Jesuits Quietly Sent Abusive Alaska Priests to Retire with Others on a Washington College Campus

By Marisa Monroe
Clarksburg Caller
April 10, 2019

https://clarksburgcaller.com/jesuits-quietly-sent-abusive-alaska-priests-to-retire-with-others-on-a-washington-college-campus/61868/

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the nonprofit news outlet Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.

This Oct. 22, 2018 photo shows the marker for where the remains of Rev. James Poole are interned at Mount St. Michael in , Wash. Over the course of his life, Poole was accused of sexually abusing at least 20 women. (Emily Swing/Reveal via AP)

On the surface, Father James Poole seemed like the cool priest in Nome. He founded a Catholic mission radio station that broadcast his Jesuit sermons alongside contemporary pop hits. A 1978 story in People magazine called Poole “Western Alaska’s Hippest DJ . Comin‘ at Ya with Rock’n’Roll ‘n‘ Religion.”

Behind the radio station‘s closed doors, Poole was a serial sexual predator. He abused at least 20 women and girls, according to court documents. At least one was 6 years old. One Alaska Native woman says he impregnated her when she was 16, then forced her to get an abortion and blame her father for raping her. Her father went to prison.

Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, Poole’s inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere.”

But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University‘s campus in , Washington.

For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest, an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

A trove of internal Jesuit correspondence shows a longstanding pattern of Jesuit officials in the Oregon Province — an administrative area that included Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska — privately acknowledging issues of inappropriate sexual behavior, but not releasing that information to the public, which avoided scandal and protected the perpetrators from prosecution.

When abuse was discovered, the priests would be reassigned, sometimes to another Native community.

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Once the abusive priests reached retirement age, the Jesuits moved them to Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga’s campus or another Jesuit residence, to comfortably spend the rest of their lives in relative peace and safety. The university administration did not respond to requests for an interview to answer whether the administration or student body were aware of the presence of known sexual offenders on campus.

The last known abusive priest was moved out of Cardinal Bea House in 2016, Jesuit records show.

Father John Whitney, the former leader of the Oregon Province who ordered Poole to move into Cardinal Bea House, said the Jesuit order is obligated to provide for priests in retirement. He said it was the only facility in the province where past offenders like Poole, then in his 80s, could be contained effectively while also receiving necessary medical care.

Poole resided at Cardinal Bea House from 2003 to 2015. If he had been allowed to live independently, without church oversight, he surely would have abused more people, even at his advanced age, Whitney said in an interview.

The house, Whitney said, was “a retirement community where he could be monitored.”

This Oct. 22, 2018 photo shows the Cardinal Bea House on the campus of Gonzaga University in , Wash. Cardinal Bea House played host to at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual abuse. (Emily Swing/Reveal via AP)

In a pair of depositions in 2005, Whitney said he did not inform Gonzaga administrators or police in about Poole’s history after moving him into Cardinal Bea House. A Police Department spokesperson said they had not received any reports, either from Gonzaga or the Jesuit order, about allegations against any residents of Cardinal Bea House.

Non-abusing Jesuits also lived at Cardinal Bea House, but there were specific “safety plans” for abusers that banned sexually abusive priests from commingling with students. The Oregon Province would not release copies of the plans. While we learned of no reports of residents abusing Gonzaga students, the restrictions were not rigorously enforced.

In a deposition in one of the several lawsuits filed against him, Poole said he regularly went to the school library and basketball games. Poole 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. Student journalists and filmmakers in 2010 and 2011 were also permitted to interview residents, including Joseph Obersinner, who worked in Native communities in Montana, Washington and Idaho. He was accused of sexual misconduct against a minor.

“We love being right in the middle of campus,” Obersinner told the school‘s student newspaper. “It‘s a blessing to see the active energy and happiness of youth every day.”

Cardinal Bea House is a modest low-rise brick building, with large windows in front and a small carport behind. It resembles an unremarkable office building, save for the white statue of an angel-winged saint standing guard over the front entrance. On a recent crisp autumn day, a prankster had slipped a hand-rolled cigarette between the statue‘s fingers.

While the building appears on campus maps and is listed in the campus directory, it‘s not officially part of the private Jesuit university. Cardinal Bea House is owned by the Jesuit order of the Catholic Church.

Poole was joined at Cardinal Bea House by other priests whose abuse was known, often for years, by the Jesuit order.

