{"id":218,"date":"2009-01-16T09:58:58","date_gmt":"2009-01-16T09:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/alaska-a-dumping-ground-for-pr.html"},"modified":"2009-01-16T09:58:58","modified_gmt":"2009-01-16T09:58:58","slug":"alaska-a-dumping-ground-for-pr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/alaska-a-dumping-ground-for-pr.html","title":{"rendered":"Allegations: Alaska is a dumping ground for predator priests"},"content":{"rendered":"

A long-simmering story has burst into the open with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the Jesuit order used Alaska as a “dumping ground” for abusive priests. According to coverage in the Anchorage Daily News<\/a><\/strong>, this week’s lawsuit is on behalf of 35 men and eight women, and another one is in the works with another 60 or so victims.
\nSex abuse lawsuits aren’t new, but this case exposes one of the ugliest aspects of the scandal:<\/p>\n

The new suit contends that pedophile priests unsuited to serve anywhere else were dumped on Alaska and put in remote villages with little or no law enforcement, making it virtually impossible for anyone to report them.
\nThere was a calculated effort at the highest levels of the Jesuit order to “‘dump’ these ‘problem priests’ in a location in which the priests could avoid detection and continued to sexually abuse countless Native children,” the suit says.
\nProblem priests from seven Jesuit provinces in the United States as well as four other countries ended up in the rural villages, mostly in Western Alaska, [attorney Patrick] Wall said. “They were specifically targeting the Athabascan and the Yup’ik cultures, because they wouldn’t talk,” he said in a telephone interview Wednesday.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whatever the merits of specific allegations (many people and the new head of the order are named, in the kind of blanket indictment typical of such a suit) this case underscores two points:
\nOne, that religious orders are unique in their autonomy from ordinary church (or Roman) oversight. That has benefited the church in many cases, but worked against the church in this case. You can’t easily pin this phenomenon on “the Vatican.” But there does need to be closer oversight of the orders on the sex abuse issue, as they are not under the same level of inspection as the U.S. dioceses (whatever one thinks of the Charter, it is a powerful tool and has been effective in many respects).
\nTwo, the Jesuits are not alone here. Orders everywhere, and many dioceses, used the international structure of the church to transfer “bad apples” as far away from prying eyes as possible. And that usually means inflicting them on the poorest of the poor, who are desperate and those with the least access to avenues of justice and the least motivation to try to seek justice.
\nThe Diocese of Fairbanks is already in bankruptcy, so it looks like the main target for claims will have to be the Society of Jesus. Heartbreaking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A long-simmering story has burst into the open with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the Jesuit order used Alaska as a “dumping ground” for abusive priests. According to coverage in the Anchorage Daily News, this week’s lawsuit is on behalf of 35 men and eight women, and another one is in the works…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nAllegations: Alaska is a dumping ground for predator priests - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/alaska-a-dumping-ground-for-pr.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Allegations: Alaska is a dumping ground for predator priests - Pontifications\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A long-simmering story has burst into the open with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the Jesuit order used Alaska as a “dumping ground” for abusive priests. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}