Interview Ken Roosa

Editors' Note: This interview contains descriptions of sexual abuse against minors.

Give me a sense of the isolation and remoteness of St. Michael.

Well, for starters, St. Michael is probably 150 miles below the Arctic Circle. It's on the western coast of Alaska on the Bering Sea, south of the Arctic Ocean from the Bering Sea, actually on the edge of Norton Sound and due south of Nome, Alaska. It's not accessible by road anytime of the year. It's not land-accessible. You can get to St. Michael by ocean. That's during the summertime. But in the winter it's closed, because the ocean freezes. It's accessible year-round by airplane. Otherwise, it is accessible from nearby villages by four-wheelers or snow machine[s] ... from villages within, oh, say, 60 to 100 miles; beyond that, it's completely inaccessible.

So it's cut off from the rest of Alaska except by air for all practical purposes. Until satellite communication became commonplace, so probably until about 16 or 17 years ago, phones were very uncommon in the villages. ... Usually you can get there directly by Anchorage in about an hour and a half to two hours, or you can fly by jet to Nome and then take a twin-propeller plane across Norton Sound. It's about 450 miles north-northwest of Anchorage by land.

How often do people leave St. Michael? They don't hop on the plane every week and go shopping.

No, it's just $500 or $600 ticket round-trip if you can get the cheapest fare to Anchorage. If you go through Nome on Alaska Airlines, it's closer to $1,000 by the time you pay your fare back and forth between St. Michael and Nome on one of the local bush airlines. So people don't come to Anchorage routinely. ...

What about between villages? How often do people interact between villages?

Stebbins is the nearest village to St. Michael, and it's about 12.5 miles to 13 miles away by road. It's closer by snow machine, which makes it pretty easily accessible in the winter if you have a snow machine, and there is tremendous amount of travel back and forth between Stebbins and St. Michael.

Less so as you get farther out. The next closest village is Unalakleet, which is about 45 miles away, but it's a couple of hours by snow machine, and then the next one is Kotlik to the south, and it's about 60 miles away.

So the farther you go, the less contact there will be, but there is still contact among the people in the different villages and a fair amount of intermarriage as well. In the springtime during basketball season, the kids fly back and forth and have tournaments, and there is a lot of exchange there. There are also cultural exchanges in the spring when there are dances and potlatches [Pacific Northwest Native festival ceremonies] and people get together and exchange gifts and have feasts and basically have celebrations.

Give me a sense of the family life in St. Michael.

I can only recount what I've been told by my clients and friends in St. Michael. I wasn't there at that time, but what I'm told by them in St. Michael and many other villages is that, prior to Alaska adopting the local option law that allowed the villagers to choose whether or not to allow alcohol to be sold and possessed in the villages, each village would be allowed to choose by itself whether to be dry, wet or damped, and that didn't happen until the late '70s or the even early '80s.

There was a tremendous amount of alcohol sold in the villages by people, who were just out to make the profit. And certainly during the 1960s, my clients described life as a child in St. Michael and in Stebbins as being -- and other villages, frankly -- as being an effort to survive among the world of drunk adults, where there was a tremendous amount of interfamily violence, where husbands and wives were frequently drunk and fighting each other; the children were neglected, often hungry. ...

The saving grace for very many children was their grandparents, if they had grandparents. ...

Tell me about [Father George S.] Endal, S.J. [and church volunteer Joseph] Lundowski … when they arrived.

Well, according to the encyclopedia of Alaska Jesuits -- it was published by the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus -- George Endal came to Alaska in 1936 as an ordained Jesuit priest, and he was here until he died in 1988. ...

We know, again from the same Jesuit sources, from the documents that we've received, that in about 1950, he was tasked to go to Dillingham, Alaska, which is on Bristol Bay, and opened a cafe from [a] boarding school. He founded the Holy Rosary Academy, which began operation sometime in the mid-1950s. ...

Sometime [after 1949], according to correspondence that I've read, he met Joseph Lundowski. Now, Joseph Lundowski was a setnetter [a type of fisherman]. He had a setnet permit in the village of Eek on the southern edge of Bristol Bay, which is on the northern coast of the Alaska Peninsula. ...

We don't know a lot about him. He is somewhat of a mystery, but we know that he spoke Russian, and we know that he had some training in the Russian Orthodox Liturgy. ...

