FAIRBANKS — “The Silence,” a 30-minute program documenting one of Bishop Donald Kettler’s journeys of atonement across the Fairbanks Catholic Diocese will be the lead story on Frontline, PBS’s public affairs program, at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
The documentary focuses on Kettler’s trip in early December to the village of St. Michael on Alaska’s western coast, where a generation of Yup’ik children were molested by Catholic clergy and workers.
The Bishop’s trips to apologize to abuse victims in the many churches where abuse took place were mandated by the diocese’s 2010 bankruptcy settlement.
The documentary is heart-wrenching and difficult to watch as the victims — now adults — detail how they suffered as children.
Their pain as powerless children is still vivid in their faces as they talk with the bishop, telling of abuse by George Endal, a Jesuit priest, and Joseph Lundowski, purported to be a Trappist monk, during the 1960s and 1970s.
A public service announcement will precede the program because of the graphic nature of the dialogue, said producer Tom Curran, who grew up in Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Curran left Alaska with his family at age 11, in 1974, returning as an adult to work as a cameraman on seven Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races.
“I felt privileged to spend some time in the villages and had a deep respect for the people there who were always so nice and friendly and welcoming,” he said.
Curran said he was shaken and haunted by the sexual abuse stories that began coming out of Alaska in the past decade.
“There was a real pull to tell the story of what happened there and why it happened, and that is what pulled me in initially,” he said.
Curran contacted the Fairbanks Diocese, and arrangements were made to travel with the Kettler to one of the dozens of small communities where the bishop conducted listening sessions with abuse survivors.
In the year since Kettler began his journey of atonement, he has visited and apologized to sexual abuse victims in 30 communities including Fairbanks and Anchorage, and he has a half-dozen more to go.
It has been an exhausting year for Kettler, a secular priest who arrived from South Dakota and was ordained in 2002 to head the missionary diocese which historically has been led by Jesuit bishops.
Throughout his travels, Kettler said he keeps asking himself how much healing is happening within the talking circles and healing services.
“The answer that comes most often is that if we can get people to talk about what has happened to them, healing can begin,” he said.
“If people who have been abused can come together and share it with others that have been abused and share that, it seems to be the most important thing,” he said.
Kettler said he also realizes that his travels to meet and talk with abuse survivors are only a first step in the healing process.
“I want to continue it. I need to hear locally from villages, and survivors and church personnel to hear what they feel is the important next step, and what would be most effective,” he said.
Kettler is the first Catholic bishop in the United States to travel and personally apologize to sexual abuse survivors, Curran said.
“Given the additional scandals unfolding in Philadelphia and Chicago at present, this is a timely film nationally as well,” he said.
A screening at Bear’s Tooth in Anchorage at 8 p.m., April 28, will be followed by panel discussion. Panel members include Curran, abuse survivor Elsie Boudreau, canon law expert Patrick Wall, trauma expert Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer, elder Max Dolchok, elder and healer Rita Blumenstein, and reporter Mark Trahant.
Contact staff writer Mary Beth Smetzer at 459-7546. |
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