New Orleans' Archdiocese settles abuse suits
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The Archdiocese of New Orleans and Catholic Charities has agreed to pay more than $5 million to settle 20 lawsuits, most alleging sexual and physical mistreatment of children decades ago at homes for boys from troubled families.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond said the $5.182 million settlement, announced Tuesday, came after years of mediation and negotiation with the 20 victims and their families.
"We know that money doesn't heal wounds and it doesn't put back together a shattered heart, but it is important that the people with whom we settle know that we care about them and any other victim of sexual abuse," Aymond said.
He said the archdiocese decided to settle after various investigations showed the allegations to be credible.
"Obviously, anytime we talk about sexual abuse it's a sad day for the Church and sad circumstance, particularly when it's abuse by someone in the ministry because that person misused the trust and authority given to him.
"We felt it was important for us to take this initiative," he said. "This gives us the opportunity to apologize in the name of the Church, to offer assistance to the victims as well as offer care and compassion. Personally, I think pursuing this through the courts could be considered further abuse with them having to relive it all again before a judge and jury."
Aymond would not release the names of the victims or of the eight alleged abusers, whom he described as either priests, women religious or lay people who had been affiliated with Madonna Manor or Hope Haven. The two homes in Marrero, a New Orleans suburb, are now closed.
"The lawsuits relate back 40 or 50 years and all of the abusers are either deceased or very, very old," Aymond said. "I want to assure the community, though, that none of them are in active ministry.
"Our prayers go out to these victims, their families and all of those involved in this matter. I hope these mediations and negotiations will bring some peace and reconciliation to these victims and all those involved."
Aymond wouldn't discuss how the settlement would be distributed. He did say, however, that the money was accumulated through three sources: insurance proceeds, cash reserves and investment income from the sale of non-parish real estate sales.
"None of the funds area result of the implementation of the pastoral plan or closure of parishes," he said.
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 did more than $280 million in damage to church property and in the past year Our Lady of Good Counsel, St. Henry, and St. Francis de Sales parishes were closed as part of a consolidation plan put in place by former Archbishop Alfred Hughes. Parishioners from Our Lady of Good Counsel and St. Henry sued the archdiocese and briefly took over churches to try to preserve them after they were closed. Police were finally called to remove them and two protesters were arrested.
Plaintiffs' attorney Roger Stetter would not confirm the dollar amount or the number of cases settled, saying instead that cases are still pending — he would not confirm how many — and that he was "not thrilled" by the settlement amounts.
He said many of his clients settled because they were in dire financial straits and that, while there's never enough money to give someone back his life or his childhood, there is an opportunity to provide some level of financial security to victims so they can go back to school or get therapy or counseling.
"We view this as just a beginning," he said.
Stetter said he wants to believe the new archbishop is sincere when he apologizes but he said he believes the church — overall — needs to do more to address past wrongs, prevent future abuse and to reach out to all those who were abused.
"There has to be more accountability," Stetter said.
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‘You’re only as sick as your secrets’: New Orleans clergy abuse bankruptcy is uniquely acrimonious
ReplyDeleteThe church is using legal tactics to prevent testimony from survivors and spur expensive inquiries into its critics
by Jason Berry and Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian November 29, 2023
This is the first installment of a three-part series exploring how the archdiocese of New Orleans’s bankruptcy stands apart from other cases of its kind.
As his practice grew, the plaintiff attorney Richard C Trahant, 56, sent money to the Jesuit high school of New Orleans. Lots of money.
Trahant graduated from the storied all-boys college preparatory school in 1985, following in the footsteps of his father and great-uncle, a path his two sons would also follow. Jesuit alumni include the former mayors Mitch Landrieu – today the Joe Biden White House’s top infrastructure adviser – and Marc Morial, now president of the Urban League. Others are the jazz singer Harry Connick Jr and the award-winning novelist John Gregory Brown, among numerous other lawyers, public officials, physicians, scholars, CEOs and priests.
Trahant found a mentor in his principal, the Rev Anthony McGinn (class of 66). When McGinn became school president, Trahant’s mother worked 15 years as his secretary. The Jesuit priest presided over Trahant’s wedding with Amy Olavarrieta, baptized their four children and officiated at his mother’s funeral in 2013.
In 2015, Trahant wrote a $20,000 check to endow a scholarship in McGinn’s name. He embraced the Jesuits’ motto: “Men for others.” Yet in 2021, Trahant recalls, priests and staffers shunned Amy and him at the graduation mass at which their younger son, Garrison, spoke as valedictorian. McGinn had broken off contact since Trahant agreed to represent a 1983 Jesuit graduate who alleged being raped as a student by a custodian.
Many secondary schools, notably eastern college preps like Exeter Academy and Horace Mann in Manhattan, have weathered long-ago abuse cases. As Trahant’s school ties eroded, he took on a steadily increasing number of Catholic clergy abuse clients. He also lost his faith.
Yet he never imagined the blowback that would come after the New Orleans archdiocese, facing many abuse lawsuits, sought federal bankruptcy protection in 2020.
Today, Trahant has spent nearly $100,000 on his own legal fees, appealing Judge Meredith Grabill’s $400,000 fine on him for allegedly violating her order barring disclosure of church files. A federal bankruptcy halts the discovery process by which lawyers secure internal documents through subpoenas, subjecting defendants to sworn testimony in depositions.
Trahant in late 2021 advised his cousin, the principal of Jesuit rival Brother Martin high school, that the chaplain – Paul Hart – had a substantial stain in his past. As would later be revealed – yet not by Trahant because of the secrecy order – Hart had admitted molesting a teenage girl in the 1990s. He nonetheless had been stationed at Brother Martin by New Orleans’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond.
Hart quickly resigned.
Trahant claims that as an officer of the court he was legally bound to alert school officials to a known predator. He also insists he did not reveal any protected information, and school officials ultimately backed his version of events.
Nonetheless, a local newspaper article on Hart’s abrupt resignation stirred concern by Grabill and other attorneys in the bankruptcy case for a breach of secrecy blanketing church files.
Grabill ordered sworn testimony from Trahant and an investigation into his actions from the US bankruptcy court trustee. The trustee’s report remains secret from the general public.
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But Trahant could review it. And an accessible transcript shows he testified at one point that the report failed to find that he knowingly or willfully violated the protective order. The transcript does not show contrary evidence.
ReplyDeleteNonetheless, Grabill fined Trahant.
A spokesperson for Judge Grabill denied a Guardian interview request, saying: “No comment.”
Yet the $400,000 fine against Trahant – who is arguably one of the archdiocese’s most outspoken opponents – is regarded as highly unusual by many legal commentators, including several who won’t speak publicly for fear of drawing a case in front of Grabill.
One of those attorneys, who is involved in the New Orleans bankruptcy, marveled at how Donald Trump had been fined only $15,000 when the judge overseeing the former president’s civil fraud trial found he violated an order barring disparaging comments about judicial staff. An appeals court has since temporarily stayed the sanction pending an appeal.
The Vermont-based attorney Stephen C Rubino, who has spent three decades representing clergy abuse victims, said: “I have never heard of a sanction like that in a bankruptcy case – never.”
The St Paul attorney Jeff Anderson, a pioneer in clergy malpractice who has several clients in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy, said that a fine like Trahant’s “has never happened in any of the Chapter 11 [bankruptcy] cases that I know of”.
“My firm has been involved in 25 church bankruptcies,” Anderson said. “New Orleans is unique. A hostile judge has bought into the church’s position to attack a state court lawyer. The judge sees the lawyer as a villain.”
But, Anderson argues, in this case, “The villain is the archbishop.”
The archdiocese of New Orleans declined to make Archbishop Aymond available for an interview or comment on a broad description of what the Guardian intended to report on for this piece.
A worst-case scenario
Remarks like Anderson’s hint at how New Orleans has become the worst-case scenario of about 35 dioceses or religious orders that have sought bankruptcy protection to resolve clergy abuse cases since 2004. Two narratives are unfolding.
One, unearthed by media reports, is the surfacing of a criminal sexual underground in clerical culture stretching back decades, under four archbishops. Yet only a handful of New Orleans-area clergy predators have been prosecuted.
The bankruptcy is its own baroque story of bruising legal tactics that have hindered proceedings as hundreds of traumatized abuse survivors wait, seemingly without an end in sight.
With more than $25m paid in professional fees alone, roughly half to its attorneys at the corporate law firm Jones Walker, the archdiocese has relied on the lead bankruptcy attorney Mark Mintz’s strategy to track the litigation-by-ordeal approach in certain other dioceses, giving the church leeway to whittle down what rape victims and others will receive in compensation.
Well before the grinding three-year bankruptcy, Archbishop Aymond had begun to disgorge, in fits and starts, the names – but not the related internal files – of New Orleans clergymen accused of preying on children.
A man in bishop garb walks with a censer and crosier.
He lists fewer than 80 of those on a roster that his administration curates of clergymen whom the archdiocese considers to be “credibly accused”. But the bankruptcy proceedings have produced a much larger overall total. Claims fully name at least 310 priests, deacons and nonclerical personnel such as nuns who are accused of abuse.
That is a disproportionately huge number for the 41st-largest US diocese in terms of size, serving roughly 480,000 Catholics. A searing 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report on church abuse cover-up schemes found 300 predators in six separate dioceses spread across a much more populous state than Louisiana.