Endal brought him in as sort of a novice master at the school. He was, we were told, placed in charge of the boys' dormitory. What we also know now is that Joseph Lundowski was a pedophile. He lived and breathed every moment of every day to molest boys, and we know that he molested boys in Dillingham. We have talked with men who were molested there, and one man testified in the deposition -- that's under oath, under cross-examination -- that in 1961, he was 6 years old; he was a resident of that boarding school, living there in the first grade, and he was being molested by Joseph Lundowski, and Father Endal, the Jesuit priest, walked into the room and saw the molestation in progress, made eye contact with him, smiled and walked [away], closed the door and left the room.

Thereafter, [the boy] was warned occasionally by Father Endal to stay away from Joe because it wasn't safe for him to be alone with Brother Joe, but he continued to have Joseph Lundowski work with him until 1962, when Father Endal was moved to the village of Nulato, and he took Joe Lundowski with him. ...

While in Nulato, for a period of two years, Lundowski molested children there -- boys, always boys, and the ages could be anywhere from 5 to 20. It didn't matter particularly to him.

In 1964, Father Endal was sent to Hooper Bay. Joe stayed behind for the better part of a year and then joined him in Hooper Bay in 1965. The two of them stayed together in Hooper Bay until 1968, although during the period of that time, Joe was on his own in a little village nearby called Scammon Bay. Joe continued to molest there, at a prodigious rate, molesting children in Hopper Bay and in Scammon Bay.

In 1968, Joseph and Father Endal moved to St. Michael. … Father Endal, who was by that time getting up in years, somewhat, would stay in the village of Unalakleet, which was a larger town and had a smaller catholic population and had better facilities and had more comfortable quarters.

It was easier going for [Father Endal], and he would make routine trips out to St. Michael and Stebbins to check on things, but by and large … Lundowski had free rein in those villages. [He] ran the catechism classes. After a short period of time, [he] began offering -- what [are] they called? -- ... Communion services. ...

So, to sum it all up, what really happened between 1960 and 1975 was, for a 15- or 16-year period, Father Endal and Joe Lundowski moved through a series of Alaska villages, always in very remote parts of the state, always with no one there to supervise them except themselves -- Joe under the supervision of Endal, but Endal being really in charge of whatever station or assignment they had. And the way I read it is that the abuse of children by both of them became more and more blatant, more and more egregious, more and more violent and vile, until it got to the point where there was almost nothing that wasn't being done. And they were doing it with complete impunity. There were no consequences; there was no one to whom they could report. They were a law unto themselves, and they did whatever they wished. ...

Let's go back and talk about catechism.

... Lundowski would teach catechism to the boys and girls every day after school. [He] began to hold Communion services, which was the local equivalent of Sunday Mass. [He] wouldn't actually have a Mass because the Communion would not be consecrated by a priest, but he would have essentially preconsecrated wafers, and except for the consecration, there would be a homily, Communion would be given to the faithful, and in all other respects [he] would really serve as a priest.

[He] would have altar servers with them, boys or girls, who would help serve during the religious services of the day. In those days, St. Michael and Stebbins were almost an exclusively Catholic community, so there was a tremendous turnout in both the catechism and at the church services.

Another really important thing was that … Lundowski offered the children food. Remember we were talking about how these were really hungry kids, and they might have had a midday meal at school, and then they go to catechism for an hour to hour and a half, and then after catechism -- by this time, we were talking probably 3:30 or 4:30 in the afternoon -- they are starting to get really hungry, and food was offered as an inducement to keep children around after the group was dismissed. And there was always a price to be paid in exchange for the meal that was offered, and that price was always sexual in nature. ...

Father Endal was the supervising priest of both those villages, Stebbins and St. Michael as well as Unalakleet. So he circled through those villages on a routine basis, checking on things, and it was his responsibility as the only priest in the area to perform the sacraments, so confession, First Communion, confirmations. Of course the bishop was supposed to do that, but he had to make sure the children were ready for their confirmations, burials, baptisms, marriages. Those were all things that only a priest was authorized to do. He had to be in the community on a regular basis to perform those necessary functions.

And were there reports of abuse?

There were. Several of my clients have told me that on more than occasion, they went to Father Endal and talked to him about the abuse that was committed … by Lundowski, … and on every occasion he told them that they shouldn't speak of it, that they should not talk about a man of God in that fashion, or that whatever had happened should be between them and himself and God, and it should go no further.

But was Endal molesting children?

Yes, in fact, he was as well. ... We now know that Father Endal was molesting children in Hooper Bay. We don't know when he began molesting children and how far back that goes, although it's well known now that pedophiles don't start molestation when they are 40 or 35. That's usually something that starts relatively early in their sexual development in their sexual life.

So there were probably victims much earlier than that, but the earliest victim we know of was in Hooper Bay, and it was a little girl. We also know of boys that he molested. ...

