COLUMN ONE : At Earth’s End, Priests Try Harder : In the Far North, Canada’s native peoples have grown disillusioned with the ‘Blackrobes.’ But the Catholic Church is making new efforts with clergy from Poland.

More than 100 years ago, the “Francis Xavier of the frigid zone,” Father Henri Grollier, paddled down the Mackenzie River and beached here, kitted out with a long black cassock, a bronze crucifix and the Oblate order’s motto of grueling devotion, “ Usque ad extremum terrae “ -- “Even unto the ends of the Earth.”

He evidently made a compelling sight: Within days, he had blessed five marriages, baptized 34 children and heard 11 adults ask to be received into the Roman Catholic Church.

“My trip to Ft . Simpson was a triumphal march,” he reported to his faraway bishop.

All of that belonged to the glory days of Roman Catholicism in the Canadian North, a time when the “Blackrobes,” along with the rough-hewn fur traders of the Hudson’s Bay Co. and a few scattered Mounties, made up what there was of a Canadian “government” presence in these parts.

Single-minded young priests traveled by dog sled in winter and canoe in the summer, with bundled vestments and skins filled with holy water and wine. They slept on spruce boughs in hide tents, hunted, trapped and fished for their food and everywhere sought the nomadic native peoples they hoped to convert, who in turn sought the migrating caribou.

These days, the Catholic Church in the hard, cold North presents a far less invigorating picture. The native peoples of northern Canada--the Dene Nation, the Cree and the Inuit, or Eskimos--have grown deeply disillusioned about white outsiders trying to uplift and “improve” them. Many have turned to their traditional legends and beliefs, and in doing so, have rejected the church.

And now, too, there is the sheer scarcity of priests. The earliest Blackrobes streamed to the Canadian northwest from France, Belgium and Quebec, bringing with them a heartening supposition that as the church took root and flourished in the Arctic, a native clergy would rise to carry on.

But not only have Dene and Inuit men proved uninterested in the priesthood; these days, even the white Europeans who used to serve in the North are unwilling to accept the rigors of celibacy, loneliness, Arctic weather and an evermore unreceptive flock.

“I have quite a problem on my hands with recruiting,” admits Bishop Denis Croteau, sitting in his simply furnished office in Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories. Indeed, when Bishop Croteau came here from Quebec as a young priest in 1960, there were 62 priests to shrive men’s souls in the vast 775,000-square-mile Mackenzie-Ft . Smith diocese. Now there are only 19.

Most of these are in their 60s and even older. Until recently, a glum reality hung over them: When they died, they knew the church in the North was likely to die with them.

“But there is a light at the end of the tunnel,” the bishop adds. That light is being shed by Poland, a country where, in sharp contrast to Canada and the United States, Catholic seminaries are full, the church enjoys widespread credibility and young men come to holy orders with a zeal to share what they have with the rest of the world.

In 1986, a delegation of anxious Oblates from northwestern Canada visited Poland, to beg their brethren to send a few good men north of the 60th parallel. The appeal worked. By 1995, Poland is expected to have dispatched a dozen young priests to take up the work of the aging Blackrobes in the North.

“Poland seems willing to supply us,” says Bishop Croteau, whose manpower worries were such that he dropped courageous, if futile, hints in the wake of a papal visit here that perhaps priests ought to be free to marry.

But in attracting young Polish Oblates to northern Canada, the church is also attracting controversy. For northern Canada is marginalized and poor--a little bit of the Third World in North America, people say--and the Blackrobes of yesteryear who grew to understand the region blazed a trail here toward the social gospel.

Much in the mold of the liberation theologists of Latin America, priests ministering in the Arctic and sub-Arctic have witnessed native misery and concluded that if the church were to have meaning in northern lives, it would have to get involved in northern, secular struggles.

Thus, it was missionary priests who set up the first cooperatives in northern Canada and who organized the first native-language radio broadcasts in the Arctic. It was priests who devised new alphabets for the indigenous northern languages, and priests who were the first to train scholarly eyes on traditional spiritual beliefs and practices.