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The unending clergy abuse scandals have driven some state legislatures and prosecutors to take a deeper look at a church successfully protecting pedophiles. Louisiana’s ultra-conservative legislature passed a 2021 law extending the time for victims to file claims. Governor John Bel Edwards, a devout anti-abortion Catholic, signed it despite opposition from the Louisiana conference of Catholic bishops.
ReplyDeleteThe aching decades-long crisis has cost the global church $10bn in legal fees, treatment for predators, survivor settlements and jury verdicts, according to Jack Ruhl, a professor emeritus of accountancy at Western Michigan University, who spent years analyzing church financial reports.
However, few if any bankruptcies have been as acrimonious as the one that saddled Trahant with a harsher consequence than many unpunished clergy abusers – or those who were supposed to supervise them – have ever faced.
A best-case scenario
In diocesan bankruptcies, the first step is establishing a creditors’ committee including survivors and their attorneys, independent bankruptcy lawyers, counsel for insurance companies holding church liability policies, and lawyers for the church-as-debtor in ongoing mediation.
The archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, stands as a best-case scenario in resolving the labyrinthine process. Ranked 69th in terms of Catholic population, the Santa Fe church last year settled nearly 400 claims for $128m after three years of hard bargaining.
Uniquely, Archbishop John Wester agreed to deposit files outlining the careers and handling of 150 clergy predators in a public archive at the University of New Mexico.
“Wester pledged to do that in the committee’s first meeting, for which I give him great credit,” said Lisa Ford, an Albuquerque attorney for many survivors.
“We’ve always wanted to do more for those who were abused,” Wester said.
Wester – who had been a bishop in San Francisco – arrived in Santa Fe in 2015, after his predecessors’ decisions caused years of litigation and pounding media coverage.
“The victims wanted a public record,” Wester said. “The old saying, ‘You’re only as sick as your secrets,’ made me want to be transparent and help the healing process.”
Asked if he had felt pushback from other bishops on releasing files, Wester said: “I got a trickling of letters saying it was a good move. I haven’t heard anything negative.”
In stark contrast with New Orleans, after years of litigation with the church, abuse survivors’ attorneys in Santa Fe had obtained a major storehouse of documents when the bankruptcy there began.
Hiding church secrets was not an issue, as it is in New Orleans, where the church is battling for control over its sickest secrets.
Early on, Trahant, as well as his fellow attorneys John Denenea and Soren Gisleson, successfully urged lawyers for the bankruptcy creditors’ committee to file a motion to compel the archdiocese to hand over the same kinds of documents Wester voluntarily released to the public. Judge Grabill has yet to rule on that motion.
Battle lines in New Orleans
A New Orleans native and the archbishop there since 2009, Aymond had met with many clergy abuse survivors before the bankruptcy. Those meetings occurred as he approved $11.7m worth of out-of-court settlements between 2010 and 2020.
The archbishop was supposed to gather with survivors again in the summer of 2022 for a meeting with the bankruptcy creditors’ committee. Survivors had prepared statements to read to him.
Yet the survivors’ anticipated exchange with Aymond imploded when Grabill announced Trahant’s purported secrecy order violation and expelled him, his co-counsels Denenea and Gisleson, and four of their clients from involvement with the creditors’ committee. The shunned survivors, who had already arrived at the meeting when it was called off, left with a bitter aftertaste.
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Soon, the church attorney Mark Mintz and the bankruptcy noticing agent Donlin Recano sent Grabill’s order finding that Trahant “knowingly and willfully violated the protective order” governing the bankruptcy to 16,000 recipients (including a girl of 18) through first-class mail. The mass mailing cost nearly $9,200 in postage alone – an expense borne by the bankrupt archdiocese, public court filings show.
ReplyDeleteTrahant and his wife Amy – who manages her husband’s law office – sued Mintz, Jones Walker and Donlin Recano in state court for infliction of emotional distress, arguing that almost none of the mail recipients were involved in the bankruptcy.
Jones Walker later steered the case to bankruptcy court in front of Grabill, who is listed as having taught a Tulane University law school class with Mintz and as serving alongside him on the advisory board for the New Orleans university’s law review publication.
The lawsuit asserts that Grabill ordered the Trahant investigation at Mintz’s suggestion.
Trahant has a copy of the court trustee’s investigation. But the secrecy order bars him from sharing its contents.
The fine covers more than half the cost of the investigation, as outlined in court records: $761,000.
The Guardian obtained unpublished documents – not from Trahant – in which Brother Martin’s attorney, responding to interrogatories from bankruptcy court lawyers, telegraphs disdain for being dragged into strife over an alleged secrecy breach.
The school’s principal, Ryan Gallagher, was trying to learn details of Hart’s abuse which Trahant – his cousin – could not provide, beyond a vague warning about past misconduct. “No formal information or court ordered details were mentioned or provided,” the school lawyer wrote to bankruptcy court investigators about Trahant while stiff-arming other questions.
The documents show a clash of values. Leaders at Brother Martin were upset on learning that Aymond had assigned them a chaplain with a hidden record of sexual misconduct that the archbishop knew about. And the bankruptcy court, along with Aymond’s attorneys, were bent on proving that its confidentiality shield had been breached.
In the documents, school officials assert that Aymond apologized for the details of Hart’s sexual misconduct and for having appointed him to Brother Martin. But the church wanted punishment in symmetry with the court.
Lee Eagan, a lay member of Aymond’s finance committee, called the Brother Martin board’s chairman, asking “how and from whom Brother Martin received information” on Hart, as the school attorney wrote in response to court questions. Aymond called the same board chairman asking “what information was received?” – and how, the school attorney notes.
It was ultimately the archdiocese that provided the details about Hart’s past to Brother Martin. Hart had kissed, groped and had “dry sex” – simulated intercourse while clothed – with a girl, 17, in the early 1990s in a youth group run out of the clergyman’s church at the time, according to documents obtained by the Guardian.
Then, in 2012, the victim – now a mother with her own children attending the same church – reported Hart to the archdiocese after learning that he was working in his old position again.
That complaint prompted an investigation by an archdiocesan board set up to advise Aymond on such allegations. Hart admitted to sexual gratification. But Aymond overruled the advisory board’s finding of an abusive sexual offense, arguing that canon law back then held 16 as the age of consent.
Aymond let Hart stay in ministry, even though church law in 2002 raised the consent age to 18. And when Brother Martin requested a campus chaplain in 2017, Aymond sent Hart.
The all-boys school offers dance and cheer team activities for girls. So in early 2022, Brother Martin asked Aymond to “relieve Hart”, the school president Greg Rando wrote in an email to the campus’s governing board. Hart wrote to Aymond that he would step aside “until the matter … has been resolved”.
Rando advised the school attorney of “several calls from … Aymond apologizing for the situation and requesting updates … of Hart”.
ReplyDeleteAymond soon imposed retirement on Hart.
As New Orleans’s Times-Picayune newspaper prepared an article on the circumstances of Hart’s resignation, the archdiocese released a statement to the outlet saying Hart had retired solely to focus on battling brain cancer, from which he died last year.
Later, in a publicly released “finding of fact” document that outlined her reasons for sanctioning Trahant, Grabill wrote that Hart was “out of work on extended medical leave and thus had no contact with minors” at the time his past fell under scrutiny.
But Brother Martin portrayed the sequence of events quite differently. The school sent a letter to students’ parents saying Hart had retired at Brother Martin’s request after it learned of “an issue from [his] distant past that could preclude his being able to serve as chaplain”. The letter made no mention of Hart’s health.
The behind-the-scenes communications also show the church seeking information on Trahant alongside the investigators appointed by Grabill.
Two federal district court judges have left Trahant’s fine in place. He has now sought relief from the US fifth circuit court of appeals. The case remains pending.
A kick in the gut
Grabill’s dismissal of four survivors from the creditors’ committee in the wake of the Hart drama was “a kick in the gut”, as one of them, James Adams, said.
Adams, 53, said: “She moved with lightning speed on Trahant warning a school about an abuser. We were collateral damage. After two years, she hadn’t ruled on a motion to compel disclosure of church files. It took us [survivors] hard preparation and anxious moments, preparing to confront Aymond. Two years into the bankruptcy, he was personally there for the first time to meet with us. We never got the chance.”
Adams’s odyssey offers another viewpoint on the fortress-church strategy that the archdiocese has adopted on the advice of its bankruptcy attorneys.
Abused as a boy by the late Father James Collery at a parochial school in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, Adams graduated from Jesuit high in 1988, just behind his future attorney, Trahant.
Adams buried his trauma within, only to find it spilling out decades later. As a bank officer, settled with children, he had marriage problems rooted in the abuse. Adams was a president and board member of the Catholic Community Foundation, raising funds for church causes. He had been friendly with Aymond, having once served as an altar boy for him.
In 2013, Adams chose Aymond to tell about the abuse. The archbishop apologized and offered to cover Adams’s therapy costs.
But having to continually go back to the archdiocese and request payment for the therapy left Adams feeling demeaned. In 2019, he privately asked Aymond for a financial settlement to let him deal with his issues on his own terms while still serving on the Catholic Community Foundation.
The tables quickly turned. A law firm contacted Adams’s employer and therapist requesting his personal files, seeking information. “I sat there stunned,” he said. “I didn’t have an attorney at that point. They were asking for medical files from my time in grade school, high school and college.”
