Ministering to 5,000 Catholics along a 400-mile coast in Alaskan diocese - Ministries - Juneau - Statistical Data Included

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 20, 2002 by Patricia Lefevere

In a contest for most beautiful diocese, Juneau--with its glaciers, rain forests, fjords, lakes, mountains, rivers, waterfalls and wildlife--could win, hands down. But the challenges of ministering to 5,500 Catholics in 11 parishes and 16 missions and stations dispersed over a dozen islands along a 400-mile coastline are formidable.

Isolation characterizes many places in the diocese--a reason to move to Alaska for many in the "lower 48," as Alaskans like to call their southern continental cousins. But the remote terrain presents major obstacles when one's mission is to bring the sacraments and celebrate Mass in these far-flung villages.

Ask Fr. Michael Nash, rector of Juneau's Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Cathedral. He was previously pastor to several small communities along Alaska's Inside Passage. To reach St. Rose of Lima in Wrangell, 120 miles from Juneau, takes 11 hours by boat.

That's why Nash still flies some 300 hours per year--an air shepherd descending to a grateful flock along Alaska's southern tail. Known as "Crash Nash" to his flying mates, he's been luckier with the vagaries of the weather--heavy fog and occasionally blowing snow--than some.

On March 23 his confrere, Fr. Jim Kelley, pastor of Holy Rosary Parish in Dillingham in the Anchorage archdiocese, died when his Piper Cherokee 140 crashed into Tuklung Mountain. Kelley, a retired Navy chaplain, who had been a pilot more than 40 years, was en route to the Bristol Bay villages for Palm Sunday services.

Nash told NCR he decided to explore aviation after studying in the high school and college seminary of his native Seattle. His father and grandfather were private pilots; his sister is a commercial pilot.

After meeting Archbishop Francis Hurley of Anchorage, now retired, a veteran pilot, Nash saw how he could link ministry and flying. In 1980 he was ordained for the Juneau diocese and has served here ever since except for three years of study in Louvain, Belgium.

Juneau has both the smallest population and the smallest church staff of any U.S. see. Though a diocese for only a half-century, Juneau Catholics will soon mark 125 years of church life in their environs. Gold and the people who came prospecting for it provided a large vein of early Catholic life here

Our Lady of the Mines

The discovery of gold in what is today Juneau brought a Dutch missionary from Canada to the area in 1879. When Pope Leo XIII established Alaska as an independent apostolic prefecture in 1894--no longer under the jurisdiction of the Vancouver Island diocese--the Jesuits provided the first prefect and assumed responsibility for the territory. They named their first church and school Our Lady of the Mines.

When thousands of gold seekers rushed in during the Klondike stampede of the late 1890s, docking in Juneau and Skagway, the Jesuits built a parish in Skagway. The town of 800 citizens--it swells to 3,000 or more with the influx of summer retirees and of people serving the cruise line industry--sees 750,000 cruise passengers between May and October. Some 300 attend weekend Masses in Skagway.

"There are a lot of people here who would put a big chain across the harbor," Nash said. Alaskans have mixed feelings about cruise ships and were the first legislators to forbid dumping waste into local waters. But it's less about pollution than about how tens of thousands of tourists "intrude on the space of the local people," Nash said.

Still, tourism remains the state's top industry. In the wake of job shortages and greater restrictions on logging--not to mention Americans' increased fear of traveling overseas since 9/11--the liners are bound to bring their bounty and their burden to Skagway, Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka and other ports in the diocese. Not only do Juneau's 13 priests--two are Oblates and two African--ministro to thousands of tourists each weekend, they also provide for the spiritual needs of hundreds of cruise ship employees.

What peeves Nash is the sometimes "condescending" attitude some visitors display toward the locals, assuming them to be uneducated, even "backward." Instead the priest points to local concerts with top-flight performers, to well-schooled, broadly experienced professionals and to fishermen who read Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevski.

People assume that Alaskans are all alike, he said. The diocese offers a good example of the state's diversity. A quarter of its Catholics are Filipino, another quarter are from other parts of Asia, 40 to SO percent are Anglos and 5 to 10 percent are native Alaskans. In summer hundreds of Mexicans migrate from Oregon and Washington to work in the fish canneries.

The Alaskan Catholic bishops have addressed one of the most divisive issues between rural and urban residents, namely "subsistence." The state's constitution guarantees all Alaskans equal access to fish and game resources, while federal law gives a harvest priority to subsistence users in rural areas. The bishops favor allowing priority to subsistence users and have argued that the constitution "may have created an injustice" for the state's native peoples by including the equal access provision.