""The Silence," a Frontline PBS documentary on sexual abuse in the village of St. Michael, Alaska, opens with scenes of one kind of silence. It is the vast silence of the snowy mountains of remote, far northern Alaska.

But the silence that is the broadcast's real focus is of a different type. It is the silence of shame, guilt and despair that descended on this 360-person village beginning in 1968. In that year, sexual abuse that would extend to 80 percent of the children of St. Michael began. It would not end until 1983. An entire generation of St. Michael’s children were devastated by a Catholic priest, George Endal, and his assistant, Deacon Joseph Lundowski.

Though Lundowski was caught in the act of abuse and removed from St. Michael in 1975, Father Endal, "revered and above suspicion," remained in St. Michael until 1983, continuing to molest the boys and girls of the village. When the children spoke of what was happening, no one, including their parents, would listen. The children retreated into silence.

"The odds of being abused as a little Catholic boy or little Catholic girl in that diocese (the Diocese of Fairbanks) was staggeringly high," says attorney Ken Roosa, "higher than anyother place in the United States that has been investigated to date." Roosa serves as an attorney for many of the victims and brought a class action suit against the Fairbanks Diocese in 2002."

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