have significant differences of opinion with in general, can’t you simply focus on what *is* important?
I don’t understand why so many people are so focused on our differences of opinion. I think it only detracts from our ability to successfully deal with problems like this one when we squabble over how we don’t agree.
Do you, or do you not, think pedophilia and child abuse is wrong? If you do… then do something positive about it. Didn’t we all learn in kindergarten that “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all?” Well, I would change that to, “If you don’t have anything helpful to say, don’t say anything at all.” Sometimes what we have to say isn’t nice, it’s necessary, but if it’s not going to help improve the situation at hand, then perhaps you should reevaluate your reasons for speaking out.
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it seems to me that no one is saying that child abuse (sexual or otherwise) is only a problem within the Catholic church. They’re just saying that it is a significant problem that is being dealt with poorly if at all, and they’re trying to help others wake up and realize just how significant it is.
The Catholic Church doesn’t need your support on this issue… what it needs is to know that you do *not* support it on this issue. If you’re catholic and you get a lot from your faith, of course this will be difficult to read about for you. But try to realize and acknowledge the difference between supporting your faith (which is absolutely understandable) and supporting a specific portion of your church that is clearly broken and needs fixing. And if you happen to be Christian, then it should be all the more clear to you that it is okay to criticize those abuses of power, it is okay (even necessary) to acknowledge them as being such. According to your bible, didn’t Jesus himself fight against the power structure of his own day? Isn’t that why he was crucified? If you’re Catholic and you want to be Christ-like, then stop blinding yourself to problems within your own “home,” stand up for what is right, and do something to change it, to make it better.
Why should’nt Wall call him Stevie, the man does’nt deserve respect. If he did not know this was going on then what was he doing in that position? Ignorance is not a good excuse. Time to go down in the basement of the Vatican and cough up some of the booty that has acculumated over the centuries.
Thank you, BeReasonable.
I think my wordiness on this article (which is not a general habit of mine online) is largely because my experience with the Jesuits has been quite positive. I go to a Jesuit school. My father is a professor here, and I have had long interactions with the Fathers of the S.J., whom I’ve generally found to be thoughtful, intelligent men deeply involved in their faith and their world. Though the abuses are terrible on their own, I think I’m more horrified by them then if they had been perpetrated by, for example, Benedictines or imams. It feels a little morally repugnant to say that, but it’s true. It saddens me that the Jesuits, who have the most stringent and restricted entrance requirements in the priesthood (14 years as a novice is common) could have admitted and then tolerated these men. Though no one is permitted these atrocities, the Society of Jesus should be better than this.
This is a sad, sad story and, as with anything having to do with pedophiles, disgusting and infuriating. I have no sympathy for priests who abused children, and even less for any of their superiors who knew (or know) about it and did nothing. They should not only be dismissed from their duties but prosecuted and jailed. However, there are hundreds of millions (close to 1 billion) Catholics in the world, and thousands of priests and nuns (and many, many more lay ministers) who do selfless work serving the poor, the hungry, the sick, and the vulnerable all over the world. I’ve known many of them personally. They get no attention because it’s not flashy and doesn’t make headlines or sell newspapers. Again, this doesn’t and shouldn’t in any way excuse the behavior of pedophiles or those who protect them…absolutely not. However, some perspective is also necessary, and is sadly missing from many of these comments.
I nominate myself as “father” slayer. Any seconds? It will cost a whole dime. All I need is a list… Motive comes forth from being molested as a child and knowing the pain, shame and confusion that NEVER goes away. I am not ashamed to feel or express my utter hatred and contempt for these disgusting, vile beasts who perform horrendous acts on children (or anyone for that matter.) Their last breath should come while looking through bloodied eyes at the rusty shovel coming down once more, as they are simultaneously sodomized by a broken wine bottle.
Sorry. Reading this article stirs up some repressed anger and hostility. My sentiments, sorrow and love goes out to all the victims…
p.s. hmmm. comments arguing anything against this article have got to make you seriously wonder… “aSeattleConservative” just what the hell is your arguement anyway? That this makes it okay? You would’nt happen to be a “father” would you?
