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.
And yet. (There is always an “and yet.”) How to explain Packy Kobuk? On my return home from my winter trip to Alaska, I stopped by Nome’s Anvil Mountain Correction Center, where Packy was serving three months for assault. Sitting in a tiny visitor’s room, I studied Packy’s round face. In St. Michael, the Yu’piks lived in many ways just as their ancestors did 10,000 years ago. They harpooned whales, tracked herds of caribou migrating across the tundra and hunted walruses sleeping on icebergs in the Bering Sea. In midsummer they gathered wild berries, a key ingredient in Eskimo ice cream—a frozen and oddly tasty concoction of lard, fish, sugar and berries. Smells of the outdoor life hung heavy in the village: the salt air, the strips of salmon drying on racks, the seaweed washed up on the beach.
For now, Packy could smell only the disinfectants used to scrub the jail’s concrete floors. Alcohol and a violent temper had put him here often in his 46 years. As a child-abuse victim, who can blame him?
Wearing navy-blue prison clothes, the short, powerfully built man folded his callused hands on the table between us. A homemade Rosary hung from his neck, the blue beads held together by string from one of his village’s fish
ing nets. All of the now-grown Eskimos I had interviewed over the past week had lost their faith—except Packy.
He had been sodomized for years by Lundowski, who had also forced him to perform sex acts with other children. It began when Packy was 12. In exchange, Lundowski gave Packy coins from the collection box and cakes and casseroles made by villagers. These gifts raised his family’s standard of living in a place where poverty was of the Third World variety.
After eight years of abuse, Lundowski left St. Michael suddenly one morning on a hastily arranged flight with a bush pilot, reportedly chased from the village by angry parents who had finally uncovered the truth. No one in the village ever talked about what happened—except Packy. He had asked for help over the years from at least two bishops, five priests and village elders. Everyone told him to keep quiet and stop stirring up trouble.
Following the death in 1999 of a priest who served in St. Michael and Stebbins, Kobuk was asked by a Jesuit superior to take more than 16 loads of documents, notepads, books and trash from the two parishes to the villages’ dumps in his four-wheel ATV and trailer.
Kobuk said he brought along 15 gallons of stove oil because the priest said the trash needed to be burned. He said the priest fed the documents and books into the flames, eliminating any evidence of wrongdoing that happened in the parishes over the years. (Jesuit officials claim it was a routine housecleaning and that nothing important was destroyed.)
“He made sure these would burn to ashes and made sure there was no trace,” Packy said. “He was reading a lot of them, too, before he threw them in.”
I pointed to the Rosary.
“Why do you still believe?”
“It’s not God’s work what happened to me,” he said softly, running his fingers along the Rosary beads. He spoke in clipped words whose cadence matched the Yu’pik language he no longer understood. “They were breaking God’s commandments—even the people who didn’t help. They weren’t loving their neighbors as themselves.”
I didn’t tell Packy about my own doubts about faith. Listening to him filled me with shame. My faith had collapsed. He had been through much worse than anything I could imagine—raped for years by a man he believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. Told to keep quiet by bishops, priests and village elders. And his belief never wavered.
I asked him to tell me more. He told me that he regularly got down on his knees in his jail cell to pray, an act that brought ridicule from other inmates.
“A lot of people make fun of me, asking if the Virgin Mary is going to rescue me,” Packy said. “Well, I’ve gotten help more times from the Virgin Mary through intercession than from anyone else. I won’t stop. My children need my prayers.”
In the late spring, I met Packy again, this time at his home in St. Michael. He told me he had recently followed the fresh tracks that a grizzly bear had made in the gray sand of a deserted beach. Packy said he could never commit suicide because it was against his beliefs, but he had hoped the grizzly would eat him and end his misery. But then, approaching some bushes where he was sure the bear has hiding, Packy had a change of heart. As he ran back down the beach, he prayed to Jesus to rescue him.
Packy’s heart aches for the church in St. Michael. Until recently, he couldn’t bring himself to set foot in it. Instead, on Sundays, Packy walked through his dilapidated village, reciting prayers and parts of the Catholic liturgy that he had learned from Lundowski. Packy included a prayer for his molester, who died in 1995. The Alaska Native asks God to accept his molester into heaven.
“I pray for Lundowski, for this soul,” Packy says. “I just want to heal.”
SIXTEEN
Letting Go of God
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
—SIGMUND FREUD, THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION
AFTER MY TRIP to Alaska, my head finally had to admit to what had happened in my heart three years before, when I had stopped attending church. I no longer believed in God—at least not a personal one who lovingly looked over me and answered my prayers. But before I officially surrendered my faith, I made one last stab at trying to recover it.
