episcopal

In the run-up to the poll, the head of the episcopal conference - the Catholic co-ordinating body in the country - had lambasted the commission's chief, Denis Kadima, for getting the elections "off to a bad start".

“The Russians did not try to Russify the natives,” said the Rev. Deacon Thomas Rivas, the episcopal secretary to the Alaska Orthodox bishop.

The diplomatic source said negotiations between the government and the country's Catholic bishops are ongoing over Alvarez's future, and that the formerly jailed prelate was currently at the Catholic episcopal compound in the capital.

It was also the first publication to report on the clergy sex abuse crisis and the episcopal cover-up beginning in the 1980s, many years before the Boston Globe published its own investigation.

At 54, he was two decades shy of the normal retirement age for bishops, and he never held an episcopal appointment after that.