Adams called Trahant. Aymond forced Adams off the Catholic Community Foundation.
Trahant and his co-counsels agreed to seek a negotiated settlement for Adams, who believed the archdiocese would do right by him after listing his abuser as credibly accused in 2018.
But then Aymond’s archdiocese declared bankruptcy, halting the case indefinitely. That also forced Adams to face the church as something he never wanted to be – an adversary – in a venue where the church was only starting to marshal its power.
To see the photos and numerous links embedded in this article go to:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/29/new-orleans-archdiocese-clergy-abuse-catholic-church
Bankruptcy court stacks odds in New Orleans church’s favor over abuse claims: ‘I’ve never felt so powerless’
ReplyDeleteChapter 11 protection is designed to give an organization time to reorganize its finances to pay its debts but victims of clerical abuse feel frustrated by a lengthy and opaque process
by Jason Berry The Guardian December 1, 2023
This is the second installment of a three-part series exploring how the archdiocese of New Orleans’s bankruptcy stands apart from other cases of its kind. The first installment ran on Wednesday 29 November 2023.
In 2020, facing nearly 40 pending clergy sex abuse lawsuits, New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese took Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, giving the organization time to sell properties or reorganize assets to negotiate debt payment.
The number of people who have gone to bankruptcy court and file abuse-related claims has since eclipsed 500. A 2021 state law opened a “look-back window” enabling the 500 abuse survivors involved in the church’s bankruptcy case to seek redress without concern for previously existing filing deadlines. The law removed the church’s ability to offer low-ball settlements by arguing those claims are invalid simply for being filed too late, arming survivors with more leverage than they otherwise would have.
The church has released names of less than a third of more than 300 accused abusers, a disproportionately high number for what is the 41st US diocese in terms of size. The vast majority of those clergy, nuns and laypeople have never been criminally prosecuted.
Most of the files are deemed confidential by the bankruptcy judge, Meredith Grabill, though victims’ attorneys have filed a motion – pending for years – to compel the archdiocese to turn over all those records.
The archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the only one among more than 30 organizations of its kind to have gone through Chapter 11 and to release its clerical abuse files publicly as part of a settlement.
Yet, the New Mexico attorney Lisa Ford – who had many clients among the 400 survivors involved in the $128m Santa Fe settlement – said: “I have never felt so powerless as in bankruptcy court.”
In bankruptcy court, the ultimate tool that a judge has is “to force a liquidation of assets”, Ford said. But Catholic dioceses are non-profits. “You can’t liquidate a non-profit,” Ford added. “The church wants all the relief bankruptcy affords with advantages commercial debtors don’t have.”
Additionally, the archdiocese in New Orleans stands as an antithesis to its Santa Fe counterpart in terms of transparency.
In New Orleans, the Chapter 11 filing has kept most church clergy files secret.
The FBI has been conducting an investigation for more than a year, though how much information it has obtained is unclear.
A priest named Lawrence Hecker, 92, was charged and jailed in September. That was months after the Guardian revealed that Hecker confessed in writing to his church superiors more than 20 years earlier that he had sexually molested or harassed multiple children whom he met while working. He’s awaiting trial.
A few other clergymen have been prosecuted. One lay deacon died while under indictment. But most documents associated with the many abusers who have never been pursued by authorities are shielded by the bankruptcy court.
Bankruptcy opens a slow negotiation. The church pays its lawyers, the bankruptcy counsel and other professional fees. In New Orleans, that’s been more than $25m, about half of that to the archdiocese-hired Jones Walker firm.
James Stang of Los Angeles, a veteran bankruptcy attorney, guides the New Orleans creditors’ committee, reportedly billing $800 an hour. The Jones Walker attorney Mark Mintz, the leader of the church’s expansive legal team, bills $490 hourly.
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Plaintiff lawyers such as Richard Trahant, John Denenea and Soren Gisleson, who represent about 80 of the 500 claimants against the church, work on contingency, typically earning between 30% and 40% of what cases finally yield.
ReplyDeleteSo far, with no end to the bankruptcy in sight, that’s been nothing – for either them or their clients.
“The bankruptcy system was not established with child sex abuse victims in mind,” attorney Marci Hamilton wrote in 2021 as a co-author for a Norton Journal of Bankruptcy Law article. “Chapter 11, in particular, exists to manage assets for an organization going through difficult times.”
Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor, is founder and CEO of ChildUSA, a thinktank promoting reform of laws on child abuse. She cites “a cruel, though unintended, irony, [that] the focus [of bankruptcy law] is on the wellbeing of the institution that covered up child sex abuse”.
Such a scenario emerged in an 11 October 2022 hearing before Grabill over a New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper article on a local Catholic high school chaplain who unbeknown to school officials had previously molested a teen girl.
The chaplain, Paul Hart, resigned after Trahant warned the school principal – coincidentally, his cousin – that the clergyman had a stain in his past. The archdiocese ultimately disclosed what Hart had done. It also became clear that the archbishop had assigned him to the school after clearing the priest of abuse on a technicality: the girl fit the church-set definition of an adult at the time of the misconduct.
Nonetheless, the hearing before Grabill focused on “the leak” of information to the press that the judge insisted fell under the bankruptcy’s secrecy order. Grabill mentioned the possible dismissal of four abuse survivors – represented by Trahant, Denenea and Gisleson – from the creditors’ committee negotiating toward a resolution for the bankruptcy.
The four survivors on the committee “have never had their abusers brought to any type of justice”, a creditors’ group attorney, Rick Kuebel, argued, according to a publicly available transcript.
Kuebel added the survivors at that point had also been “serving on this committee for two years without compensation”, attending hours-long video conferences discussing court developments.
“They are frustrated that, unlike other cases, this archdiocese has chosen to be opaque or not transparent with all these various documents,” Kuebel said. “They’re very frustrated that this [leak] has become the focus of the case instead of trying to get [the church] reorganized and get through to” a resolution.
“Yes, I understand it’s a nuclear option,” said Grabill, in a striking turn of phrase. “But I have to protect the process and enforce court orders.”
Protecting the process
Several weeks later, when the committee members gathered at Kuebel’s office for a meeting that the New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, was supposed to attend to hear their statements, word came that Grabill had chosen “the nuclear option”.
She had removed Trahant, Denenea and Gisleson from involvement with the committee. She had sacked their four client-survivors – while later fining Trahant $400,000, an order he has appealed to the federal fifth circuit court of appeals.
Grabill aborted the survivors’ chance to address Aymond.
One attorney knowledgable of the proceedings, speaking on background for fear of angering the judge, called the fine “an overreach” that unduly caused the committee a substantial delay.
The Emory University law professor Lindsey D Simon believes the shield that bankruptcy affords parties such as the Sackler family in the controversial opioid mass litigation becomes much stronger when wielded by Catholic dioceses. That reality warps the Chapter 11 laws’ intent, according to Simon.
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“Many of these bankruptcies deprived victims of their day in court and forced them into the settlement process,” Simon writes in Bankruptcy Grifters, an article for the Yale Law School Journal.
ReplyDeleteSimon adds: “What sets the diocese cases apart … is the way they incorporate some of the most destructive practices that set up hurdles and deprive claimants of meaningful protections.”
Saved from coming clean
Some legislatures have been trying to correct the course at least slightly.
Acknowledging that child victims often go decades before confronting the impact of early sexual trauma, lawmakers have sought to prolong deadlines for survivors to initiate civil and criminal action.
California passed a look-back law in 2002 that led to mass settlements five years later. The Los Angeles archdiocese paid the largest settlement on record: $660m for 508 cases.
Religious orders contributed $200m. The archdiocese borrowed $175m from the Allied Irish Bank, which channeled Vatican funds to complete the settlement.
Dan McNevin, who received a 2007 settlement from the Bay Area diocese of Oakland, has been gathering names of clergy offenders as the diocese continues facing additional claims. “Survivors want information so they can reconcile what led to trauma, their personal stories,” McNevin told the Guardian.
“I wanted it thinking I could put together the pieces of what damaged me, and my brother, who cut off his hand” as a result of his abuse.
McNevin said he thought getting the files on his abuser, Father James A Clark, would help him heal and “erase that shame”.
But, as in New Orleans, the Oakland diocese – which is also in bankruptcy – has its documents under a protective seal, even as the diocese’s own self-reported number of child molester clergymen has steadily ballooned.
In 2003, the diocese admitted to 12. The number doubled after publicity surrounding abuse lawsuits that the diocese had settled.
A 2019 update increased the number to 45, and these days it’s about 60, according to news reports.
The Oakland diocese’s bankruptcy involves accusations against 120 clergy with 330 victims. Citing his own research, McNevin argued the number of accused should really be 174 or so.
“I want the names listed as a form of contrition by the church. The list is proof of the crimes. And enough on the list is proof of the conspiracy to hide. The list keeps growing. These bankruptcies are saving dioceses from ever coming clean,” McNevin said.
The Milwaukee experience
Jeff Anderson, a St Paul plaintiff lawyer and pioneer in the clergy abuse litigation field, faults Chapter 11 as a “strategy to shield bishops’ complicity and incriminating priest files, and to suppress the value of settlements by delaying and wearing down survivors”.
Anderson had survivor clients in Milwaukee, where the archdiocese took Chapter 11 in 2011. Wisconsin had the most restrictive filing deadlines – or statute of limitations – in the US on the issue of negligent supervision, a key factor in church litigation.
