YUKON KUSKOKWIM DELTA (AK)
KYUK Radio
January 8, 2019
By Anna Rose Macarthur
A recent report offers details on Roman Catholic Jesuit priests, deacons, and laypeople accused of sexual abuse in dozens of communities across Alaska. Those communities include 13 villages in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The region has a long history with the Roman Catholic Church, dating back to the late 1800s. Most of the church officials accused of abuse in the report are deceased. Jesuits West issued the recent report listing the perpetrators in December. Anchorage Daily News editor Kyle Hopkins has been following the story and talked with KYUK about his reporting on the issue.
Listen Listening…11:44 Listen to the interview with KYUK and ADN’s Kyle Hopkins here.
Transcript:
KYUK: “Jesuits West calls these 33 church personnel ‘credibly accused of sexual abuse.’ Eight of them were in Bethel. Do we know why Jesuits West chose this moment to release this information?”
Hopkins: “I spoke to a spokesperson for Jesuits West, and she was relatively new to that organization, which represents churches all in a 10-state area which includes, of course, Alaska. And it’s the organization that encompasses what used to be the Oregon diocese, which went bankrupt. And in that bankruptcy in Oregon, that led to a release of names of priests who had been accused, and there were a round of dioceses that went bankrupt when these civil lawsuits were filed in the mid to late 2000s after the abuse and the cover up were exposed in 2002 in Boston. In the subsequent years, you had many, many civil lawsuits that were filed, including a really big one in Alaska which involved the 300 plus people who were abused, or victims who were abused by priests. Many, many in western Alaska. And that lawsuit led to the bankruptcy of the Fairbanks diocese, and it was that lawsuit way back in 2013 that actually first revealed a lot of these names that many of us are seeing for the first time because the Jesuits then dug up those names, along with a whole slew of other names all across the West Coast, and put them all together for what might have been the first time, and then publicized that list, not in response to any kind of a legal requirement. But that effort did come after there was a really scathing report that came out of Pennsylvania that reignited interest and outrage at priest abuse all over the country.”
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