Maverick Among Eskimos

All along the lower Yukon, Eskimos in sealskin mukluks last week mushed their snarling dog teams to a place called Alakanuk--which means, in Eskimo, "It's a mistake."* They came to tell their political problems to a priest, for the Rev. Segundo Llorente, S.J., has just been elected to Alaska's state legislature, the first Roman Catholic priest to hold elected legislative office in a U.S. state./-

Almost as short (5 ft. 7 1/2 in.), at least as well padded (187 Ibs.), and even more cheerful than most of the Eskimos he serves, Jesuit Llorente, 51, is a maverick candidate--a write-in whose bishop almost forced him to resign. He is also a maverick priest. For 14 years, he has served as an official marriage counselor--first appointed by the territorial court, now by the new state's Supreme Court. As state official he cannot refuse to marry anyone legally free to marry. And however invalid they may be in the eyes of his church, he has performed ceremonies (though not Catholic ones) for both Protestants and divorced couples.

La Paloma on the Yukon. Spanish-born Father Llorente decided to be a priest when he was seven, joined the Jesuits at 16. "I wanted to be a missionary," he says. "I just put an atlas in front of me and I spotted Alaska. A kid feels very holy. I thought, 'Christ died for me on the Cross, so I'll die for him in the snow.'" (Segundo's brother Armando, also a Jesuit missionary, is serving in the sun as a student adviser in Castro's Havana University.)

Llorente came to the U.S. in 1930. He took his three years of theology at St. Mary's College in Kansas, and was ordained a priest in 1934. A year later he was in Alaska. "I heard him when he first came up the Yukon on a boat in the summer of 1935," says Eskimo Trader John Elachik. "He was singing La Paloma so loud we could hear him way up the river. We thought he was drunk."

The Eskimos soon learned that while Father Llorente never drank more than an occasional beer, he was one of the most exciting things that ever hit the tundra. He in turn made the Eskimos sound five times as colorful as they are, in stories he wrote for a Jesuit monthly in Spain, whose publisher began collecting his pieces and printing them in paperback books (there are now nine, all brisk sellers). Father Llorente also writes, in English, for the Fairbanks News-Miner, whose managing editor rates him "the best stringer we've got."

Sneeze in the Dark. His daily life provides plenty of material--like the story about the time his dog sled plunged through a hole in the Yukon ice. "It was bottomless," he recalls as he waves his elbows to show how he tried again and again to crawl out on the ice, only to have another piece break off and dunk him. "We broke through 73 feet that way. Twice I gave up. But life is sweet." Jesuit Llorente has served in various Alaskan missions, including three years north of the Arctic Circle. But his most arduous work began in 1950 when he was assigned to Alakanuk, on a Yukon delta island. Here he found 3,000 Eskimos and fewer than 100 whites--a parish of 4,000 square miles of tundra, which freezes solid in the winter's 17-hour, 35-below-zero nights.

He built a wooden church with his own hands, moved into a shed behind it. Father Llorente found himself coping with many a problem he had not learned about in his Jesuit schooling--the extra clerical work, for example, caused by the Eskimos' practice of changing their names whenever a member of the family dies, so that the returning spirit would not know whom to haunt. He soon laid aside his clericals (though he uses vestments at Mass). "I don't need identifying clothes," he explains. "They know me if they hear me sneeze in the dark."

Necessary Evil. Last September, Father Llorente heard that the Eskimos of Alaska's 24th District were planning to write in his name as Democratic candidate for the state legislature. Promptly he asked his bishop, the Most Rev. Francis D. Gleeson, S.J., who told him it was all right to take the job provided that he did nothing to get himself elected. The final count: 210 for Father Llorente, 93 and 91 for his two opponents. At this point, Bishop Gleeson began to have second thoughts--especially in a year when Protestant-Catholic tensions had become an election issue. He asked Representative-elect Llorente to resign, and the priest dutifully sent his bishop a note of resignation addressed to Alaska's Governor William Egan, together with a letter explaining why it should not be forwarded ("If I don't go, I failed the voters").

Last week the smiling Eskimos of the 24th District heard good news over the short wave: Bishop Gleeson had changed his mind; Father Llorente could serve. Explained the bishop: "In this particular district, for a priest to act as a legislator can be of real benefit to the people, but in general I would call it something along the lines of a necessary evil." Said Llorente: "It's a great testimony to the strength of American culture when a Spaniard who is a Catholic priest is elected to the legislature by Eskimos."

* Because in Gold Rush days, stern-wheelers bucking the summer current traditionally mistook this unpromising spot for a trading post six miles upriver.

/- Closest to setting a precedent was Father Gabriel Richard, one of the founders of the University of Michigan, who was elected a territorial delegate to the U.S. Congress in 1823 before Michigan became a state in 1837.

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