Anderson over several years brought cases alleging fraudulent behavior by religious superiors, which the courts allowed. He had 350 clients among 578 survivors suing the archdiocese.
Archbishop Rembert Weakland had a cavalier history of recycling predators through different positions before his 2002 resignation after ABC News reported that he paid $450,000 in hush money to a former lover, a theology graduate student.
The bankruptcy under since-retired judge Susan Kelly took nearly five years in often bitter proceedings. One issue was $57m that the archbishop, Timothy Dolan, had diverted to a Milwaukee cemetery trust, keeping it off the table for settlements.
Dolan soon left for New York, becoming a cardinal.
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Anderson saw the cemetery deposit as “fraudulent on its face” but managed to “claw back” some of the funds for settlement purposes. He said the prospect of having clients’ claims dismissed on statute of limitations grounds loomed over the negotiations, undercutting Anderson’s leverage.
ReplyDeleteAnderson filed 578 proof of claims documents by victims, detailing their abuse, at a time when the archdiocese had a published list of 48 sex offenders.
“The creditors’ committee wanted those files sent to the state attorney general,” according to the survivor and activist Peter Isely, a therapist with a master’s in divinity from Harvard.
“We believed more than 100 alleged offenders were named in those documents, cataloguing thousands of instances of abuse. We wanted them seen by law enforcement to see if some cases could be prosecuted. Judge Kelly refused. She sealed those documents. The settlement was like an unconditional surrender.”
The bankruptcy ended with $21m for 330 claims: a meager $6,363 per person, with scores of survivors receiving nothing.
Anderson had a heart attack after the proceedings. He said the case “remains one of the most painful chapters in my career”.
Years later, however, Wisconsin’s attorney general, Joshua Kaul, reacted as other prosecutors have done to the shocking revelations of bishops’ coddling pedophiles in a landmark 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report. He moved to gain access to the 578 proof of claim files which the bankruptcy judge put under wraps.
“The investigation improperly targets the Roman Catholic church and appears to be a product of anti-Catholic bigotry,” the archdiocese’s lawyer wrote Kaul in 2021, objecting to the files’ release.
Kaul’s request is still being litigated.
The often-glacial pace of litigation has driven victims’ lawyers to seek a wider scope of assets. One example is the targeting of the endowment of Gonzaga University, a Jesuit institution in Spokane, Washington.
At least 29 Jesuits were accused of abuse in Native Alaskan communities, which the order’s north-west Oregon province administered. The Jesuits and their insurers settled the claims in 2009, paying $50m to 110 victims.
The average settlement was $454,545. Gonzaga’s endowment was untouched.
In the New Orleans bankruptcy, the potential value of clergy abuse claimants’ individual cases hinges on whether the 2021 look-back window survives challenges to its constitutionality endorsed by the Catholic church. The law for now remains on the books.
‘I may live to regret it’
Richard Trahant’s life changed in 2018 when he joined attorney John Denenea in taking the case that still haunts both men.
In 1979, a boy of 16 worked part-time in the Salesian priests’ residence at Archbishop Shaw high school in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero. The boy, identified in court records as CJ Doe, cared for an invalid cleric.
One night, as CJ was about to leave, a priest named Salvatore “Sam” Isgro grabbed him by the neck, covered his nose with a cloth soaked in a chemical that stunned him, pulled down his pants and anally raped him. “Don’t tell anybody,” the now-late Isgro said, his breath reeking of garlic and tomato sauce.
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On the bus, children laughed at his pants’ bloody rear. He got into the bath once back home with his aunt and uncle.
ReplyDeleteHis aunt screamed over the bloody water. His uncle drove him to the hospital.
“They said I was ripped from the rectum,” CJ told the Guardian. “I missed 10 days of school and had to wear a sterile pad. I never went to [gym class] after that.”
Fearful of accusing a priest, CJ joined the army. Memories of the rape stalked him. After a mental breakdown, he received an honorable discharge and was subsisting on disability pensions – trailed by post-traumatic stress – when he dragged himself to see New Orleans’s archbishop Gregory Aymond in 2018.
Aymond’s habit of meeting with abuse survivors keeps with the US Catholic bishops youth protection charter of 2002. That document was enacted after the Boston Globe had exposed local bishops’ concealing clergymen who were child predators, igniting a chain reaction of similar media coverage in other communities.
Amid a resulting firestorm of criticism, the bishops pledged “not [to] enter into confidentiality agreements for grave and substantial reasons brought forward by the victim/survivor”. The promise was to halt the practice of negotiated settlements that muzzled survivors by barring them from disclosing the agreements’ terms, hoping to suppress publicity that could produce more litigation.
New Orleans’s archdiocese, however, maintained muzzle clauses long past that, as Kevin Bourgeois learned in 2019.
A therapist who was abused in the 1980s as a student at a New Orleans high school which primarily educated boys interested in the priesthood, Bourgeois is fond of Aymond, whom Bourgeois knew from attending a high school where Aymond once worked.
Bourgeois said Aymond personally and sympathetically listened to Bourgeois’s story of abuse – something the bankruptcy would prevent the archbishop from doing now.
“Now, Greg’s hands are tied,” Bourgeois said. “The frustration shows on his face.”
But the church’s out-of-court mediation of Bourgeois’s claim – which Aymond did not participate in – “was a miserable experience”, Bourgeois told the Guardian.
For that, he blamed Wendy Vitter, the archdiocese’s in-house attorney, for insisting he sign a non-disclosure agreement. Vitter has declined to publicly discuss her work with the archdiocese ever since becoming a federal judge in New Orleans in 2019.
CJ Doe told the Guardian that in his case, Aymond put him in touch with Salesian officials and insisted he go to a psychiatrist in Texas. “He told me be sure you don’t tell anyone,” CJ said, alluding to how Aymond and the Salesians put him through a metaphorical maze.
After meeting with CJ, Trahant drove home and sobbed in his carport, disturbed to his core by the details of his client’s abuse.
“I may live to regret it,” Trahant said. “But I am going into this darkness.”
That was four years before the $400,000 fine he’s facing today.
Trahant, Denenea and Gisleson have taken on CJ and 86 other clergy abuse survivors as clients. All of those cases hang in limbo as the archdiocese’s bankruptcy grinds on, with no clear signs as to what a settlement may look like – or when one might be feasible.
To see the photos and numerous links embedded in this article go to
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‘The devil was in that building’: New Orleans church orphanages’ dark secrets
ReplyDeleteSurvivors of institutions run by Catholic diocese recall litany of sexual abuse as bankruptcy process keeps documents hidden
by Jason Berry The Guardian December 3, 2023
This is the final installment of a three-part series exploring how the archdiocese of New Orleans’s bankruptcy stands apart from other cases of its kind. The first installment ran on Wednesday 29 November 2023, and the second installment ran on Friday 1 December.
Call her Sheila.
She doesn’t want her name used because of court testimony she has given as a state social worker which helped put men who abused their families in jail. She’s retired now, but still a rescuer by nature.
On a recent afternoon she went back to Madonna Manor, the Catholic orphanage in a Spanish colonial revival building, now shuttered, several miles across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. “A reverent place,” she sighed, “but it’s also a crime scene.”
She gazed at the wooden plank covering a window. Raccoons now nested in rooms that were once the dormitory for boys under age 12 at Madonna Manor. Feral cats roamed the empty playgrounds where homeless men sometimes camped.
“I tried. I did everything I could to get that man put away,” she said, referring to Harold Ehlinger, who lived in a dormitory room when her day job was counseling boys at Madonna Manor decades ago.
On the opposite side of Barataria Boulevard, another Spanish mission structure housed the older, adolescent boys: Hope Haven, a name dripping with irony like candle wax given the hell described in victims’ lawsuits against the New Orleans archdiocese.
The buildings warped by neglect stand on vast green acreage – potentially sizable assets in the bankruptcy protection this archdiocese sought in 2020, facing abuse victim lawsuits. The church case now exceeds 500 abuse claims, whose potential value depends on the survival of a recent Louisiana “look-back” law which eliminated filing deadlines for victims.
The outlines of a subterranean criminal religious culture are emerging with roughly 100 abuse claims that center on the two orphanages.
The severity of suffering at Hope Haven and Madonna Manor probably explains why 23 of those claimants, already some of society’s most vulnerable and marginalized, have had legal troubles and been incarcerated – their cases are among those brought by the law firm of New Orleans trial attorney Frank E Lamothe.
“People escaped – sometimes in groups,” said a former resident, not among Lamothe’s clients, with his own lawsuit against the orphanages pending, under a pseudonym.
Call him Leon. Born in 1971, he was sent to Madonna Manor from a splintered family in late 1982 or 1983 – he’s blurry on exactly when. “Instead of taking abuse I’d run away – too many times to count,” he said. “Police would bring you back. It was pretty much a prison.”
A religious brother named Harold Ehlinger is accused of child sexual abuse in several lawsuits pending against the church and Catholic Charities, which ran the two facilities, while utilizing public funds from the United Way and local government.
In the fall of 1980, Sheila had a freshly minted master’s in social work from Tulane University when she went to work at Madonna Manor. In counseling and group therapy she discovered boys angry, cynical and acting out over sexual abuse by Brother Harold in his private room within the dorm. The boys agreed to give her statements – she taped interviews.
When Sheila rapped on his door, Ehlinger answered in a bathrobe, with a flustered child inside. Ehlinger was “furious at seeing me”, she recalled.