When children would come forward and talk to him about molestations that had occurred by Joe … he would tell them to be quiet, and then some of those children would later be molested by Father Endal. And on at least one occasion we know of, Joseph Lundowski and Father Endal jointly molested a boy.

The other point I wanted to mention is that during the 1960s, the kind of food that was available in the village was essentially subsistence food. So we were talking about diet that's high in protein, high in fat, but there was almost no sugar available. And so what Joe … [was] doing was offering very exotic food to the children in the villages. [He was] offering syrup and pancakes or a cake or hard candy, things that they had never had before or only got very, very rarely. So it was a real draw. It was very hard to say no to something that was so hard to come by.

How skilled were these men at being predators, not only for the children but also for the way they handled the parents?

I think it was easy for Lundowski … to assume a position of authority and trust in the community. [He] really just stepped into a tradition of respect and honor that had gone back over 50 years, actually throughout the entire lifetime of the parents of the children in St. Michael during 1968-to-1975 timeframe, when [this man] had unfettered access to the children in St. Michael and Stebbins.

The catechism teaches that it is a mortal sin to strike a priest; it is mortal sin to speak ill of a priest. The religious leaders in these Native communities of St. Michael and Stebbins, as well as the other tiny little communities in western Alaska, were the only representatives of Western culture, other than perhaps the schoolteachers who came and went that lived there.

They understood the legal system, the language. They served as a go-between to the government. They literally translated documents and helped people understand. Many times, the priest learned to speak Yup'ik, the predominant Native language, and explained what documents were that required them to participate in a census or explain to them what a fishing permit was, which they needed to have in order to fish or sell their fish, or what a fish ticket was to sell their fish legally; explain to them how to engage in just simple matters of commerce, talk to them about interactions with the police.

They were trusted elders in the community, and in many instances, their word was final. They dictated what happened in the community almost as a government would do, a government of one. They stepped into a tradition where it was prohibited to question, and trust was a matter of religion. It was very easy for them, and then they threatened the children and told them that if they told anyone, they would go to hell, or even more subtly playing on Native superstition, something bad will happen to someone in your family.

When the children did tell their parents, almost without exception the parents did not believe them, punished them often physically, whipped them for lying and saying things about the church.

So they were skilled at what they were doing. They knew how to do what they were doing. They warned the children what would happen if they tried to tell, and when they did, they were proven correct.

I've seen photographs of Lundowski, and I've heard descriptions of him. I don't think he was a particularly tall guy, probably around 5'8", 5'9" maybe. He was bald. He was stocky, very strong, big arms, which makes sense -- somebody is pulling nets, it's going to develop muscles, make sense. He had false teeth, and many of them described never being able to forget him removing his false teeth before he began to abuse. He was Russian, so he had Eastern European features. I have not seen him other than in a couple of photographs, where he was dressed sort of generically, but he usually wore robes, the vestments, when he was saying Mass. …

Would Lundowski wear the robes when he was performing rituals?

Yes. I think around the village, he wore pretty durable, heavy-duty clothes -- it's not an environment where you can dress up -- blue jeans and probably work shoes, that sort of thing. He was described as being very strong. ...

Lundowski really knew no limits. His most common form of molestation involved performing oral sex on boys and men. ...

Tell me about these men being pedophiles. What is a pedophile?

Joseph Lundowski and George Endal were pedophiles. … A pedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to children, and that is their exclusive and preferred method of sexual expression. …

Tell me about the trauma of the children.

The trauma doesn't arise from the classification of the abuser. The trauma arises from the abuse, and there is no doubt that when an adult representative of Christ on earth, who is a religious figure, exposes his penis and asks you to touch it or ejaculates on a child's arm, that's abuse, and that's traumatic, and that's very difficult for anyone, particularly a child, to match that up with God's love and the message of Christ, and that's what he did to them.

He sort of cracked their egg; he broke their world. He destroyed their view of God and committed what has been I think very accurately described as spiritual homicide. Whether he then went on and did other things with them or not is really beside the point.

How did it happen? How did these guys get away with it?

Well, you have to realize there were no police in the village. There were no phones to call the police. Had a child picked up the phone and gotten to the one phone in the village and then [was] able to make a long-distance call and somehow got the state troopers on the phone and said, you know, "My name is Tommy, and I live in St. Michael, and I'm being molested by this guy who works for the church," he wouldn't have been believed. They wouldn't have been taken seriously. They [would have] said: "How old are you, Tommy? Who put you up to this? Was you dad there?" And of course those [kids] who were telling their parents were being disbelieved.