Some points.
Alaska was divided into districts in the late 19th century where missionaries of different religions would establish schools on behalf of the Bureau of Education and Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Catholics were given the swampy district between the mouths of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Northwest Alaska went to the Swedish Evangelical Brotherhood, Southeast to the Presbyterians, and so on. The Russian Orthodox church was not given a district; it was already present and once the Russians left, it was the only defense for Native people from the newcomer churches, which were considered blasphemous in the eyes of Orthodoxy, the one true church and protector of the faith since Council of Nicaea (iirc).
The Catholics were given this district because it was swampy, filled with mosquitoes and biting insects, spread out over a vast area of wet tundra and riverine sloughs that were hard to get through in summer and winter. Reports of the Bureau of Education are available in Google Books, and accounts of missionaries are online at Library of Congress as well.
AS such, the priest or missionary was often pressed into service as an official representative of the government, as postmaster, judge, sheriff, doctor and translator. Often they were the only people available to translate Yup’ik to English, French, and other languages. In some cases, sexual abuse was perpetrated by whites on Natives and opposed by the Russian Orthodox church, but no other church seemed to oppose it-they all preferred to force marriage onto those caught abusing young girls (George Palmer in fact beat a Russian Priest for opposing his cohabiting with a 12 year old Native girl, almost causing an uprising against the trader).
Also, the Great Death was in 1900-1904 in the Kuskokwim River region as documented by Rev. Henry Kilbuck, who was taking the census in 1900. Robert Fortuine, MD, has written a book and several articles about the devastation of the diseases that arrived in Alaska as a result of the Gold Rush, which included a huge variety of ailments including tropical diseases from crossing Panama (Yellow Fever) as well as things we take for granted today as minor, such as whooping cough, mumps, measles, and chicken pox. Death rates were incredibly high as waves of Gold Rush travelers passed through Native Villages and spread diseases around that the locals had no resistance to. Once one disease was going, another would afflict the survivors and get passed on to the still sick. It was a holocaust.
The Catholic Church has a lot to atone for in this case. I am disgusted but not shocked by aSeattleConservative and Kip, who in the one case demonstrate why Conservatives are simply sad, perverse and defective people and the second an example of sociopathic conditioning. Alaska’s Native People, like Natives everywhere, have suffered regrettably thanks to the influx of white people from Europe, from the military to the citizens to the priests and the government. It’s time to right some wrongs if we can.
Bashful No Longer: Oswalt, Wendell
Chills and Fever: Fortuine, Robert
and everything by Ann Fienup-Riordan.
Before contact, native people had their own societies. Men, women, elders raised and protected the children together. Taught them skills they’d need when they came of age. Taught them the “rules or laws” of each group in order that they’d become productive members of that society. Taught to rely on each other for survival.
After Contact, they have broken families, acoholism, drug addition, high suicide rates, etc.
“Such progress!”
@help4victimsnot$$$$4lawyers:
Yeah, those grandstanding lawyers are SO much worse than priests who abuse their power while holding themselves up as paragons of the correct way to live.
You seem to take it all very personally. Are you a priest or monk yourself, or just a brainwashed Catholic?
Sadly, the same abuse of native peoples by religious and educational authorities has occurred right across North America; there is a long history of this at residential schools in Canada as well. The damage will take generations to set right. My heart goes out to the victims and their families; speaking out is the first step in healing this great wrong.
Years ago (in 1979), when I went through treatment for alcoholism at a facility for Native people in Seattle, I witnessed something that still deeply haunts me to this day should I think about it.
As a part of the addictions therapy at this facility, a group of trauma specialists engaged in an exercise that mentally and emotionally caused victims of sexual trauma to “re-live” their experiences. One of the program’s staff members, who was Alaskan Native, volunteered for this exercise. He was “walked through” his experiences of both sexual and physical abuse at the hands of clergy members when he was a boy growing up in Alaska. As the therapists guided this man (who had a very kind, gentle affect) through his trauma, the man suddenly became so enraged that he had to be restrained by six big men who were on the program’s staff. This poor fellow was again living through what had happened to him in Alaska, and he was horribly transformed from a calm, rational person into a raging, wounded and angry beast that was literally foaming at the mouth. At one point, I actually thought that his head was going to explode.