She told her supervisor. The supervisor had her meet with a priest who listened gravely and accepted her documentation. Ehlinger disappeared. She was relieved. In 1982, she took a better-paying job with the state of Louisiana.
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Sheila the whistleblower had gone when Leon arrived. Church authorities had allowed Brother Harold to reside in a cottage near Hope Haven.
ReplyDelete“Brother Harold was like the boss,” Leon continued. “Once you’re targeted they got lockdown units. They’d put a pillow over your face so you can’t hear what’s going on. Sometimes they wore masks to conceal [their] identity so you didn’t know who raped you.
“They’d bring you over to the Dark Tower – that’s what we called the church, the cathedral they had on the property. Running away from Madonna Manor you just wanted to be someplace else. You’re still going to an abusive environment, but it was the horrors of being sexually assaulted, like the devil was in the building.”
Leon’s lawsuit alleges beatings and sexual assaults by several men. “Brother Harold performed some form of fondling, groping or molesting of [Leon] on an almost daily basis,” the complaint alleges.
“When I got out,” he told the Guardian, “I was damaged goods.”
In the mid-80s, Sheila was driving past a Catholic school. She saw Ehlinger, surrounded by kids, guiding them into school buses. She was stunned. “I naively thought they’d turned him over to the police or kicked him out of ministry.”
Ehlinger was one in a procession of alleged pedophiles at Hope Haven and Madonna Manor, according to various pending lawsuits, depositions and documents from past cases not subject to bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill’s secrecy order concealing church documents.
Collectively, those documents provide new, chilling particulars about two of the most infamous institutions linked to the Catholic clergy abuse crisis – but whose details have largely been buried in the past.
Ehlinger’s last known address is a Holy Cross religious house in Austin, Texas. A process server went to hand him legal papers there.
Ehlinger is among the more than 200 accused Catholic church abusers not on the local archdiocese’s “credibly accused” list, though the church resolved past cases identifying him in what became negotiated settlements.
The church declined the Guardian’s request for an interview with Archbishop Gregory Aymond or to answer general questions about this report.
Haunted by nuns
Call him Joe. His lawsuit against the church uses a pseudonym.
In 1976, when he was 11, Joe went to Madonna Manor. He noticed that the pool was closed.
“I was told one of the students drowned in the pool,” he said. “I never knew the boy’s name, only that he snuck out one night and died in the pool.”
Joe said he started wondering about the boy’s death after Sister Martin Marie began “tying me by the genitals and nearly suffocating me to sexually pleasure her between the legs”.
“She liked to sit on my face till I couldn’t breathe,” he remarked.
To this day, he said, he wonders about whether the boy who was said to have drowned may have been abused.
Martin Marie, a member of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, was named in an earlier wave of lawsuits over the orphanages in 2009. Like Ehlinger, her name is not on the archdiocese’s credibly accused list.
Joe finds that appalling because he says Sister Martin Marie wasn’t the only nun complicit in the beatings and sexual abuse he endured on the verge of puberty.
“I kept running away from Madonna Manor because of those nuns,” Joe said. “They sent me back to my mom and stepdad in Metairie. Things didn’t go well for me after Madonna Manor. My mom didn’t believe me about the nuns.”
Joe said he was committed to a mental hospital in Mandeville, a community across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. He recalled being treated with the anti-psychotic medication thorazine. “I didn’t trust people,” he said. “I became very violent, I did fight the staff.
“I was held down, injected and put in restraints.”
He got out. After scrapes with the law he found a foster father, and slowly began rebuilding his life.
“I’m in a safe place now,” Joe said.
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For many years he avoided Madonna Manor. But on a recent autumn day Joe gave a work buddy, who lived near the complex, a lift home. He found himself on Barataria Boulevard, and the memories started surging. He parked at the back of the Madonna Manor dormitory.
ReplyDeleteHe found Sheila standing there.
Sheila saw the pain on his face and knew in a heartbeat he was a survivor. Like her, she sensed, he had left a piece of his heart there. Thinking of the boys she had tried to help, she stepped toward him and said: “Hi, I’m Sheila.”
“I’m Joe,” he replied. “I used to live here.”
She was a stranger but within a few minutes he was pouring out stories of his past – did she know about the boy who drowned? She did not. Sheila took the Madonna Manor job four years after Joe left. They exchanged phone numbers. He called her that night, sobbing as he let loose memories of the hell he survived, wondering if that boy who was rumored to have drowned was a victim like he was, only worse.
Joe continued by sharing details about his best friend at Madonna Manor, an altar boy who was molested by a priest.
The boy, Rene Perez, was eventually moved to another home across the lake.
“He and two or three others had run away,” Joe said. “They took bicycles and were going across [a] bridge when he got hit by a car and thrown in the water. They found him I think about five days later.
“The funeral was held at Madonna Manor church, but I wasn’t there that weekend.”
Still fighting tooth and nail
In the 1920s, Hope Haven opened as a home for dependent children. Madonna Manor opened a few years later. Eventually boys younger than 12 lived at Madonna Manor, and older teenagers at the other institution.
Exactly when the two institutions became a magnet for pedophiles and people prone to sadistic behavior is unclear. But 17 lawsuits filed in 2005 made allegations going back to the 1950s that described horrific abuses.
Besides the School Sisters of Notre Dame, other authority figures at the orphanages were Salesian priests and brothers, who founded the nearby Archbishop Shaw high school.
A major figure in the 2005 litigation, a priest named Ray Hebert, was director of the two facilities from 1966 to 1971.
Hebert, who held the elevated title of monsignor, was also the director of Catholic Charities, which had responsibility for the orphanages. If any cleric had textured knowledge of the internal dynamics at the two facilities, it was Ray Hebert.
In 2008, during the litigation, Hebert gave a deposition, saying: “If you were a trained social worker, you didn’t speak of orphanages.” Institutions for dependent children was more correct, he said, because state funding was involved.
Yet the survivors of the sexual and physical abuses may as well as have been on another planet from most of society. Most came from dysfunctional families and lacked any freedom to leave on their own, other than by running away, which invited retribution.
Hebert in the early 1990s took another job, as vicar of clergy at the New Orleans archdiocese, a position that required him to investigate priests accused of child sexual abuse.
Attorney Michael Pfau, who represented plaintiff-survivors of the orphanage, asked if Hebert ever reported a priest to the police or child protective services.
“No,” he answered. “I never did.”
Hebert stated that after interviewing a given priest, he sent a report to his boss at the time: the longtime archbishop Philip Hannan.
Pfau asked: “Did you ever ask a priest to sign a written statement?”
Hebert replied: “No, not that I remember. I recall one case, you know, where after interviewing the [priest] and taking notes, I did ultimately write up a report as to what I had learned from him, and asking him to go over the report to see whether he objected to anything I had put in that report not being accurate. But I didn’t ask him to sign this report.”
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On retiring from that job in 2003, Hebert said he destroyed all his notes.
ReplyDeleteDoing so was a serious violation of canon law, according to Tom Doyle, a former priest and canon lawyer in the Vatican embassy in Washington DC in the early 1980s. Canon 1719 reads: “The acts of the investigation, the decrees of the [bishop] which initiated and concluded the investigation, and everything which initiated and concluded the investigation, and everything which preceded the investigation are to be kept in the secret archive of the [administration] if they are not necessary for the penal process.”
How many reports Hebert actually wrote is unknown. But his 4 November 1999 assessment of Father Lawrence Hecker was made public, in a recent filing by the Orleans parish district attorney’s office, after his criminal indictment.
The document is notable for Hecker saying he harassed or slept with various boys but did not rape them. Hecker does, however, concede that a young man “came out, years later, he told his parents that he and I had had sex together. They reported this to … Hannan and he spoke with me about it in early 1988.”
By 2012, when Sister Carmelita Centanni, the archdiocese’s victim assistant coordinator, wrote to Archbishop Aymond, she cited an allegation of sexual abuse against Hecker from the police in Gretna, a New Orleans suburb, stating: “This is the NINTH allegation we have on record against Larry Hecker.”
Hecker retired with the comfort of a church pension until it was discontinued after the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy. He has been in jail awaiting trial since his indictment in September.
In the 2005 Hope Haven-Madonna Manor litigation, three plaintiffs mentioned Hebert among other accused abusers. Hebert responded by filing his own lawsuit against the plaintiffs, alleging defamation and denying he ever abused anyone.
Two other plaintiffs also named Hebert among other abusers but had not filed suit at that stage. Ultimately, after the archdiocese settled the Hope Haven-Madonna Manor litigation for $5m, the plaintiffs who named Hebert withdrew their claims against him.
Religion News Service revealed a bitter divide at the time of the settlement. Some involved in the settlement wanted the church to be required to release all documents pertaining to abuse at Hope Haven and Madonna Manor, but that didn’t happen.
“We’ve had to fight the church tooth and nail for more than four years to get [the church] to acknowledge wrongdoing,” said attorney Roger Stetter, who also had clients in the litigation. Stetter accused the archdiocese of trying to hide evidence.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond, who was recently installed at the time, seemed conciliatory. “It’s important that these wrongdoers come to light and that we admit that as far as we can tell [the charges] are true,” he said.
But the church went on to underreport its list of abusers.
