Losing My Religion (19 page)

“I was so angry and upset that anything would set me off,” Manly says. “It got so bad that when I went on vacation to Italy, I wasn’t able to get out of bed. It was that bleak.”

On a drive one day down Pacific Coast Highway near San Clemente, he contemplated exactly how he would kill himself with a .45-calibre Glock. The thought scared Manly into an intense multi-year counseling program that he now credits with saving his marriage, bettering his relationship with his girls and relieving him of the oppressive anger.

One thing counseling couldn’t give Manly back was his faith. He realized he first started to lose his religion during a 2001 deposition with retired Bishop of Orange Norman McFarland, a key witness in the Ryan DiMaria case. When the bishop entered the conference room, he set down a rosary and a prayer book in front of him. Manly’s mother regularly used a similar rosary and prayer book set, and the pages of her devotional had become torn and tattered. To Manly’s eyes, McFarland’s prayer book appeared unused.

“I realized that the rosary and prayer book were just props,” Manly says, adding that his suspicions were reinforced by this exchange with the bishop, who admitted that a “precocious” 15-year-old girl could prove to be quite a temptation for a priest:

MANLY
:
Does it make any difference to you in terms of how you handle priest matters [whether] the priest abused a three-year-old or sexually abused a seventeen-year-old?

MCFARLAND
:
Yes, there is a difference.

MANLY
:
What is the difference?

MCFARLAND
:
From what I have learned the experts say that pedophilia, I don’t think, is [curable].

MANLY
:
How about a fifteen-year-old girl?

MCFARLAND
:
Well, that is also very wrong. But I think there is more a chance [of that] being an isolated incident…I can understand the temptation of that more. It can’t even occur to me with a child or baby. Does one make a distinction [between] 15 or 17? She may be very, very precocious or adult-looking, and there would be temptation there.

 

By the time the Alaska cases surfaced in 2003, Manly knew his faith was lost. “When I started this, I thought clergy sexual abuse was a holiness problem involving a few priests,” Manly says. “But I’ve found no one in the clergy, in all my cases, who did the right thing. Some of them weren’t bad people, but they didn’t have the courage to do what was right.

“As a Catholic, you are raised into thinking the priest is like Jesus and you’re a sinner, and you’re so tough on yourself as a young person. Now I realize that you’re just a fucking tool—a pod for them to grow and get money from. They use ‘we’ll get your soul into heaven’ as a guise. When the reality of it hits you in the face, it really knocks you on your ass.”

One morning in 2006, Manly took off his neck a well-worn Miraculous Medal, a popular symbol among Catholics, said to be created by St. Catherine Laboure in the 18th century at the request of the Virgin Mary. “All who wear them will receive great graces,” Mary reportedly said. Manly received his Miraculous Medal as a second-grader on his First Communion. On the back were the words “I’m a Catholic. Please call a priest.” He had worn it every day of his life since the age of seven.

“It was part of me,” Manly said. “Taking it off was the final sign that I was really done. I felt very sad, but it was the beginning of real freedom—emotionally and spiritually. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Journalists always walk a tightrope between professional and personal friendships. During the Catholic sex scandal, I developed several close professional relationships with people on both sides of the controversy, but I never crossed the line to share my own views. (I did develop one personal friendship within the church, told my editors and stopped reporting on that person.) I knew a little about John’s loss of faith. Only later, after I left the beat, did I discover that we had traveled such a similar path, one filled with difficult emotions, marital challenges, disillusionment, therapy and, ultimately, a loss of faith.

But back in 2004, when I sat across from Manly at the restaurant, he was a source. I knew him as the fearless and sometimes bull-headed scourge of the church. Yet there he was, barely able to talk to me at lunch about what he had seen in Alaska. Before the meal was over, I knew it was a story I wanted to cover. A few months later, I headed up to western Alaska with
Los Angeles Times
photographer Damon Winter to see for myself what had happened. I knew it would make for a riveting tale, but I also felt compelled to do it because it represented the last major, untold story about the Catholic sex scandal—molesting priests had invaded even some of the world’s most remote outposts. So despite a healthy fear of flying in bush planes and only a hooded sweatshirt for cold weather, I found myself onboard an Alaska Airlines flight from Orange County to Anchorage in late January 2005, the start of the first of two trips to the villages.