I talked with a woman who was a teacher in Stebbins in 1971, right during the very epicenter of this abuse, which took place from 1968 to 1975 in Stebbins and St. Michael, and she told me that she had heard many stories from children about this happening. And at first, she didn't believe it, and ultimately she came to believe it, and she spoke with her husband, who was also a teacher, and said: "What are we going to do? What should we do?" And her husband said: "We can't do anything. It's the church. They are too powerful. We are going to lose our jobs." So they just did nothing.

These were children who had no one to turn to and nowhere to go, and the adults that they tried to reach out to believed the abusers over their own children. ...

This was 1970. It was absolutely unthinkable that the Catholic Church could be involved in the sexual abuse of children, and certainly for it to be knowingly involved and covering it up was simply beyond anyone's conception. It couldn't be happening. So the only answer was you've got a dirty-mouthed child who is making it up.

As far as Lundowski is concerned, if they didn't do it voluntarily, if they couldn't be cajoled into it with promises of hard candy or pancakes or [a] sandwich or gold star, there were threats: If you don't do it, I'm going to fail you in catechism, and your dad is going to be here. If you do it, I will give you a gold star, and your dad will be happy.

And we found a box of gold stars and blue stars and big gold seals and ribbons that he used to reward his victims. But if he didn't go for that, there [are] the ones who said, "I told him no, and I tried to run, and he grabbed me and dragged me back in the room and threw me on the bed and held me down, took my pants off and did it anyway."

There really was no way for the children to stop him and no one that they could go to. Now, they should have been able to go to Father Endal, but that was dead-end because we now know that Endal himself was a willing participant in the abuse, and there was no way that he was going to stop it. ...

There was no way out. It was just a nightmare.

Did word get past Endal? Was the Catholic Church covering up for Endal?

We know that the word got out past Endal that Lundowski was a molester because there is a series of letters, correspondence between a Jesuit priest named [Father] Jules [M.] Convert, [S.J.], and the vicar general of the Fairbanks Diocese in 1964 that had to do with a scandal in Nulato involving Joseph Lundowski that, as one of the letters said, "What would we have done had it involved a woman?," leaving one with the clear and distinct impression that it probably involved a male.

And they talk in code, and they discuss the fact that Father Convert, who is the head of the Jesuits in Alaska, thought that Lundowski was unfit, that he was a religious nut, that he was a problem and needed to be disposed off, and he was complaining bitterly that the bishop, who was also a Jesuit, wasn't taking appropriate action. And the vicar general, who is also a Jesuit, was writing back, and in the language of the day, he was saying: "Come on, Jules, man up. Are you the head of the Jesuits in Alaska or not? If you want him gone, take the action. If not, quite blaming the bishop. Do something."

And the upshot of it was that there was a series of letters that went back and forth, and nothing happened.

Why do you think that is?

Nobody wanted to take responsibility. Nobody was willing to make a decision. Why, I can't say, but [that's what] happened: nothing.

And instead of calling Joseph, who was really at that point just a volunteer for the diocese, instead of call[ing] him into Fairbanks and questioning him and dissociating him from the church, instead they sent him on to Hooper Bay to meet up again with Father Endal. This would be in 1965.

They moved him on into Hooper Bay, and by 1969, Father Endal was writing letters to the bishop. And there had been a change in bishops. The previous bishop had passed away, and there had been a new bishop appointed. He was writing letters to the new bishop telling what a wonderful man of God Joseph Lundowski was, and asking that the bishop give him special appointment as an acting deacon so that he could engage in all of the acts that a deacon should be able to do, including the Communion services and so forth. ...

How does [the] abuse compare or reflect all of Alaska? Is this just an isolated case?

No, no. Sadly enough, ... St. Michael is not an isolated case. There are other villages in Alaska where, if you look at the official Catholic directory knowing what we have uncovered in the last seven years, and you trace the assignments of molester priests, you can find villages that have had molester priests assigned to them for 20 or 30 or 40 years, villages where a couple of generations were never exposed to a priest who was not a molester except for maybe somebody who came through visiting when the priest was on sabbatical or on vacation or something.

If you look at demographics, the Fairbanks Diocese is, as it is currently configured, is probably one of the largest, if not the largest, [on a] square-mile basis in the country. It's the entire northern half of Alaska. It's almost as big as the state of Texas. There are only 14,000 Catholics in that area, and yet in a diocese with only 14,000 Catholics today, and no doubt the population was smaller in the '60s and '70s when most of the abuse that we uncovered occurred and population centers were still as they are now, Fairbanks primarily, and half the Catholic population lived in Fairbanks.