Between 2010 and 2020, the archdiocese settled more than 130 sex abuse claims, totaling $11.7m, in many cases requiring victims to sign confidentiality agreements – a move specifically denounced by the 2002 US bishops’ youth protection charter.
Hebert died in 2014. Several years later, there was a new wave of lawsuits against Hope Haven and Madonna Manor after Aymond published a list of New Orleans Catholic clergymen whom his archdiocese considered to be credibly accused of child molestation.
In January 2020, the archdiocese paid $325,000 to resolve a case that accused Hebert, Sister Martin Marie and others with ties to Hope Haven as well as Madonna Manor. The archdiocese would not pay such settlements if it didn’t consider claimants believable, as one of the organization’s vicars general told an abuse survivor in a separate case.
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But Hebert’s name is conspicuously absent from the archdiocese’s credibly accused list, which has been updated several times since it was first published in 2018.
ReplyDeleteThe issue no one wants to touch
Amid news of the later lawsuits, Joe contacted the attorneys John Denenea and Richard Trahant.
They told him the process could be long and frustrating. But he signed on.
After the bankruptcy began, Joe was surprised at the opportunity to serve on the creditors’ committee, representing other survivors and negotiating toward a settlement. He had few illusions about the church but wanted to help push against the rock of injustice.
Last year, he went to a scheduled meeting with Aymond, where he and three other survivors hoped to speak their truth directly to the archbishop. But then came word that Judge Grabill was removing him, Trahant, Denenea and three more of the lawyers’ survivor clients from involvement with the committee.
Grabill maintained that Trahant had violated a secrecy order by warning a local Catholic high school run by his cousin that the campus’s chaplain had a substantial stain in his past.
Trahant’s warning ultimately forced the archdiocese to disclose that the chaplain had engaged in sexual misconduct with a teenage girl at a past assignment in the 1990s but was allowed to continue his career.
“I think it was a setup by the church,” Joe said. He said his lawyers had long been after the records that vividly outline the abuses at Madonna Manor, Hope Haven and numerous other archdiocesan institutions across the New Orleans area, which serves about a half-million Catholics.
“The church doesn’t want to release that information,” Joe continued. “I think Richard [Trahant] was a patsy and they took us all out. That’s my take.”
The archdiocese’s formidable status in bankruptcy court leaves a trail of questions.
Given the public funds expended at Hope Haven and Madonna Manor, why haven’t federal authorities used their power to do a surgical review into every file archived at the archdiocese, including those detailing the abusive history of the two orphanages?
If Joe had cause to worry about whether a boy drowned there, and if his pal Rene Perez was the victim of a priest and died trying to escape another facility, what kind of oversight did Louisiana officials provide at Hope Haven and Madonna Manor?
Should the sadistic violence and rapes alleged by Leon be swept under the rug of time by the most powerful law enforcement authorities?
If Hebert, who oversaw the facilities, was in fact an abuser – as a $325,000 settlement would suggest – do documents shed light on his decisions that allowed the place to become a pedophiles’ haven, as alleged in the lawsuits?
How much do those 23 former Hope Haven and Madonna Manor residents who are now incarcerated know about what happened there?
Will Judge Grabill seal off information on crimes against children, as alleged in so many cases, to furnish a settlement when the church finally presents a reorganization plan?
More than half of New Orleans’s federal judges have recused themselves from archdiocesan litigation because of ties to the Catholic church.
This fact does not surprise Stephen C Rubino, a veteran plaintiffs’ lawyer who is now retired in Vermont. But that doesn’t mean Rubino – who spent many years in New Jersey litigating against the church – likes it at all.
“You should not be able to maintain a criminal racketeering conspiracy for hiding pedophiles and still function as a religious, tax-exempt charity,” Rubino – also a former Florida state prosecutor – said in response to the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy. “That is the issue no US attorney wants to touch.”
Ramon Antonio Vargas contributed reporting
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‘He controlled my life’: New Orleans archdiocese ignored woman’s claims before priest’s abrupt dismissal
ReplyDeleteAnthony Odiong – who gave anti-LGBTQ+ sermons – had detailed allegations abuse filed against him before his removal
Ramon Antonio Vargas The Guardian December 7, 2023
A Louisiana Catholic priest’s sudden dismissal from the church where he had been a popular pastor for the last several years has set off a fresh scandal in the embattled New Orleans archdiocese, the second-oldest in the US.
As they tell it, local church leaders rescinded Anthony Odiong’s invitation to serve as a cleric in the region due to unspecified “concerns … about [his] ministry prior” to his arrival in the archdiocese – “and quite possibly during his time” there. As a result, the New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, told Odiong’s bishop in Nigeria to recall him to his home diocese “as soon as possible to address these concerns”, officials said in a statement.
The statement did not mention whether those concerns stemmed from Aymond’s receipt in 2019 of a detailed complaint against Odiong of years-long sexual and financial abuse from a woman who viewed the clergyman as her spiritual adviser – and who says the church brushed her off.
“These concerns do not include the abuse of minors nor to our knowledge involve anyone in this [church],” is all the archdiocese’s statement said.
The statement added that the archdiocese had reported Odiong to law enforcement authorities, and the organization had ordered him to soon leave the rectory where he had been residing.
Meanwhile, Odiong has offered up a starkly different counter-narrative. He has publicly suggested that Aymond booted him out from serving the archdiocese with about a half-million Catholics after likening members of the LGBTQ+ community to “monkeys and animals and chimpanzees” in a recent sermon that warned of a purported liberal takeover of the church.
The archdiocese’s statement did not deny that it found Odiong’s remarks to be problematic. And it suggested that the comments may have expedited a departure originally scheduled for January.
“Unfortunately,” the statement said, “[Father] Anthony’s words and actions since being informed of this decision have led to us taking action to relieve him as pastor now.”
Whatever the case, the circumstances of Odiong’s departure from the St Anthony of Padua church highlight the layered predicament Aymond and his archdiocese find themselves in.
The archdiocese has racked up nearly $34m in legal and other professional services fees since filing for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020 in the face of a mountain of local clergy abuse litigation. To cope with the bankruptcy court expenses, the church recently announced a plan to close several of its churches.
St Anthony of Padua was not one of the churches affected by the downsizing. Yet Odiong’s dismissal has stirred unrest among his parishioners and their community of Luling, Louisiana, whose population of about 14,500 people resides about 25 miles (40km) south-west of New Orleans.
Masses held by Odiong in which parishioners came to be healed both physically and spiritually proved to be particularly popular and helped attendance for weekend services surge from fewer than 390 to more than 500, according to reporting in the local St Charles Herald Guide newspaper.
Odiong and at least some in his former congregation now feel as though they have been thrust into the split brewing between those who support and those who oppose Pope Francis’s attempts to make the Catholic church more welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community, a prominent agenda item during a recent synod of bishops at the Vatican.
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Francis in November dismissed Joseph Strickland, at that time the bishop of Tyler, Texas, for his criticism of the pope’s goals to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people and to give the laity more responsibilities within a church that does not allow gay marriage.
ReplyDeleteThe outpouring of support for Odiong from some of his followers has generally echoed the support among conservative circles that met Strickland after his ouster.
“You have your flock’s unwavering love,” read one of numerous recent Facebook posts from Luling residents. Another read: “I [shudder] to think what my spiritual life would be like without his guidance … My friends and I stand WITH [Father] Anthony Odiong, NOT against him.”
However, what the controversy surrounding Odiong’s departure also seems to highlight is how few – if any – of his most fervent believers realized that he stands among more than 300 clergymen, religious personnel or lay church employees who are accused of abusing vulnerable parishioners – mostly children but also adults – in claims filed as part of the archdiocese’s pending bankruptcy.
Most of the records associated with the bankruptcy are under a court seal. But the Guardian managed to obtain a copy of the claim against Odiong, which was prepared by his accuser’s attorney, Kristi Schubert.
A review of the document – filed under oath – raises questions about whether Aymond could have acted against Odiong long before his abrupt dismissal and the anti-LGBTQ+ remarks that he insisted cost him his position.
When asked about his response to the accusations in the bankruptcy, Odiong said: “We have discussed the allegations, and I have a lawyer taking care of that.”
He said he could not elaborate but maintained that Aymond had rescinded his invitation for Odiong to minister in the New Orleans archdiocese because the Nigerian “went against the pope and the synod”.
Schubert, who represents numerous clergy abuse survivors, said: “I am not surprised at all that it took a public scandal for [Father] Odiong to finally see even minimal consequences. In my experience, credible abuse allegations alone have not been enough to motivate the church to remove a priest.”
‘Dismissed my claim’
Odiong underwent his clerical training in Nigeria and was ordained in 1993, according to his biography on the St Anthony of Padua webpage. For more than a decade, he served in Nigeria.
But the country has historically been convulsed by sectarian violence against Catholics. In 2006, Odiong moved to Austin, the capital of Texas, to minister there on the invitation of the city’s bishop at the time: Aymond.
Odiong later worked in campus ministry at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He obtained a master’s degree in theology from Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.
Meanwhile, Aymond became New Orleans’s archbishop in 2009. In about 2015, Aymond invited Odiong to serve as the pastor of St Anthony.
Odiong’s healing masses helped improve church attendance. Their popularity led to the construction of a new healing chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which opened in 2020.
He took parishioners with him to Medjugorje, the site in Bosnia which has attracted a million pilgrims annually since 1981, when six children and teenagers there said they had witnessed the appearance of the Virgin.
