Not all victims of Catholic priest pedophilia are equal: the followup...

[the_future_modernes]

Remember this? The 'Pedophile's Paradise'

Alaska Natives are accusing the Catholic Church of using their remote villages as a “dumping ground” for child-molesting priests—and blaming the president of Seattle University for letting it happen. ... The priests came to occupy the role of shamans by a weird confluence of history and microbiology.

In the early 1900s, a Spanish-influenza epidemic ripped through Northwest Alaska, sometimes killing entire villages. They called it "the Big Sickness" or "the Big Death." Winton Weyapuk was a child in Wales, Alaska, and was orphaned by the epidemic. In an interview from 1997, he recalled that the flu came on a dog sled. The mailman, on his monthly delivery, brought the corpse of a man who'd died on the way to Wales. Curious villagers crowded around the corpse. "The men, women, and children who came to see this body went home, and many got sick and most of them died before the next morning."

Weyapuk's father died that first night, so the family moved into an uncle's house. Most everyone in the uncle's house died, and Weyapuk and his brother Dwight lived in a one-room sod house with four corpses until someone found them. He recalls seeing white men building tripods over the sod houses, using block and tackle to pull frozen bodies up through the skylights, then blasting holes in the frozen ground with dynamite for mass graves. Family sled dogs, neglected and starving, roamed the streets and fought over human remains. The shamans, normally counted on as healers, were helpless.

The population was decimated, and the social structure had to be created from nothing: Another Wales resident remembers that, in the aftermath, so many families had been destroyed that an official from Nome came to the village with a stack of notarized wedding licenses. He lined up all the surviving men, all the surviving women, and all the surviving children, and built families at random. Catholic missionaries made major inroads into these communities in the aftermath of the Big Sickness. (Along with the Baptists and Orthodox churches. The major churches had a summit in Sitka years prior and divided up their geographical spheres of influence.) The missionaries brought flour and coffee, built orphanages and schools. "They looked at the shamans as evil and of the devil," Boudreau says. A new social order was created. In the villages of Northwest Alaska, the Jesuits stepped into a tailor-made power vacuum.MORE

And yes, it is REALLY just as disturbing as you think it is...


Well. This is the result: Huge payout over US priests sex-scandals

Decision to pay $166 million in damages is the largest ever by a Catholic religious order such as the Jesuits.... The Pacific Northwest chapter of the Roman Catholic Church's Jesuit order has agreed to pay $166 million to settle more than 500 child sexual abuse claims against priests in five states, attorneys have said. The decision on Friday compels a payout by the Society of Jesus in the Oregon Province, and is part of an agreement to resolve its two-year-old bankruptcy case. Lawyers for the victims said it is also the largest ever payout by a Catholic religious order such as the Jesuits. The Oregon Province is the Northwest chapter of the Rome-based Jesuit order and covers Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana. The victims, most of them Native Americans from remote Alaska Native villages or Indian reservations in the Pacific Northwest, were sexually or psychologically abused as children by Jesuit missionaries in those states in the 1940s through the 1990s, the plaintiffs' attorneys said. ... "No amount of money can bring back a lost childhood, a destroyed culture or a shattered faith," Blaine Tamaki, a lawyer, who represents about 90 victims in the settlement, said in a statement. MORE