Father James Jacobson, sent there in the mid-2000s, was accused of sexual abuse by members of the Alaska Native community of Nelson Island. He claimed he never forced anyone to have sex, saying in a deposition that he had consensual sex with seven Native women. He admitted to fathering four children and using church funds to hire prostitutes in Anchorage and Fairbanks when he was principal of a Jesuit boarding school in Glennallen.

Another priest, Henry Hargreaves, accused of sexually assaulting young boys, was sent to Cardinal Bea House by 2003, and subsequently allowed to lead prayer services in at least four Native American communities on two reservations in Washington state.

The abusive Jesuits at Cardinal Bea House were part of the Oregon Province‘s outsized problem with sexual misconduct. The province had 92 Jesuits accused of sexual abuse, by far the most of any province in the country, according to data we compiled from church records, a database maintained by advocates for sex abuse victims, and information released earlier this month by the Jesuits. In addition, about 80 percent of accused abusers worked in Native communities in the Oregon Province.

Poole has been described as charismatic, outgoing and narcissistic, so he was perfectly suited for his role as the voice of KNOM, the radio station he founded in 1971. Elsie Boudreau, an Alaska Native, was a station volunteer and one of Poole‘s victims. From the time she was 10 until she was 16, she volunteered at KNOM.

Boudreau said in an interview that when she was 11 or 12, during a Saturday music request show in which they were alone in the studio, Poole would kiss her on the lips and fondle her, something she didn‘t realize was wrong until she was much older. He also made her sit on his lap and lie on top of his body.

For Boudreau, it was slap in the face that Poole lived out his retirement comfortably until he died early this year. “To me, what that says is they are taken care of,” Boudreau said. “They are protected by the Catholic Church, when the victims were never protected.”

The Jesuits‘ deep roots in Native communities

The Catholic Church was deeply embedded in the Native communities of Alaska and Indian reservations in the Northwest. In the early 1900s, the Jesuits had established a school and an orphanage in Elsie Boudreau‘s hometown, the predominantly Alaska Native community of St. Mary‘s in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Jesuits, officially called the Society of Jesus, are a Catholic religious order founded in the 1500s. While Jesuits can work in various roles from parish priests to teachers, the order is known for its academic and socially conscious bent. There are more than 100 Jesuit high schools, colleges and universities in North America.

Jesuit priests were formidable figures in small Native villages, presiding over daily life from Mass to marriages, baptisms to burials; even teaching catechism lessons, where some of the abuse of the youngest victims took place. Boudreau said she viewed her Catholicism as more central to her identity than being Yup‘ik. That religious identity was shattered by her abuse.

“The whole premise behind the Catholic Church and their mission with the Native people, with indigenous people, was to strip them of their identity,” Boudreau said. “And so sexual abuse was one way. I think it‘s intentional when you have an institution that is aware of problem priests, perpetrator priests, and moves them to places where they believe that people are ‘less than,‘ where they believed the people there would not speak out.”

In 2002, two other abuse victims in Boudreau‘s community filed a lawsuit against the church. Learning of the suit from a news story, Boudreau, then in her early 30s, had a shock of recognition. She, too, had suffered abuse, and no longer wanted to remain silent.

Boudreau reported her abuse and was deeply unsatisfied with the response. The region‘s presiding bishop eventually invited her to a meeting, but Boudreau said he didn‘t seem to understand how the abuse had affected her life.

“It was very clear he didn‘t care about what happened to me,” Boudreau said. “He didn‘t acknowledge that little girl who was hurt and say, ‘I‘m sorry this happened to you, what can I do?‘ Instead, I became a liability.”

Yet, Jesuit leadership had known about James Poole‘s behavior for longer than Boudreau had been alive. In a 1960 letter to a Jesuit official, local Jesuit leader Segundo Llorente fretted over Poole‘s conduct. Poole regularly had long, one-on-one conversations with young girls about sex, Llorente wrote. Llorente‘s letter speculated that Poole, “has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere. Some think that may be (sic) he is projecting outwardly what is eating him inwardly . he is deliberately placing himself at all times in dangerous situations.”

There might have been some personal insight in those words. The names of both Llorente and the Alaska church official with whom he was corresponding, Father Paul O‘Connor, appeared on a list released by the Fairbanks Diocese in 2009 of priests accused of sexual misconduct.

Despite Llorente‘s warning, Poole‘s abuse of minors and young women in Alaska went on for decades, according to attorneys who represented clients, as well as letters from church officials and other court documents. At least one victim accused him of rape.