Ungodly

[Trigger warning for clergy abuse.]

If someone had asked me if the Catholic Church's institutional sex abuse conspiracy could get any worse, I believe I would have been hard-pressed to come up with an answer—because how could it get any worse? Well. Once again, I despair to report that evil is more vast than my imagination.

Brendan Kiley has written a comprehensive investigative piece for The Stranger, which details the allegations by indigenous Alaskans that the Catholic Church used "their remote villages as a 'dumping ground' for [known pedophile] priests."

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."

Roosa, along with his associate Patrick Wall, "a former Benedictine monk who once worked as a sex-abuse fixer for the Catholic Church," know of 345 cases of sexual abuse in Alaska by 28 predator priests, which is a concentration of sexual abuse that is "orders of magnitude greater than Catholic sex-abuse cases in other parts of the United States."

Kiley's article explains the historical context in which Catholicism came to be such a powerful force in the area, but the former fixer Wall succinctly sums up why the area subsequently became a dumping ground for sexual abusers: The predator priests were sent to the isolated Alaskan villages "to get them off the grid, where they could do the least amount of damage," defined by the Church in terms of its own public relations, not in terms of damage to children.

And the reason that the villages made such a spectacular waste containment site for sex predators is the same reason that the predators found themselves in a "pedophile's paradise":

[T]he 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.'"

I just don't even know what to say about the depravity of the perpetrators, about the callousness of their enablers, who cared more for nurturing and maintaining a public image than about the safety of children. And many adult women, whose victimization is also discussed in this article.

Flo Kenny, a 74-year-old survivor who spent the morning of January 14 in Seattle, participating in a press conference announcing a new lawsuit, began her story thus: "I am Flo Kenny. 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."

May it be so.

[H/T to Shaker Museclio.]