One aging northern Oblate, Father Camille Piche, achieved local fame for saying Mass in Slavey, an Indian language, even though some of his congregants were unilingual whites. Lately, he has been fighting a proposed pulp mill that threatens to pollute traditional fishing waters of the Mackenzie River basin.

Another noted activist priest, the French-born Father Rene Fumoleau, wrote a path-breaking study of northern Indian treaties, and thereby sparked 20 years of tough land-tenure negotiations with the federal government. Militant Dene in the region regard Father Rene, who lives in a two-room cabin in Yellowknife with no running water, as one of but a handful of whites they can trust.

“We western missionaries felt we had more to teach than to learn,” Father Rene says of his early years in Canada, when he was given five dogs, a sled and instructions to ride a 2,000-mile priestly circuit every winter. “It was the colonial system. The situation changed, so I changed, too--no choice.”

Can the young priests of Poland build on such a legacy? The Polish clergy, after all, has encountered problems of a greatly different nature: not neglect by Indian-affairs bureaucrats or mindless resource exploitation by huge outside concerns, but half a century of totalitarian opposition.

Their thinking, as an unsurprising consequence, tends to the traditional and the conservative--not to say the reactionary. Liberation theology goes down poorly with the Poles; leftist biblical exegesis smacks all too much of the Marxist dogma that they and their village pastors struggled so long to overthrow.

Thus, when the Canadian delegation set out for Warsaw, skeptics worried. Would transplanted Polish priests ever fit in?

One answer may eventually be found in the fortunes of 29-year-old Father Andrezej Stendzina, now of Ft. Simpson. Father Andrezej is the first of the new Polish priests to arrive in the Mackenzie-Ft. Smith diocese, and today is by far the youngest priest serving the faithful for thousands of square miles.

“When I came to Ft. Simpson, I told the people, I have come to learn, not to teach,” he says in accented English. As yet, no one in Ft. Simpson, aside from a few local Canadians of Polish ancestry, has mastered the pronunciation of his Polish name. To everyone, he is simply Father Andrew.

Like most of his priest-compatriots, Father Andrew is an unstinting traditionalist. He has little truck with a married priesthood and believes that politics and religion mix at the peril of the latter.

Liberation theology? He shakes his head.

“When I hear that in some countries (church) people want to bring communism, I can’t believe it,” he says.

At the same time, Father Andrew is the very picture of open-mindedness when it comes to the folkways of Ft. Simpson, a traditional Dene meeting place that grew apace with the Hudson’s Bay trading post here. Already, he shuffles rhythmically in traditional Dene drum dances, down by the sacred confluence of the Liard and Mackenzie rivers. He has been teaching the young to play soccer. He hopes that in a few more months, he’ll be fluent enough to say Mass in Slavey.

Father Andrew may have his quarrel with a politically engaged priesthood, but the faith he has brought to northern Canada was shaped in no small part by a worldly wise, and militant, Polish church.

“The government was telling us stupid things, but people could learn the real facts at church,” he says, negotiating his pickup truck along the long, empty gravel roads that link the villages of his vast parish, stopping here and there to smoke a cigarette or read his daily office from an Oblate breviary. “The church was the moral support for everybody who wanted to change things.”

Father Andrew was still a seminarian, preparing for the work of the church in Africa, when the Canadian recruiters reached his hometown of Lubliniec, in southern Poland, looking for missionaries for the far north of another continent. He thought things through and concluded that the need in Canada was the more pressing.

“In Africa, they can get young priests any time,” he says.

In 1988, he arrived in Toronto, all his earthly possessions in two suitcases. He learned English, was ordained in Ft. Simpson, and said his first Mass in Edmonton, Alberta, at a nursing home for elderly missionaries.

“You could almost feel their excitement when they saw that finally someone young had come to continue their work,” he says. “They had sacrificed their health, their life, their energy, and they knew that when they had to leave, well. . . . “

There are eight villages in Father Andrew’s parish, some, but not all, connected by gravel roads. The biggest is Ft. Simpson, population 1,000 or so. It harbors a rectory roomy enough for the half a dozen priests who used to live here; there is also a nuns’ residence and a wooden church, painted green and white.