But the year before the healing chapel at St Anthony opened, a woman who described meeting Odiong at Franciscan University in 2007 contacted the archdiocese of New Orleans with detailed abuse accusations against Odiong.
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The abuse claim that the woman later filed in bankruptcy court described how Odiong positioned himself to be her spiritual director.
ReplyDelete“From May 2007 until December 2018, Father Odiong and I spoke daily,” said the woman, who recalled being 37 when she met the clergyman. As her personal spiritual adviser, she said Odiong “came to control nearly every aspect of my life, including my financial and relationship decisions”.
Among numerous other alleged misdeeds, she accused Odiong of forcing her to perform sexual acts – including oral intercourse – with him during the sacrament of confession, at private masses in her home and in at least one motel room. She described the acts occurring in New Orleans, in West, Texas, in Pennsylvania and in Alabama, in her car while stopped in a church parking lot – despite the vow of celibacy that Catholic clergyman make.
The woman said Odiong told her she would earn forgiveness for her sins through her sexual service. She accused him of threatening to “place a curse on her head” if she ever refused, of insinuating that she was mentally ill by calling her a “troubled woman”, and of stealing money, including thousands of dollars from her.
At one point, needing the floors of her home redone, she alleged that Odiong forced her to hire a man who she learned was “a rapist”. Her floors did not end up getting redone, and she was drawn into a legal dispute that cost her nearly $50,000, she said.
The woman said she mostly stopped engaging with Odiong in late 2018. That was weeks after Aymond had released the first version of a list naming several New Orleans Catholic clergymen whom the church considered to be credibly accused of molesting children or vulnerable adult parishioners, igniting a wave of additional claims of church molestation that eventually thrust the archdiocese into bankruptcy.
Odiong was not on the list, which was one piece of the broad fallout from a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report that found Catholic clerical sex abuse in that state was much more widely spread than the church had acknowledged.
And in early 2019, the woman – whose home is in Pennsylvania – contacted a religious brother serving as the New Orleans archdiocese’s point of contact for abuse claimants, and reported Odiong.
She said the archdiocese’s victims assistance coordinator told her: “I do not think you are remembering things correctly.” Then, toward the middle of July that year, she said, she reported Odiong directly to Aymond.
The woman said she sought to boost her credibility by saying she had ghostwritten some of the letters Odiong sent to Aymond over the years, including ones that successfully asked for financial assistance to complete his education while also requesting an invitation to work in New Orleans.
Nonetheless, “I felt like he dismissed my claim as well,” the woman said of Aymond.
The woman cited copies of text messages and phone call logs to establish the volume of contact that she had with Odiong and to support her assertion that she had conversed with Aymond. She captured telephone recordings that showed she contacted detectives in Luling and her Pennsylvania home town about Odiong, though it is unclear if those agencies pursued investigations.
After the woman reported him to the archdiocese, Odiong wrote to her saying that the victims assistance coordinator had contacted him, according to an email her lawyer provided. It is unclear what else the archdiocese may have done in response to her claims.
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Information produced during the bankruptcy’s discovery process and reported on by the Guardian has established that the archdiocese over the last several decades has gone to extreme lengths to shield abusive clergymen – including the handful of ones convicted of or charged with crimes by subpoena-wielding authorities despite the church’s protection.
ReplyDeleteOdiong did serve as the pastor of St Anthony of Padua through most of 2023, presiding over weddings, baptisms, weekly masses and services at the healing chapel.
As recently as August, Odiong, Aymond and a third clergyman hosted a three-day series of masses at a church in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. Odiong presided over a healing service following the mass, according to an archdiocesan bulletin.
Odiong’s removal
It was not until a Saturday service on 18 November at St Anthony of Padua that Odiong informed his congregation that their time together was coming to an end. He said his plan was to move by January to Florida, where he intended to build a chapel like one whose construction he was overseeing in Texas.
At Sunday mass on 26 November, he elaborated with remarks that took aim at the LGBTQ+ community.
“The church is dividing already,” Odiong said during his homily that day, according to a video available on YouTube. “Now the gays have taken over the church. The LGBTQY – whatever you call them – have a stranglehold on the church now. We’re going to begin to bless all kinds of monkeys and animals and chimpanzees, and priests who will not do it will be persecuted.”
Odiong went on to suggest that he was “not safe” because of his beliefs on that topic. “Yet, I’m not afraid – I’m excited,” he said. “I like a good fight.”
As Odiong tells it, Aymond told him that he had until the next several days to move out of St Anthony of Padua’s rectory. The archbishop had rescinded Odiong’s invitation to minister in the New Orleans archdiocese, the ousted clergyman said.
Before St Anthony’s Sunday mass on 3 December, the church announced it would not livestream video of the service as usual.
At mass, the archdiocese said, parishioners were read a statement telling them that Odiong’s removal was being expedited over various but unspecified concerns. The archdiocese’s statement asked Odiong’s congregation to respect his privacy and keep him in their prayers “during this time of transition”.
The statement triggered a wave of Facebook comments in support of Odiong. One accused the archdiocese of having “besmirched a holy man’s character to his congregation” with no substantial specifics.
The woman who has accused Odiong of abuse is demanding damages from the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case, which remains unresolved. She argues that she lost at least $150,000 in wages after her mental anguish over Odiong’s alleged domination interrupted her ability to work as a licensed clinical social worker.
The woman’s lawyer, Schubert, said it was disturbing but unsurprising that the archdiocese “allowed Odiong to continue to hold a position of trust and authority” for years despite her client’s complaint.
Schubert said her client’s case was only the latest to illustrate how “abuse allegations will typically be ignored or covered up as long as possible” by institutions like the archdiocese.
“The only thing I’ve really ever seen the church respond to quickly is the fear of bad publicity,” Schubert added. “They don’t fix things that are bad. They fix things that make them look bad.”
As for Odiong, he said he plans to continue in ministry as long as he has the permission of his supervising bishop in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria.
“You have to let this play out,” Odiong said. “This is just the beginning.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/07/new-orleans-archdiocese-anthony-odiong-gregory-aymond
US archbishop secretly backed bid to free priest convicted of raping child
ReplyDelete‘I join you in the prayer to guide those regarding your appeal,’ Gregory Aymond of New Orleans wrote to priest given life sentence
Ramon Antonio Vargas The Guardian December 18, 2023
As he reached the end of his 41-year life, Kevin Portier had endured child rape at the hands of a southern Louisiana Catholic priest for whom he had served as an altar boy; a highly publicized trial that sent the clergyman to prison for the rest of his days; and the trauma associated with those experiences.
But one of Portier’s harshest ordeals came within his final two years alive. Representatives of the church that he had been raised to believe in approached him at his home, at his job and at a relative’s funeral to ask him to lend his support to efforts to secure an early release for his rapist, Robert Melancon.
“I don’t know what the real deal is,” Portier wrote in a fall 2017 email seeking answers from leaders of his local diocese, who didn’t realize until later that the people lobbying for Melancon’s release were actually church officials about 60 miles away in New Orleans. “And [it] doesn’t matter. All that matters now is I will not be lied to by the Catholic church.”
It’s unclear whether Portier, before his death in the spring of 2019, ever learned exactly who was trying to engineer an early release from prison for Melancon. But records that the Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans has fought to keep hidden show the city’s archbishop Gregory Aymond – while not even being in charge of him – furtively sanctioned legal maneuvers that, if successful, would have prematurely freed Melancon from what Portier considered to be a just punishment.
Meanwhile, one of the attorneys who played a key role in the campaign to free Melancon, VM Wheeler III, would himself later be convicted of molesting a child – an act of abuse that occurred years before, but that was not reported to authorities until after he joined New Orleans’s Catholic clergy as a deacon.
The records in question make clear that the effort to free Melancon involved overtures by affiliates of the archdiocese of New Orleans to the highest levels of government: to the warden of the prison where the convicted rapist was incarcerated, to the director of Louisiana’s department of corrections, and to the state’s governor himself.
It brought tension between New Orleans’ archdiocese and its smaller counterpart in Louisiana’s Houma-Thibodaux region, which administered the church where Portier served and met Melancon. After learning an early release for Melancon was a possibility, the bishop of the Houma-Thibodaux diocese told his New Orleans colleagues that he did not support it, regardless of arguments that the convicted rapist deserved it because he was enfeebled at the time.
Ultimately, Melancon died in prison in November 2018 at age 82, as Portier had wanted, before his own life ended about 18 months later.
Nonetheless, the saga of Portier’s pain vividly demonstrates how actions undertaken by the archdiocese of New Orleans in private often do not match its public pledges of empathy for survivors of its decades-old clerical abuse crisis.
The US’s second-oldest Catholic archdiocese, under Aymond’s leadership, declared bankruptcy in 2020, saying it was the most fair way for the organization to make whole hundreds of people abused by its clerics while allowing the church to continue carrying out its intended mission of sharing the gospel.
“The healing of victims and survivors is most important to me and to the church,” Aymond wrote in a letter to the approximately half-million Catholics in the New Orleans area shortly after the bankruptcy filing.
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The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy after paying $11.7m in out-of-court, abuse-related settlements during a 10-year period beginning in 2020. The proceeding has now cost the archdiocese nearly $34m in legal and other professional fees; remains unresolved; and therefore has not yet resulted in any compensation for those with pending abuse claims.