You still have in essentially a 20-year period with a few outliers in the decade before and after, you have over 300 child victims of sexual abuse. If you look at the Diocese of Los Angeles, with a Catholic population of 3.2 million, there were 550 victims who came forward during the one-year window, 550 out of 3.2 million. ...

The rate of abuse in the Diocese of Fairbanks is several orders of magnitude higher than any other place in the United States that has ever been investigated to date. The odds of being abused as a little Catholic boy or little Catholic girl in that diocese, in the Fairbanks Diocese, was staggeringly high. ... It's a very daunting and depressing situation, and the worst part of it is, it should never have happened.

Why shouldn't it have happened?

Because the abuse was perpetuated by men who were sent there and were promoted as being sexual-safe celibates, and even probably more importantly as men who were there to do good, who could be trusted with your children, who were there to teach them about God and about how to be a good person, to help them grow into good adults and good citizens. And instead of fulfilling that honorable, decent mission, they perverted it for the basest of reasons -- for their own sexual desires -- and ruined hundreds of lives, not just of the people they molested, but the people who were in contact with them. Their husbands, their wives, their children, their parents, their immediate family members, their brothers and sisters all had to deal with the anger and the violence and the alcohol abuse that stems from it.

So thousands of people's lives were negatively impacted, and they could have all been positively impacted. ...

How could the church know that these men were pedophiles?

We think they knew in many instances before they sent them here. ... We think the hierarchy of the church knew or should have known.

We know that some of these pedophiles came here from other places. Why is it that we wind up with pedophiles in Alaska from ... Lyon, France; Brussels, Belgium; from Spain, from Hungary, from Boston, from New Orleans, from Wisconsin? Why are they all here? What happened to them? ...

We will never get those documents, but it seems more than passingly unusual that six -- I think I just named six or more of the 13 pedophiles that we initially identified came from other countries or other provinces in the United States. The Jesuits consistently say, "Oh, this was the most difficult mission, and only the best men were sent to Alaska." Well, if the best men were sent here, where the hell did they send their worst? Because in some years, we can demonstrate that over 30 percent of the priests who are in the Diocese of Fairbanks were actively molesting children.

How can you run any kind of business, any kind of an operation [that] has 30 percent of your key employees molesting children and not know about it? ...

What was the long-term effect of this kind of abuse, particularly in St. Michael? ... What do you see personally?

I see a community of men and women who are lost. They have no spiritual connection anymore. That's gone. If you go to the Catholic Church in St. Michael today on an ordinary Sunday, there may be four or five people at Mass. The church, which was nurturing and the spiritual and social center of the town, is gone. It's gone.

[I see] men who don't know how to hug each other or are afraid to touch other, don't know how to relate to women, who tell me that sometimes when they are having sex with their wife, they think about that priest and what he did to him, and that's the only way they can get off, and they cry, and they talk about [how] they know it's sick and they know that it's twisted, and there is nothing they can do about it -- the long-term effect on these men, you know, they need help. They need serious weekly therapy, sometimes probably starting off with twice-weekly therapy with a really good psychotherapist, and they are not going to get it. It doesn't exist. There is no money for it, and there is nobody willing to live in a remote community where running water is at a premium, where it costs $1,000 to get to Anchorage to go to the mall. People aren't going to live there.

When it costs $8 a gallon for heating fuel, who is going to pay the setup [for a] mental health clinic for a community of 400? Nobody. I see no help. ... I don't think there is really much of a future for the men and women who were molested. They are all now in their 40s and 50s and older. The older you go, the longer you go, the older you get without treatment, the harder it is for anything to change.

Several of them have committed suicide. Others are dying of natural causes, poor health care, disease, cigarettes, cancer, and some have just given up. Some don't really care anymore. They want to die. I've talked to men who say: "I just fantasize about being dead. I just want it to be over." Life has just been filled with too much pain, and there has been no letup. There has been no real joy. I don't think it was always that way in St. Michael. I think that would have been a fantastic place to grow up as a little boy or little girl if the monsters hadn't come to town. ...

Some of the parents have softened their stance on how terrible it was. They thought at first for anyone to be suing the church -- and some of the elders who are still alive, [who] have children, told their children: "I wish I had known. I wouldn't have let that happen to you." Some are still in denial, but all in all, I see the men being friendlier to each other, and they talk more openly about what happened.