My first stop in Anchorage was the REI store to pick up $1,500 worth of arctic gear. I then met up with John Manly, his associate Patrick Wall and Ken Roosa, an attorney based in Anchorage who represented scores of Alaska Natives who had been sexually abused by Catholic priests and missionaries. A former state sex crimes and federal prosecutor, Roosa—a soft-spoken man with a love of the outdoors—had fallen into the business of suing the Catholic Church quite by accident.

When he left the government for private practice, he was looking for clients for his new law firm and was handed a file that another attorney didn’t have time to check out. An Alaska Native said he had been abused as a child by a Catholic priest, an allegation that intrigued Roosa because of his background in prosecuting sex crimes. That case ultimately yielded another seven victims of the same priest. The Diocese of Fairbanks offered $10,000 to each Alaska Native. The average clergy sexual abuse settlement in Los Angeles was $1.6 million; the Catholic Church initially estimated the life of a Yu’pik was worth about 1 percent of an Angeleno’s. Eventually, Roosa accepted a multimillion-dollar offer from the church to settle those cases. Within the small world of Alaska attorneys, he became known as the guy who handled clergy sexual abuse claims. More victims started coming forward, first in a trickle, and then a deluge. As the numbers grew, Roosa called Manly, an attorney he had read about on the Internet, and asked for his assistance.

Together, all of us hopped a flight to Nome, the last town before the Alaska Native villages. At the tiny Nome airport, we climbed into a small prop plane for a noisy 90-minute flight to St. Michael Island. Our bush pilot had a wild gray beard and old-fashioned leather flying helmet. I took an Ativan to calm my nerves and tried not to hyperventilate. With the midday winter sun hugging the horizon, I looked down and saw the frozen Bering Sea spread like a bumpy white blanket in all directions. I had done some research about the history of the Catholic Church in Alaska, and it came alive for me as our plane headed to the frozen edge of civilization.

In 1886, the Jesuits established their first mission in western Alaska. Making converts in this unforgiving corner of the world proved difficult at first. For thousands of years, Eskimo hunters and gatherers had been ruled by
Yuuyaaraq
, or “the way of the human being.” Yu’pik people believed that their elaborate oral traditions and spiritual beliefs helped ward off bad weather, famine and illness. It wasn’t until an influenza epidemic in 1900 wiped out more than 60 percent of Alaska’s native population that the Jesuits began to make headway. The Eskimo shamans were no match for the deadly virus. Entire villages converted to the new religion virtually overnight.

Today, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks stretches across the upper two-thirds of Alaska, a rugged chunk of territory bigger than Texas but with only 41 churches and 24 priests. Jesuits, who still staff the diocese, call the villages “the world’s toughest missionary field!” in advertisements that use photos of darling Alaska Native children to raise funds for the religious order.

In our plane, we circled the wind-swept island and set down on a small landing strip a few miles from the village of St. Michael and its 370 residents. An elder of the village, Tommy Cheemuk, was waiting for us in a battered and rusted Ford pickup truck with no reverse gear. We piled into the uncovered bed of the truck and huddled together for warmth as Tommy drove us to his village. As I watched the barren landscape go by on that impossibly cold afternoon, I immediately could see why Manly told me that this was the perfect setting for a molesting missionary. Just 200 miles below the Arctic Circle, St. Michael and its neighboring village, Stebbins, sit on a rugged section of coast where the tundra meets the Bering Sea. They are accessible only by small plane or, when the ice melts on Norton Sound, by boat. In the 1960s and 1970s, when most of the molestations took place, the villages had no police officers and only a few phones. (During my trip there, they still didn’t have running water.) The most respected man in the villages was whoever the Jesuits sent to run the parishes. For such a man, it was a pedophile’s paradise.

Though the Jesuits deny it, there’s evidence to suggest that the villages of western Alaska served as a dumping ground for molesting priests.