As a Native American, but not Alaskan, I have heard stories all my life (I am close to 60 now) about the terrible abuses that were meted out to people from my own tribe in South Dakota (Pine Ridge Agency), as well as almost all other tribes in the U.S. that had been exposed to missionaries and their assorted ilk over the years.
The incident I witnessed in Seattle that icy day long ago shall never be forgotten as it was the greatest display of human rage I have ever known.
This is just a good, sad story.
this makes my blood boil! and my brain cry in search of answers! How? and Why? then i guess the only other thing i’d like to know is what they plan on doing to eliminate this bologna! the sooner the better!
Thank you to Melvin for sharing that very sad yet educational story. It reminded me of a letter I read in the Seattle Times fifteen years ago, a letter I also found very educational:
Neal Summers And Darrell Cloud — Releasing Bottled-Up Rage
Some students, teachers and readers of The Times express difficulty comprehending how a long-term victim of childhood sexual abuse could be impelled by rage to kill his abuser.
I’m a state certified mental health counselor. For over 40 years I have worked with victims of childhood sexual abuse: teenagers, women and men. I have encountered murderous rage in several instances, and have worked with both a teenager in Seattle and a woman from Alaska who did attempt murder. The teenager caused serious injury but not death. The woman did kill with an ax. I worked with a client who had been sexually abused by her father for years, and then discovered that he had also sexually abused her daughter. When she got off work each day she sat in her car outside her father’s house with a shotgun, ready to shoot to kill the instant he stepped out. Fortunately, she was able to talk out her rage before she got the father in her gun sight.
I gave three workshops for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse in a small town in Washington state. At the conclusion of the third, a woman who had not spoken throughout the workshops asked if she could walk me to my car. Alone with me she quietly said, “I want you to know that I have taken the loaded gun out of my purse. I’ve carried it for a long time.”
For those who can’t talk, can’t get access to a therapist, the bottled-up rage becomes so intense that the victim is likely to attempt either suicide or murder.
Had Darrell Cloud gone to a therapist the murder of Neal Summers could have been averted. However, the action did clarify what I’m sure many students and probably others knew and kept secret: childhood sexual abuse.
Vera Gallagher, Seattle
Copyright (c) 1994 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.c…
Excellent article! Very well researched and written. This is such an important topic, I really appreciate you taking the time to write it.
There is more here than meets the eye. When a church denomination becomes so big that they can hide their own crimes from the public gives them the opportunity to continue in these crimes for decades, then that becomes the real problem. The church has become to powerful for anyone to stop them from these crimes which they sweep under the carpet (under cover), then release them on unsuspecting victims is ungodly. And yet the Pope claims that his church is the one true church, knowing what kind of crimes its hiding. Its ungodly is what it is. The Lord is the judge they will have to face, and in that time he will not be so forgiving. Count on it.
Brendan,
Why are there so many unsourced quotes in your article?
Some details strain credulity–the person who had six cousins commit suicide?
I don’t doubt the basic premise of your article; however, it contains elements of the sort of hysteria found in cases where it turns out that nothing untoward has happened–instead, suggestible children were manipulated into making up stories.
Perhaps you can post some notes sourcing the unattributed quotes in your article. I would bet that many of them come from the lawyers and investigators fighting the church, which makes the quotes much less damning.
The irony is in how the Church condemns “unnatural” acts. Celibacy is not only unnatural, but harmful, and as we see here.. can lead to sexual deviancy. Priests are always around children, their sexual impulses will manifest themselves one way or another.. just imagine the sheer number of pedophile priests that simply haven’t done anything and haven’t been exposed.
The reality is: men need to HAVE SEX, it’s inherent to us, so for God’s sake or anyone else’s do it with a woman.