I turned to John Huffman, my pastor at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. He had always been a spiritual Superman to me—and not because of the national reputation that landed him on the board of directors for evangelical powerhouse organizations such as World Vision and Christianity Today. It was because he had lost a wonderful 23-year-old daughter to cancer at the height of his very public ministry and handled the tragedy with incredible grace—a gift, he would tell you in his booming baritone voice, that came from God. He had been through life’s cruelest moment, tested like few had, and his faith remained steadfast.
I also liked John because of his approachability. Though a first-rate intellectual who had earned a PhD, he also was a weekend athlete and a huge sports fan, and had a good sense of humor that allowed him to poke fun even at his own tendency to drop names. It was an attractive combination. I took John to dinner and told him about my crisis of faith. I asked him if I could e-mail him some tough questions about Christianity. He agreed without hesitation. Rock solid in his faith, I think he welcomed the challenge.
My questions were basic, verging on the clichéd, but I desperately wanted some solid answers I could grasp so I could climb back up into my faith. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God get credit for answered prayers but no blame for unanswered ones? Why do we believe in the miraculous healing power of God when He’s never been able to regenerate a limb or heal a severed spinal chord? Here is our exchange:
Bill: “Okay, John. I’ve been holding off until I think of the perfect question to begin. Since that hasn’t happened, let’s just start here. Does it bother you that God seems to get a pass no matter how a prayer turns out? If the prayer is answered (and someone recovers from a grave illness, for example), then God is said to be a loving Lord who cares about His children’s wishes. They asked and they received.
“But then when the prayer doesn’t get answered (the person dies, for example), the Christian will say: Well, it’s God’s will. Or the prayer was answered, but not in the way we expected. Or we simply can’t know the Lord’s mysterious ways.
“The bottom line is: God seems to be praised, or at least still believed in, no matter how the prayers turn out. Is that just too convenient?”
John: “I know what you mean. I must admit that I get a bit ticked off myself at the insensitivity and even narcissism of people who seem to blithely dismiss life’s tragedies, exempting God from any responsibility while they grandly praise Him for everything good that happens.
“I remember how hurt I was when my daughter Suzanne died of cancer at age 23, while I heard some Christians praising God for His goodness on matters as small as getting a parking space to items as big as the fact that their child diagnosed with terminal cancer was finally healed.
“At the same time, I’d have to admit that I probably fall into the category somewhat similar to those you’ve described, as I find myself troubled with those people who wouldn’t think for a moment to express gratitude to God for the good they experience but are quick to damn Him for anything that goes wrong.
“Genuine gratitude can transform one’s life. The capacity to thank God for the blessings and also praise Him in difficult times, in my estimation, is a sign of maturing faith. As much as I hated losing my precious daughter, every so often someone would come to me and say, ‘Why in the world would God allow your daughter to die, given all the good you do as a pastor?’ My genuine response would be, ‘Why shouldn’t I experience this pain? Why should I be any more exempt from loss than anyone else?’
“I don’t think that God is in the business of zapping people indiscriminately. He didn’t create sin. He didn’t create diseas
e. He didn’t create spousal abuse. The buildup of sludge from all of our centuries of human disobedience to God takes its toll.
“But ultimately, I may end up sounding just like the persons who give you trouble. My ultimate affirmation is let God be God and acknowledge that He is in charge. He knows what I don’t know. And frankly, if I’m totally honest with you, a life of gratitude is one that bows before the Sovereign God arguing with Him on those things that trouble me, lamenting the losses of life, but ultimately saying, ‘Thank you for your blessings and help me handle the painful losses, because I know that You know what I don’t know. You, God, are infinite; I’m human and finite. Right now, I only see in part from my human perspective. You see the big picture. Thank you for the blessings and thank you for giving me the strength to handle life’s tragedies and even to voluntarily involve myself in the pain of others, helping them in a way in which I allow my heart to be broken by the very things that break the heart of God.’”
Bill: “So the seeming randomness of God’s blessing and intervention isn’t random at all, but we can only understand the bigger picture after death? In the meantime, the crooked, atheist businessman prospers and the child of devout Christian parents dies. Why would a loving God make this impossible for us to understand? What’s the point of that?”
John: “I guess I’d have to accept your observation that the randomness of God’s blessing and intervention isn’t random at all and that perhaps we can only understand the bigger picture after death.
“But I’m not prepared to quite leave it at that.
“I am a rational person, like you, and I do want left-brain answers to just about everything.
“I’ve discovered that there are some good answers to some of my questions in life, like ‘Will we have a wreck if I irresponsibly take a left turn into oncoming fast-moving traffic?’ The answer is quite easy for me to see. It’s my own error, stupidity, mental lapse or selfishness that causes tragedy and may kill me and my loved ones. For such activity on my part, if I survive, I must face the consequences.
Losing My Religion Page 21