By Phil Ferolito
Yakima Herald-Republic
March 26, 2011
http://www.yakima-herald.com/stories/2011/03/25/historic-settlement-reached-in-priest-abuse-scandal
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| Kathy Mendez was abused as a young student at St. Mary's Boarding School in Omak. The Cowlitz tribal member and Yakama descendant is part of a class-action lawsuit and settlement against the school. She recalls talking about the abuse to her attorney, Blaine Tamaki. "I was torn apart from thinking about it," she says. |
Though it was some 40 years ago, Kathy Mendez remembers all too clearly getting called into a priest's office time after time as a student at St. Mary's Mission and School near Omak, Wash.
It was the setting for countless, and secret, episodes of sexual abuse by the priest, whose behavior was tolerated for decades.
The Wapato woman kept those memories locked deep inside, hiding her pain. But they would later complicate her life, touching even her 10 children.
But now the 55-year-old is ready to start the healing process with her family.
The new chapter comes with a landmark settlement announced Friday calling on the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus in Portland to acknowledge the wrongdoing and pay out $166.1 million to roughly 450 complainants, all Native Americans from tribes across the Northwest, including some Native Alaskans.
The order has also agreed to no longer call the victims "alleged victims," to write apologies to them and to enforce new practices designed to prevent abuse, according to plaintiffs' attorneys.
"Right now, I think it will help me correct a lot of stuff -- becoming dysfunctional from post traumatic stress," Mendez said. "Now I want to help my family -- that's were I'm going."
Attorneys from across the Northwest for victims -- including a handful of Yakama tribal members -- jointly announced the long-awaited settlement, calling it the largest in history between a single religious order and sexual abuse victims.
Yakima attorney Blaine Tamaki is representing 90 victims, the largest single group of complainants, which will receive $30 million, or about $330,000 each.
Attorneys fees have not yet been announced.
According to the lawsuit, victims suffered sexual abuse at boarding schools run by the religious order in Washington, Idaho and Montana from the 1950s through the 1980s.
"This is by far the worst case I've been involved in," said Tamaki, whose lead complainant, Mendez, initiated the case more than two years ago. "(The priests) were supposed to be there to teach them to read and write. They were supposed to be teaching them about God, not distrust and betrayal."
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The lawsuit was filed in February 2009 in U.S. District Court after Mendez, a Cowlitz tribal member and Yakama descendent, decided to come forward.
The Society of Jesus operated St. Mary's Mission and School for more than 60 years. Although the Society filed bankruptcy after facing more than 200 previous claims, it will sell off assets to pay $48.1 million toward the settlement while its insurer will pay the remaining $118 million.
A big question when the bankruptcy proceedings began was whether the assets of local Jesuit schools, including Seattle University, Gonzaga University, Seattle Preparatory School, Bellarmine Preparatory School and Gonzaga Preparatory School, belonged to the province. Attorneys for the victims had initially argued that they did and therefore could be used to pay creditors. The province and schools said they are separate from each other.
But during the bankruptcy negotiations, the victims' attorneys did not pursue their argument. As a result, Friday's settlement does not include the schools, and they are not contributing any money toward the settlement.
But that also means that lawsuits filed against the schools before the Jesuits declared bankruptcy will now move forward again -- including claims against Seattle University alleging abuse by the Rev. Michael Toulouse, a former professor.
The Society was the first Catholic religious order in the U.S. to file bankruptcy because of abuse claims.
Tamaki said the abuse suffered by Native Americans has received little attention. "This is the first time that it has been revealed that these atrocities happened to Native American students," he said.
He accuses the Society of placing priests who had a history of pedophile behavior in "low-level assignments" in remote areas on Indian reservations.
"They put them at these Indian boarding schools where no one would be watching them, where no one would hear from them," Tamaki said.
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Mendez said she felt compelled to take action after reading newspaper accounts of other victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests.
"I thought I was the only one," she said. "I was just in shock."
She said she was ordered to St. Mary's Mission by a probation officer when she was 11 years old for getting in trouble over curfew violations and smoking cigarettes.
Mendez was taken from her mother, with whom she lost contact once at the mission.
It wasn't long, she recounted, before she "came under the eye" of a priest named Father John Morse. Mendez said he would call her into his office, where spankings with her panties down quickly led to sexual acts by the priest.
"Sometimes I tried to fight and defy, but in the end he would win -- make me cry," she said. "At 11 years old, there's not much you can do. He was the authority figure. He was the one with the power."
Eventually, more than a year later, she was able to leave the mission and live with her adult sister in Yakima.
But memories of the abuse haunted her. She had trouble with relationships, bearing 10 children by several different, older men.
By the age of 20, she had three children. Often feeling trapped, she would flee from relationship to relationship. "I don't know," she said. "It just kept happening, trust issues, promiscuity."
For years, Mendez said she felt trapped by her past, and sometimes still does.
"I sometimes still feel like that abused little girl, the hopelessness that you can't get away from," she said. "It's like such a defeat to yourself. It's just awful."
But counseling has helped, and she's been happy in a relationship for the last 10 years. Now, Mendez is working on healthier relationships with her children.
"I've been able to understand what had happened to me," she said. "It wasn't because I was a bad girl. I was damaged by someone else. It wasn't because of me."
She said the settlement will allow her and other victims to finally begin putting the abuses behind them.
"I'm really relieved that it's finally over," she said. "It was really drawn out. It was hard going through that."
* Material from The Associated Press was included in this report.
* Phil Ferolito can be reached at 509-577-7749 or pferolito@yakimaherald.com
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