“It’s like the French Foreign Legion—you join rather than go to prison,” says Richard Sipe, the former Benedictine monk. “I was absolutely convinced this happened in Alaska.”

Since the Catholic sex scandal broke in 2002, more than 110 Alaska Natives from 15 villages have stepped forward to say they had been molested by Jesuits. These victims also contend, with tears streaming down their face, that many others—cut off for decades from legal and emotional help—have committed suicide to end their pain.

Packy Kobuk has to walk past the Catholic church of St. Michael to get almost anywhere. To fill a drum of heating oil. To take his children to school. To wash his clothes at the only Laundromat in his village.

“I think about burning it down, but I have to block that out,” Kobuk, then 46, told me on that trip. “It all comes back to me right away each time I have to see it.”

Even after 30 years, he and his fellow victims couldn’t shake their memories of the late Joseph Lundowski, a volunteer Catholic missionary who arrived in their village in 1968. Staffing remote village parishes with full-time priests had proved impossible, which was why Lundowski and other volunteers played a key role in these ministries. The devoutly Catholic village elders welcomed Lundowski warmly, as they did all men of the cloth. But the children soon grew to fear and despise him.

Now grown, they claim that over a seven-year period “Deacon Joe” molested nearly every boy in St. Michael and the neighboring settlement of Stebbins, villages connected by a winding 12-mile dirt road. The alleged victims, now in their 40s and 50s, secretly carried this burden until 2004—not even talking about it with each other. Only after watching the Catholic sexual abuse scandal unfold across the nation on satellite television did 28 men from the two villages decide to break their silence. The numbers of those raped by Lundowski would eventually rise to 70 natives in six villages. Correspondence from early in the missionary’s career in Alaska shows that his superiors knew that he had a serious problem but did nothing to stop him.

“No one would believe us,” Kobuk told me. “[Lundowski] worked for God, and I was just an Eskimo child.”

On my first trip to St. Michael Island, I spent five days in the villages interviewing the men who had been abused. It was the first time most of them talked in depth about these experiences. Few had told their wives, fearful that they would be thought of as homosexuals. Most of them wanted to talk with me away from their homes. Usually stoic, many broke down, shaking and crying. Their faces contorted. They begged to somehow be freed of the unending pain. The scene was simply indescribable in words, but
Times
photographer Damon Winter was able to capture enough of it to become a Pulitzer prize finalist for his work. His photos showed the anguish of Tommy Cheemuk, crying as his wife tried to comfort him. Of John Lockwood, a broken man in a tattered shirt, sitting on a bucket, one hand covering his eyes, the other holding a lighted cigarette. Of another Alaska Native who has believed for years that a salmon bone was stuck in his throat, ready to kill him at any moment. He became housebound, too afraid to venture far from the phone in case the bone broke away and punctured an artery or his heart. Multiple tests by doctors failed to reveal any bone. I thought it more likely that he was experiencing a psychosomatic response to being forced to have oral sex with Lundowski. I had seen similar symptoms before.

Upon hearing the abuse claims, the Jesuits did the usual duck and cover. They offered no help to the Yu’piks. They denied that Lundowski had ever worked in the villages or for them, a claim easily disproved by documents in their own files. Finally, in 2007, the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church agreed to pay $50 million to 110 Eskimos to settle their claims.

During my two trips to St. Michael, as odd as this may sound, I felt satisfaction for the first time about my religious doubts. What had happened to helpless boys at the edge of the world made a lot more sense if there were no God. Confronted with evil, whether man-made or satanic, our task is always to fight it. But it helps to try to understand it, too—and I found it refreshing to focus entirely on the fight, knowing that one bad man and one corrupt institution had been purely self-interested. I did not have to worry about God’s role anymore.

I attended a Sunday service at the St. Michael parish on a bitterly cold morning. I was secretly delighted to see only a handful of elderly Alaska Natives and one younger family show up to a Mass that once drew the entire village. The residents knew what the church had done to their children, and they no longer wanted any part of it. It was hard to worship a God that let this kind of thing happen, in a church run by the men who looked the other way—and even now, 40 years later and in a more enlightened age, refuse to help.