They certainly have welcomed me with open arms, and I think there has been some good done there. The money that's come into the community probably hasn't been nearly as important -- that's from the legal settlements -- hasn't been nearly as important, I think, as just the openness and the acknowledgment among the men and the women: women now knowing why their husbands are tormented, maybe not knowing before and now understanding; men understanding some things about their wives that they didn't know, or girlfriends, that they didn't know before.

I see good things happening as a result of the openness, but again, it's so much pain, so much anger, so much death that didn't have to be. It's really truly tragic on a community-wide scale. ...

Tell me how the lawsuit got started.

The short story is that after we first began filing lawsuits and expanded the number of molesters that we were suing, each time as we identified a new molester, it would open up a new group of victims, because no victim wanted to be the first one to say something about a priest, because each person believed they were the only one until they found out somebody had made a complaint against their perpetrator, and then they would go, "Wow, I'm not the only one."

And it sounds so obvious that a molester would have multiple victims, but for each person who was molested, it was very personal, and they thought and believed -- and it's very common for that to be the case -- that they believed that they were the only one.

So as we filed a first lawsuit against the priest up in the northwestern part of Alaska, a guy who had been really a legend and known for 25 years, we got a call from one guy in St. Michael, who happened to be drunk at that time. I think that's the only way he was able to get the courage to make the call, and he called me and said: "I see your suit filed against [Father James E.] Poole, S.J. What are you going to do about that guy Lundowski, who used to give me blow jobs all the time when I was a little boy?"

I had never heard of Lundowski, and as it happened, I was planning to go to Stebbins to talk to another woman who had recently, within a day or two, had called me and talked about Father Poole, who is [a] Nome priest, and I said: "Well, I'm coming to St. Michael next week. What's your name? I will meet you; I'll talk to you." ...

This was in June of 2004, and Patrick Wall [a legal consultant] and I went together. Pat's a former Benedictine priest. And we were met at the IRA [Indian Reorganization Act Council]. We got a ride into town from the airport at the IRA, and these guys that we'd never talked to were all waiting for us, and they sort of whisked us off to a guy's house and ran the women out, and then the four of them sat there and started telling us about their abuse. They said: "We are not the only ones. We've got some guys in Stebbins that want to talk to you, too."

And we went, "Wow," and so we wound up going over to Stebbins later I think that day and talked to four or five other guys in Stebbins who were also Lundowski's victims, and talked to our Poole client there that same day. I think we gave them hope, and we said, "We'll take your case, and we'll find out the truth about these folks, and we'll see what we can do for you." Pat was very good, because as a canon lawyer and former priest, [he] really understood the way the church worked and said: "I knew where the records are. We'll get the records, and we'll find out about these people." And we did.

And over the next four months, five months, the calls continued to come in until by that time we had 28 or 29 clients. And over time, I would go back to the village and meet with people. And there is no office space there; you can't rent an office in St. Michael [because] there are no offices. There is really just people's private home, and then there is a city office and the tribal offices.

So we would find a space at the tribal office. They would let us sit at a table, and word would get out of the town pretty quickly that we were in town, or I was in town, and then the guys would come to see us. And they would come in not knowing who else was coming in, but it would be different people that I talked to at different times. They were all just showing up without an appointment just to find out what was happening or to say hello or to talk, to get some reassurance, and they would run into each other there, and that's sort of how it happened. ...

What did that foster?

I think [it] foster[ed] an awareness that no one was safe, that it wasn't a failing or moral flaw. It wasn't that this happened to me because I wanted it to happen; it happened because I was in the wrong place with the bad man. And there was an example that I would use often to help them understand that, and it goes like this. I would say, "Do you have a son?" "Oh, yeah. I have a son." I said, "Now, if there was a teacher over at the school who molested your son and you found out about it, would you be mad at your son?" "No." "Why not?" "Well, he is just a little boy." And I ask him, "Whose fault would it be?" "Well, that teacher, he ought to know better than that." "So you were just a little boy, too."

And then it would dawn on them. "Oh, I was just a little boy," because they are hard on themselves. All victims are hard on themselves. They often want to call themselves "survivors," and they are survivors. But in their heart of hearts, so many blame themselves and feel like: "If I had just done something different, it wouldn't have happened; he wouldn't have done that to me. If I had just taken a different route home from school that day or if I would have just not stayed to play basketball at the church that afternoon --"

Somehow they want to blame themselves, because it's just so hard to blame the priest. ...

Was this just a paradise for these guys? It was like a perfect place for them to land?

It was a perfect storm for molestation. There was nowhere for the kids to hide. There was no one they could talk to. ...

Was this like, the beginning of their career?

This was the end of Lundowski's career, because he started molesting within the ambit of the Catholic Church in about 1959, '61 for sure that we know of.