ReplyDeleteRecords that lay out the efforts to free Melancon are not publicly accessible because of a secrecy order from a judge that took effect shortly after the archdiocese declared bankruptcy. The Guardian obtained them through a law enforcement source.
Other confidential records obtained and reported on by the Guardian have established that the archdiocese over the last several decades has gone to extremes to shield abusive clergymen as long as possible – including the handful of ones convicted of or charged with crimes by authorities armed with subpoena powers that can pierce the church’s protection.
New Orleans church officials in a prepared statement maintained: “Archbishop Aymond had no role in requesting or advocating the department of corrections for the temporary release of Robert Melancon for medical reasons in accord with the department’s health care policy. Archbishop Aymond initially considered allowing Melancon to be housed at [an archdiocesan-run nursing home named] Wynhoven under certain conditions but ultimately decided against allowing Melancon to live in an archdiocesan facility.”
The records surrounding the effort to free Melancon – temporarily, if not permanently – stopped short of describing him as terminally ill at the time. Yet the church’s statement also sought to characterize a letter that Aymond sent to Melancon expressing support for an early release as “a corporal work of mercy” consistent with the archbishop’s “pastoral ministry to a dying prisoner”.
Portier’s father, Wilson Portier, said in a brief interview that he was generally aware there had once been efforts to free his son’s rapist from his life sentence. Yet he said he was stunned to learn those had been carried out in part by another convicted abuser – as well as endorsed by Aymond, who wasn’t even technically Melancon’s boss.
“Everybody’s got a right to a lawyer,” Wilson Portier said of those who had backed an early release for Melancon. “But they’ve got to live with their conscience that they knew – they already knew – he had abused somebody.”
‘Leaving it in God’s hands’
Portier pursued rape charges against Melancon at a time when most of the public could not grasp that clergymen were capable of sexual abuse.
It was late June 1995 when police arrested Melancon on accusations that he had raped Portier for several years beginning when he was eight, in about 1985. Several more years would pass after Melancon’s arrest before the 2002 Catholic clergy abuse scandal in Boston’s archdiocese opened the world’s eyes to priests and deacons who were child rapists – and their supervisors who enabled them.
Portier said Melancon began raping him almost immediately after he became an altar boy at Annunziata church in Houma, Louisiana. Melancon was the pastor there. Portier was 18 and Melancon nearly 60 when police made an arrest in the case.
An anonymous donor posted a $500,000 bond for Melancon to be out of police custody while awaiting his trial. The trial occurred about a year later, which is a relatively fast turnaround in Louisiana’s often sluggish criminal justice system.
Local media coverage captured the climate that greeted Portier. Supporters of Melancon insinuated that he had been unfairly targeted for political and religious persecution because the local top prosecutor’s father was Jewish.
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By that time, the Houma-Thibodaux diocese had paid Portier $800,000 to settle litigation stemming from his abuse. It was not the church’s practice to pay that kind of sum if it believed someone was lying. Yet Portier faced accusations from defense attorneys that his only motivation to come forward against Melancon was greed.
ReplyDeleteIn taking the witness stand against Melancon, Portier testified that he had gone ahead with the criminal trial despite having received his settlement because he didn’t want his abuser to rape again.
“I feel I would have the peace of mind – the peace of mind that he won’t do this to anyone else,” Portier said.
Portier’s testimony received a significant boost from another witness who testified that Melancon had recruited him to be an altar boy and molested him for several years. For that torment, the witness said he got a $30,000 payment from Melancon’s superiors.
The jury hearing the case against Melancon deliberated fewer than two hours before finding him guilty of aggravated rape. As a result, Melancon was handed a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
Though the jurors’ brief deliberations suggested they strongly believed Portier, Melancon vehemently maintained his innocence. He told the judge presiding over his sentencing: “Your honor, I am innocent of these trumped-up charges that have been brought against me.”
He later wrote in gratitude to a college journalist who had penned a column expressing skepticism of Portier, highlighting some inconsistencies between his testimony during the criminal trial and the civil litigation. Melancon thanked Michael Heinroth, saying: “My faith in the justice system as well as my faith in my church has almost disappeared.”
Melancon also wrote that Heinroth’s favorable take on his defense salvaged at least some of his flagging faith in the news media.
“I still have a difficult time believing all this is really happening,” Melancon wrote to Heinroth, who acknowledges learning a lot more about the nature of the Catholic clergy abuse crisis since writing his student newspaper opinion piece challenging Portier’s credibility. “A young man of questionable character … tells an outrageous allegation [about] me … and not only the jury, but many others believe it!”
Portier was much more reserved in his response to the verdict against Melancon. He declined to discuss his case in public, and his only remark to the Louisiana newspaper the Advocate was: “I’m leaving it in God’s hands.”
‘No threat to public safety’
Melancon had been imprisoned for more than two decades when the New Orleans attorney VM Wheeler III sent a letter, on 19 July 2016, to the warden of the Homer, Louisiana, correctional center where Portier’s convicted rapist was housed.
About two years later, the archdiocese of New Orleans ordained Wheeler as a deacon. Months before his death in April, Wheeler pleaded guilty to indecent behavior with a juvenile after being accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy two decades earlier.
All of that was still ahead for Wheeler when he reached out on behalf of Melancon. At that moment, he argued in favor of an early release for the priest because of a new state prison policy meant to benefit certain infirm incarcerated people.
On the letterhead of the influential New Orleans law firm where he worked at the time, Chaffe McCall, Wheeler listed Melancon’s various maladies, including hypertension, type II diabetes, an enlarged prostate and coronary artery disease.
“We believe that, given his medical condition, Melancon poses a low risk of danger to himself or society and no threat to public safety,” Wheeler wrote to the warden.
Adding that the imprisoned clergyman was “permanently and irreversibly wheelchair and bed bound”, Wheeler said the plan was to place Melancon in an archdiocesan-run assisted living facility in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero if he were granted a medical release.
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Reply
Wheeler wrote that Melancon would not be anywhere near any “sites of congregation for juveniles”, though a Catholic elementary school would have been about a half-mile away.
ReplyDeleteA week later, the pastor of the Metairie, Louisiana, church where Wheeler would later be assigned as a deacon wrote a letter to Aymond.
Andrew Taormina’s missive mentioned the new state prison policy, which could have led to an early, medical-related release for Melancon. It mentioned that the warden of the prison where Melancon – Taormina’s former classmate – was being kept had already given encouraging news.
The warden, Jerry Goodwin, “has expressed his opinion that Bobby will qualify for this temporary (and perhaps permanent) release to a nursing facility”, Taormina wrote to Aymond. To give him the best shot possible, Taormina added, Aymond would need to approve the plan to move Melancon into the Marrero nursing home, colloquially known as Wynhoven.
“We are told that things could go very quickly for Bobby if he qualifies for ‘furlough’ release,” Taormina wrote.
A stamp on Taormina’s letter shows Aymond’s office received it. Handwritten notes on the document read: “Will it be announced? … Will victims be notified? … Cost who will absorb?”
At the beginning of 2017, Taormina sent another pair of letters: one to Louisiana’s piously Catholic governor, John Bel Edwards, and one to his secretary of corrections.
Taormina’s letter to both argued that Melancon’s various health problems made him eligible for at least a temporary medical furlough that he could spend at Wynhoven. The transfer would both prevent Melancon’s health from continuing to deteriorate in prison and save the state some money as it grappled with a strained budget, Taormina wrote.
“We have met with Archbishop Gregory Aymond, and he is open to Father Melancon ultimately being housed at Wynhoven,” Taormina asserted in his letter to Edwards.
In his separate letter to the corrections secretary, James Le Blanc, Taormina said he hoped to obtain letters of support from the sheriffs and district attorneys of the parishes – Louisiana’s term for counties – where Portier had been abused and where Wynhoven was located.
In August of that same year, Melancon – whose priesthood had not been stripped from him – sent a pair of handwritten notes directly to Aymond.
One was to complain that the bishop to whom he reported, Houma-Thibodaux’s Shelton Fabre, had instructed him to stop celebrating mass in prison as a priest because he was prohibited from doing so given his conviction.
Melancon – who at the time was purportedly bed-bound, if his supporters were to be believed – did not appreciate being called out for his masses in prison. “This man rebukes me for answering God’s call,” Melancon wrote to Aymond. “All I did [was] feed God’s people with the bread of life. No one will take that joy from me – not even a bishop.”
In the other note to Aymond, which was dated a few days earlier, Melancon said he understood that Taormina was scheduled to have a meeting in Baton Rouge – Louisiana’s capital – about his appeal for an early release from prison.
“I asked Our Lady to guide them to make a positive decision,” Melancon wrote, referring to the Virgin Mary. He added that he had heard “nothing” from Fabre’s diocese and complained that he felt as if he had been “tossed aside like a used candy wrapper”.
Aymond sent one reply to Melancon in between the dates of his notes.
“Dear Bobby,” Aymond’s note said in greeting. “I join you in the prayer to Our Lady to guide those regarding your appeal to make a positive decision. We leave such things in the hands of the Lord and pray for His compassion and for justice.
“I am sorry that you feel tossed aside by some in the church. Be assured of my deep respect for you, appreciation for your many years of ministry and for your life of faith that you continue to live now.”
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‘I’m going to let it rest’
ReplyDeleteWhile few Louisianans knew of the clandestine efforts by some in the church to help Melancon win an early release from prison, