"A Pedophile's Paradise"

"A Pedophile's Paradise" - That's the title to a story on Dan Savage's blog that looks at yet more details of the sex abuse scandal that continues to dog the Roman Catholic Church even though the main stream media with its short attention span has become less fixated on the story line. In the newest lawsuit, the plaintiffs allege a cover up conspiracy which includes the head of the Northwest Jesuits from 1990 to 1996—is named as a co-conspirator. I continue to believe that until bishops and cardinals and the heads of religious orders suffer the consequences of their malfeasance and actions to cover up the sexual abuse of minors, the Church as an institution deserves no respect whatsoever. The truth is that many in the hierarchy knew what was going on, closed their eyes to problem and worked to try to keep the truth hidden. Not very Christian conduct. Here are some highlights:

*

This morning (january 14th), 43 Alaskan Natives filed a lawsuit against the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), claiming a widespread conspiracy to dump pedophile priests in small Alaskan towns and shelter them from exposure. The suit was filed in the Bethel, Alaska Superior Court.

*

Attorney Ken Roosa announced the lawsuit at a chilly press conference outside Seattle University this morning and said, as of today, he knows of 345 cases of molestation, only two of them against non-natives. The Jesuits, he said, sent known pedophiles to isolated Alaskan villages—many of them only accessible by boat or plane—to let them abuse children with impunity. "It was a pedophile's paradise," Roosa said. "We are going to shine some light on a dark and dirty corner of the Jesuit order."

*

The rate of child molestation by priests in Alaska, he said, "is several orders of magnitude larger" than anywhere else in the United States. (Roosa compared this lawsuit to one in Los Angeles, with 550 cases of abuse and a Catholic population of 3.5 million.) . . . This suit—against the Society of Jesus as a whole—is the latest battle in a long campaign Roosa has been waging against the opaque, secretive way the church responds to accusations of sexual abuse.

*

A former Benedictine monk, Patrick Wall, said 28 pedophiles from four countries 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. "The Catholic church has the largest body of documentation of non-incarcerated pedophiles in the world," he said.

*

Three years ago, Roosa said, a former head of the Northwest Jesuits testified about the "hell files"—personnel files with information about priests that was "special," "not public," and "not good." Sundborg allegedly would've had those files in his office when he was the head of the Northwest Jesuits. When Roosa tried to acquire those files from the Northwest Jesuits, he was told they didn't exist.