It ended abruptly in July of 1975 when he was seen raping a 6- or 7-year-old boy through the windows of the church on a summer day, and the person who saw it happening made quite the report and would not let it go and was vociferous enough about it that he was booted out of the community the next day.

The police were not called, surprisingly -- and tellingly I think -- that even when there was an eyewitness by an adult to the abuse, the authorities were not called. The church handled it internally. He was transported out of the town and left the state, and as far as we know never returned. Endal stayed there for another eight years. He did molest additional children during that time frame. …

Were Eskimos not seen as human?

I do believe that it's pretty clear from the evidence that the Jesuits felt themselves to be far superior to the Native Alaskans, that they were in Alaska to serve -- in reading their house diaries and reading the documents, they talked down about the Natives, and how great it is to see another Jesuit come in, because it's just not possible to hold a conversation with the ignorant Natives. ... They were very peremptory and autocratic in their dealings with the Native people. ...

In the village of St. Michael and Stebbins, because of Lundowski particularly, but also Endal, how big a percentage of the children were molested?

Well, we're talking about during that seven-year time frame -- I don't know for certain, because a lot of them have died, but if I were to give you my best estimate, it's got to be more than 80 percent. The only church in the community at that time was the Roman Catholic Church, and all of those children were forced to go to catechism. It was obligatory. And from what I can see, Lundowski molested every male child he could get his hands on. ...

It's interesting. ... I think kind of the official script is to discount overall what happened in Alaska by saying there were a few such as Lundowski and Poole that were way beyond normal in terms of the rest of the church, and that if you took those out, it would be just like the rest of America. Why do you think Alaska was different? I mean, the number seems just that's not the way it was.

Well, there's probably a number of factors for that. First of all, there were some years during the '60s and '70s when almost 30 percent of the priests in the Diocese of Fairbanks were molesters. You can take Poole out, and you could take … [others] out, and the numbers are still astronomically high. So it's, I hope, not like the rest of America.

Some would say, "Oh, well, it was the isolation, and the men were out there alone." But I don't believe that for a second. I don't believe that being out in a remote area makes you molest children. ...

Maybe take a minute and describe the bankruptcy proceedings, and just the process.

Both the Diocese of Fairbanks and now the Oregon Province of the Jesuits have filed bankruptcy as a result of a landslide of sexual abuse claims that have been made against them in the last decade. And someone once described bankruptcy as being "all about broken promises." And it's really true. You think that, when you file a lawsuit against someone, that you're going to get to have your case heard by a jury, and you're going to be allowed to tell your story, and those who have harmed you will be judged, and that you will at least walk away with a verdict. And that just isn't true.

Both of these institutions have sought refuge in the bankruptcy process. They have not been liquidated, as you or I would be if we harmed someone and we didn't have enough insurance to pay for it, and we could expect that we would have to sell all that we had and pay those that we've injured. They've done that not in the least. They have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; they have reorganized. They've kept a very substantial proportion of their assets. I think the Jesuits will wind up with millions of dollars of property and probably something like $45 million in cash. ...

Not one single case has ever gone to trial. No one has had their day in court. No one has gotten a judgment; no one has had a verdict. No one's gotten to tell their story. No one has been able to force a perpetrator to sit in front of a courtroom and be questioned by their lawyers. It's never happened.

The bankruptcy process has taken, on average, better than two years. It's arcane; it's dense; it's difficult for most nonbankruptcy lawyers to understand. The legal fees in these bankruptcies have probably totaled near $8 million. The bankruptcy lawyers get paid first, long before the victims do. So I would say it's been unsatisfying in many respects. I understand the need for bankruptcy, and I understand why, I guess, this exists, but for many of my clients, it's been confusing and frustrating.

One of the things that some of your clients said to [Bishop of Fairbanks Donald Kettler] was, "Why do we read about extraordinary settlements in the rest of the United States, when the ones up here are so much less?" ... The bishop's response is that it's a missionary church, and it doesn't have those kinds of resources, but I'm curious how you would respond to that.

The reality is that in most of the cases in the lower 48, where you see the $100 million settlement -- the $190 million settlement in San Diego, the $100 million settlement in Orange County, the $660 million settlement in Los Angeles -- most of that money is not coming from the debtor or from the diocese. Most of the money that's paid in these large clergy settlements or bankruptcies is paid by insurance companies, because the Catholic Church has requirements in their Code of Canon Law that the church maintain insurance on its assets and on its activities. The truth of the matter is that the Fairbanks Diocese has done a terrible job of insuring itself. They've lost most of their insurance policies; they didn't keep their records. The policies that they did have were ambiguous or inadequate. ...