May all the molesters burn in hell!!!!!!!
I couldn’t read the whole article but I’d like to have a hour with a rapist priest,a straight razor, and a bag of rock salt….
Can we just jump to the part where the money will make everything ok?
incinerate
It was hard to read, but I know it must have been much harder to write. Well done, Mr. Kiley. The complicity, and they are all complicit, of the Church hierarchy in covering up these and countless other abuses is shameful and sinful. It breaks my heart to think that the church I happily grew up in was such a hellish experience for others. I would rather that church cease to exist than another child be victimized by sick and evil men posing as servants of God.
I had thought that the Jesuit church, benedictine groups, and catholic groups were all separate from one another. At least, they didn’t go together when I was in Catholic School. Can someone fact check this point?
To all attacking organized religion in this: most people and priests aren’t like this. As with many cases, the minority is the loudest. Most Muslims are not terrorists, but still many people associate them with the Muslim religion.
Things like this rarely happen, making this an even bigger deal when it does. Sexual harassment and rape is no small matter, and no, the leaders in the church didn’t handle it right at all. But what are people supposed to do? Abandon their beliefs all because of a few fuck-ups?
As a Catholic, I feel EXTREMELY sorry for the injustice that these victims felt at the hand of the church and many people, but the church as a whole is not bad, and they do many things for the community.
A few bad apples do not ruin the bunch.
petite_nombre wrote:
“Most Muslims are not terrorists, but still many people associate them with the Muslim religion.”
Perhaps you meant:
“It is a certain fact that not all Muslims are terrorists, but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are Muslims.”
–Abdel Rahman al-Rashed
in response to candylittlegirl:
not even half of all child molesters are catholic, most are regular people.
“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.”
This is just bullshit. It’s obviously made up. Come on! If it was in “I, Anon”, eveyone would be saying BULLSHIT!
your a fuckin piece of shit
I know it would appear that I am biased in favor of the plaintiffs, being an Alaskan Native myself, but I heartily dispute the previous comment calling a pastor’s activity with his students Bull. If you spent one day in an Alaskan village, you would see that most of those people have encountered such pain and dysfunction in their lives at the hand of the Jesuits and other churches, you would know that what they allege is the truth. Substance abuse as a result of broken family life is rampant, as are birth defects; as people in the village drink or do drugs and then procreate, furthering this vicious cycle of despair. My grandfather suffered at the hands of the church–it removed him from the arms of his loving parents and put him in boarding school in an effort to “whiten” him. We all still feel a disaffectedness because of that one seemingly well-meaning effort to bring Alaska’s indigenous population “up to par” with white America. Natives have and always will want to continue to live their lives in the traditional way. The Churches easily disrupted that peaceful but separate existence, creating endless despair in the most beautiful place on earth that has cost us all, and not just in taxpayer dollars (therapy, abuse, hospitalization, lawsuits, criminal justice overload, murder).
Pedofiles are EVERYWHERE not just the Catholic church,They are in every religion,income status, poor and rich,schools,daycare,homes, foster and boarding homes,doctors dentists,they have also been protected,shelterd and not exposed by many people of all of the above,is it fair to target only one religion?
I attended Seattle Prep and I swear that Fr. Boly’s (surfer boy)interaction with the woman at the other catholic girls school was total wrong. In fact one Jesuit studing to be a priest at the time left and married a girl from the same school that he and Fr. Boly use to visit. When Boly was at St. Joseph’s in Seattle he even hired some those women to work there. And continued to maintain a relatinship that seemed strange He basicly bancrupted the parish with is lasting building legacy that was not needed. the man went unchecked for years. He is in Oregon on special assignment. I wonder why?
Pedophile priests are only the tip of a great historical iceberg of corruption. But that may now be coming to an end. The very origin of the roman catholic church is coming under question by a new interpretation of the moral teaching of Christ; redefining the character of faith and the nature of the Resurrection. Is Rome about to fall for the second time? Check the link, join the revolution.
http://www.energon.org.uk
This article provide a lot of information about pedophiles and, as a consecuence, most of the time quote or cite comments expressed in some media (legal documents, catholic files, and so on). Where are the sources cited along the article? I think an addendum should be posted for the sake of clarity and professionalism.
