Frontline Investigates Church Sex Abuse in Alaska

The Silence - Tuesday, April 19, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS
FRONTLINE reveals a little-known chapter of the Catholic Church sex abuse story: decades of abuse of Native Americans by priests and other church workers in Alaska.

In The Silence, the first of two magazine segments airing Tuesday, April 19, 2011, at 9 P.M. ET on PBS, FRONTLINE producer Tom Curran and reporter Mark Trahant examine the legacy of abuse by a number of men who worked for the Catholic Church along Alaska's far west coast in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They would leave behind a trail of hundreds of claims of abuse, making this one of the hardest hit regions in the country....

"This was 1970," says Anchorage attorney Ken Roosa, who represented the Alaska victims in a class action law suit against the church. "It was absolutely unthinkable that the Catholic Church could be involved in the sexual abuse of children. There was nowhere for the kids to hide. There was no one they could talk to. The adults believed the abusers over their own children. It was a perfect storm for molestation." As part of the church's class action settlement with the victims, the bishop of Fairbanks, Donald Kettler, was asked to do something that no other bishop in the country had done on this scale: return to all of the villages where the abuse occurred and apologize to the victims in person.

In December 2010, FRONTLINE gained unique access to Bishop Kettler's visit to the village of St. Michael -- frequently referred to as "ground zero" for the abuse -- where the bishop would come face-to-face with the reality of the abuse that the church had refused to acknowledge for years.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-silence/