Let me talk a little bit about justice, because for so many people on the outside, looking at this, they think that this is all about money. They think that this is all about people who want to sue the church for money, but I have to tell you that that's really not it. There's not a single client that I have ever worked with -- and I've worked with several hundred -- who wouldn't give every penny of it up instantly if they could just have not had this happen to them. ...

And for most of them -- in fact, for me, the hallmark of someone who has been abused, and the way I frequently differentiate between someone who has been abused and someone who may be just trying to come in and get some money -- and there are some like that -- is that someone who has really been abused will say to me, invariably: "I just don't want this to happen to anybody else. If, by filing this lawsuit, I can make sure that nobody else gets abused, that's what I want."

How did the whole noneconomic part of this unfold? And, I guess, what does it mean to have a [bishop] visit like this?

The noneconomic portion of the settlement was something that we attorneys and the creditors' committee -- which was a group of seven men and women who were themselves victims, who sat on a steering committee for the bankruptcy lawyer, the attorney who was representing the victims in the bankruptcy action -- worked on.

So the lawyers representing the victims in the state court actions, the committee of victims, and the attorney representing the victims in the bankruptcy court, we all worked together to come up with these things that we thought were important for the protection of victims in the future, that went beyond the compensation -- and in our minds, in many ways, [that] was more important than the money that was paid, because hopefully that would have a lasting effect, after the money was gone, the money was spent. ... There would be something there that would protect children in the future.

So we put our heads together to come up with this list of things that we wanted the bishop to agree to, in addition to agreeing to pay the money that he paid.

As to the second part of your question, I think that's a very individualized thing. I have had some of my clients call me and say: "Do I have to go to that healing thing with the bishop? I just don't want to see him. Ken, do I have to forgive him?" And [there are] others who look forward to an opportunity to hear what the bishop has to say, and maybe, in their own mind, they're moving on. And so I don't think there's any way that you can generalize about what the significance of it is. For some, it's a time of fear and terror to be in a room with a priest again, and for others, it has a completely different meaning. ...

In fact, actually, this victim didn't want to be there at all, but she was there for her significant other. And she later said: "I didn't want to be there. Every time I looked at the bishop, I saw Father Endal laughing at me."

The very first time I ever met the bishop was in 2003, when we had a mediation with my very first four clients in St. Mary's. The bishop was there, and a representative from the Jesuits and some lawyers. And the clients, one by one, came into this crowded, hot little bush conference room in Bethel. And you know how some of these rooms can get really close and really hot in winter? And this man came in, and he was wearing a coat. And he was just sitting there, telling the story of his abuse, and he was just sweating. Sweat was just literally running down his face.

And I asked him if he wanted to take his jacket off, and he just almost violently refused. He later told me that being in the room with the bishop terrified him, and the idea of taking off any clothing -- even a coat -- in the presence of a priest was more than he could stand. ...

I have a question for you, and you may have addressed this already. [At one point Bishop Kettler], basically he was saying, "I'm not sure if Lundowski really worked for the church," and there was a great deal of denial. ...

At some point during the process, where we began to hear more about Joseph Lundowski from clients and realized that he was a player, as we began this process of trying to figure out who he was and exactly what his relationship was to Endal, and we didn't really know. We knew he was there, and we figured Endal must know, and we had some information, but we hadn't really gone too far in our investigation, we filed a lawsuit [link to timeline], November of 2004, I think it was, and it made quite a splash.

And the church seemed to be shocked; they didn't know who he was. And there [were two] investigative [reporting] team[s] that went out to St. Michael, and ... [they were] very suspicious. They thought that I was somehow scamming them. "Who is this Lundowski?" And [at] one point, they said, "Does this guy even really exist, because the church says they don't know who he is." ...

I think the real turning point in that whole process was, there were several men in the room who were talking about Joe, and one of them said: "Wait a minute. I think I've got a picture of him." And he left, and he went home to the family album, and he pulled out a picture of Joseph Lundowski sitting in the room with the wood stove there, and he brought it back. And all doubt disappeared. ...

The documents that we looked at to prove to the church that Joe worked for them and was recruited by them and retained by them were documents that they had in their possession since the '60s, that were in their files, that they have always had, and that we requested that they produce to us. And then once we got them, I went over them page by page, through thousands of pages, and extracted all the evidence and then gave it back to them and said, "Now, tell me Joe Lundowski didn't work for you." And I also gave copies to the media, and they stopped denying it. ...