Thanks for your attention.
Regarding Fr. Toulouse
He always showed up at Prep track meets, I think now to watch the boys. But nothing has ever been brought up with the fact when Fr. Toulouse died in Calif, there was a 14-16 year old boy, he was traveling with and was from Washington State. I wonder what his stories are?
This is really disturbing. I do believe that the Catholic church probably does cover things and maybe they do use “dumping grounds”. I would like to think that the officials would put the needs of the victims above the offenders. However, since cases like these can be difficult to prove, I’m guessing that there are probably situations in which they don’t have enough evidence to excommunicate offenders. In which case, I can actually believe that Catholic officials might use unsuspecting communities as dumping grounds. Truly appalling.
Rome in going down for the second and last time.
http://www.energon.org.uk
When I hear of stories such as this I can’t help but wonder; what is the difference between a witch and a pedophile?
If memory serves me, this same “religious” organization pursued and punished those who boiled up various animal parts and called out some idiotic verbiage, calling this an effort to save these same people.
It would seem now that people are more learned and sophisticated, there is nothing wrong with assaulting young boys and not being held accountable for screwing up their lives.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have the same issues. There are known pedophiles who are protected by the Watchtower society and are knocking on your doors every Saturday morning. There is a huge story here too if anyone cared to look.
To anyone who has ever worked in healthcare in that part of Alaska finding out about this is kind of a light bulb experience because it only makes sense considering the suicides, mental health problems, and chemical dependency it would generate. There are other types of serial preditors who go to that area. They have serial bullies who work in healtcare rendering the treatment very dysfunctional. Many of the pracitioners are incompetent and have been run off from the lower 48. When native people try to get help they are often met with abuse or incompentence. These serial bullies abuse the good staff until they are rendered ill and leave. This leaves a core of staff that essentially can not function. It causes trauma on top of trauma. What a horrendous situation.
This is a sick and sad thing that has happened all these years to all these innocents. In a “civilized” society, these men would be in jail getting what they gave from “bubba”. What’s even worse is the cloak of secrecy they enjoyed from their superiors. The fact that they want to cover it up at all costs is indicative of their guilt.
All I surmise from this is the one central common denominator; religion, not money is the root of all evil. We all just read the proof.
Not one person has the guts to start killing these animals?The article says it is desolate,no police, what more do you need? Kill everyone of them and there will be no more child rape.
@Santana
Yes if that religion supports the crime. Either by the specific dogma contained in the scripture OR in the Catholic churches case an actual power structure that actively hid and controlled the information about these priests.
The same can be said for criticizing Islam. In the case of the bible its support of slavery, persecution of homosexuals, and lack of any condemnation of child abuse or rape are good examples as well.
Does this mean that religion should be banned? No. Ideas should never be banned. They should be heard and if they are terrible ideas they should be quickly mocked. We should have a free market of ideas the best will float to the top. That will only happen if people are brave enough to criticize the truly horrible.
the reason these pedo priests abuse boys is that they have IPPA Induced Pedophilic Pheromonic Addiction ,,,which is they are addicted to the unsmelled scents given off by young bodies and need constant ‘fixes’ which they get by – getting into close contact with young bodies.
The Detergents industry needs to get to work to make anti-APPA sprays for classrooms and toilets and for clothes conditioners for final rinse or for ironing sprays to pedo-prood the children.
It would be nice if the main stream media would change their approach to this. It is the parishioners who continue to attend and fund the church that are enabling these atrocities to continue. The news should call a spade a spade, and the catholic church an evil institution, more appropriately associated with satan than any god, and make it clear that those funding the church are in fact funding these hellish actions.
Why is the Catholic Church allowed to maintain a IRS non-profit status when they spend so many millions of $ donations on covering up felonious crimes by their front line representatives? Why is there not a hue and cry to revoke their non-profit status?