Thread by @reveal

1/ The Catholic Church for years shuffled @TheJesuits priests accused of sexual abuse in and out of Native communities.

A new trove of internal documents shows how they hid this abuse. And sent many of them to retire in a house on the @GonazagaU campus. revealnews.org/article/these-…

2/ @EmilySchwing first started reporting this story while working as news director at @KNOM in Alaska. She heard rumors about the station’s founder, a Jesuit priest named James Poole. But never anything concrete.

3/ That changed when Emily spoke to Elsie Boudreau, the first Alaska Native victim of childhood clergy sex abuse to publicly identify herself and her abuser.

That abuser, Boudreau said, was James Poole.

4/ Poole repeatedly abused Boudreau when she volunteered at the radio station as a child, she said.

Court filings point to more than 20 victims, both children and young women.

5/ Boudreau’s story was part of a larger pattern.

In the early 2000’s, hundreds of civil lawsuits alleging abuse were filed in Alaska and the Northwest against the Jesuits.

6/ The Jesuits agreed to pay $166 million to victims as part of their bankruptcy settlement, the third largest in Catholic Church history.

seattletimes.com/seattle-news/n…

7/ @EmilySchwing kept digging. Using church documents and published lists of Jesuit priests in 5 Northwest states, she and @mikejcorey discovered there are more than 3x the number of Jesuits accused of sexual abuse in those areas compared to the average for the rest of the U.S.

8/ She also found that that Jesuits accused of sexual abuse were shuffled around more than 100 Native communities in Alaska and on Indian Reservations across the Northwest.

9/ Here’s how Patrick Wall, an advocate for victims of clergy sex abuse, described it:

“We see a wholesale slaughter of generations by the Jesuits in Alaska.”

10/ Meanwhile, church leadership believes crimes were committed. But Jesuits accused of sexual abuse were never charged or prosecuted.

In Alaska, there are more than 300 childhood victims of clergy sex abuse. All are Native.

11/ There’s more: When Jesuits accused of sexual abuse reached retirement age in Alaska and the Northwest, they wound up at a retirement home on the @GonzagaU campus.

It’s called Cardinal Bea House, and over 32 years, it housed at least 20 accused priests.

12/ @EmilySchwing asked a Jesuit leader, Father John Whitney, about how he dealt with Poole and other abusers.

Whitney said he did not inform Gonzaga administrators or police in Spokane about Poole’s history after moving him into Cardinal Bea House.

13/ Whitney said if Poole had been allowed to live independently he surely would have abused more people, even at his advanced age. The house, Whitney said, was “a retirement community where he could be monitored.”

14/ Once at the home, there were specific “safety plans” for abusers that banned sexually abusive priests from commingling with students.

While we learned of no reports of residents abusing Gonzaga students, the restrictions were not rigorously enforced.

15/ Poole said he regularly went to the school library and basketball games. He also said he met with a female student alone in the living room of Cardinal Bea House when she came to interview him for a report on Alaska.

16/ All told, more than 90 Jesuit priest accused of sexual abuse in Alaska and the Northwest were never criminally charged or prosecuted. After years of care at Bea House, they died quietly and were buried outside Spokane, Washington.

17/ More than 650 Jesuit priests are buried in a tiny cemetery here.

It sits outside the gate of a K-12 school. Eight percent of the priests buried here have been accused of sexual abuse.

18/ For more stories like this, sign up for our newsletter: revealnews.org/newsletter