Now, though, the nuns are gone, and the priestly population is down to just two: Father Andrew and a 49-year-old colleague, Father George LaGrange, who until the Pole’s arrival was the youngest priest in the diocese. Gone, too, are the dog sleds of years gone by. Father George, a pilot, flies a light plane to the roadless villages, while Father Andrew serves the rest in his pickup.

Some of Father Andrew’s parishioners haven’t seen a resident priest in years. When he arrives on 40-below winter evenings, he must chip away the ice from the doorways, find fuel, scare up a place to sleep, hear confessions and say Mass. Some villages have eager beavers who want to help with the liturgy. But others have problems that come as quite a shock to him, after Poland.

Father Andrew had never even heard of child molestation before he left his homeland; here, he finds it a spreading concern.

He cannot help but notice the drunkards who dodge him in the streets of Ft. Simpson. He has received tearful alcoholics who say they want to dry out--and who leave the rectory and head straight for a bar. He has learned, on pastoral visits, to step nonchalantly over heaps of garbage on people’s living-room floors.

“It’s terrible sometimes,” he says. “It’s really hard.”

Still, in every household he visits, the people sooner or later ask him to pray with them.

There are those who pin a large measure of responsibility for the North’s rampant social problems on the Catholic Church itself. Angry native Canadians, baptized as children, say that in its efforts to “tame” them, the church undermined their culture and left them without a sense of who they are.

In particular, these natives blame Canada’s so-called residential schools, set up by the federal government to assimilate native children, and run by the Catholic Church. All across Canada, from 1920 to 1970, native children were taken out of their remote hunting villages and compulsorily packed off to the residential schools, where nuns cut off their braids, dressed them in uniforms, demanded that they speak French and English and made them attend Mass every day.

Critics now say that at the very least, the institutionalized children were robbed of their ability to live normal lives.

“There are a lot of family problems now (among native Canadians), because people don’t know how to parent,” says Alice Hill, a social worker in Yellowknife who grew up in a residential school. She herself is divorced, and adds that she cannot talk to her own Slavey-speaking mother any more, because the nuns forced her to speak English and forget Slavey.

Worse yet, some native adults now charge that they were beaten, malnourished and sexually abused in the schools. At one notorious residential school in Saskatchewan, the Thunderchild Boarding School, former students allege that one boy died after a severe beating, which police and the church deny.

What no one contests is an investigation that revealed 45 deaths out of 605 children between 1903 and 1948, when four desperate students torched the buildings, forcing the school’s closure. The deaths were from a variety of causes but the main ones were tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough and similar diseases. Critics of the residential schools say the children would not have contracted these diseases if they had been left in their villages.

All the same, other native Catholics are still stirred by the religious discipline and traditions that a priest like Father Andrew represents. One of these is Joe Mercredi, the mixed-blood editor of Ft. Simpson’s local newspaper, the Mackenzie Times.

Mercredi writes provocative native-rights editorials under the pen name “Ramjoe;” last summer, he even took up arms against the Canadian army over a land dispute in Quebec.

Yet for all that, he also keeps a picture of Pope John Paul II on his office wall, and ridicules fellow natives who trace their woes back to the arrival of the Catholic missionaries. He insists that residential schools like Thunderchild were the exception, not the norm. He worries that the social gospel will divide his people, and he admires tough, traditional priests. He was thrilled when he heard that the church was sending someone from Poland.

“I thought, the children are going to have a shield, and that is Father Andrew,” he says. “He will be like the priests when I was a kid.”

On a recent day, Mercredi turned up at the mission house door, asking Father Andrew to say Mass, not in English, not in Slavey, but in Latin.

“A lot of the old-timers prefer the Mass in Latin,” he explains. “Latin had a flair to it. By comparison, English seems dead.”

Later that afternoon, a surprised Father Andrew complied.

How to sort out the traditional and the modern, the European and the indigenous, the political and the personal? That will be Father Andrew’s biggest mission in the North.

“I still have a lot to learn,” he says. “I’ll probably be learning for the rest of my life.”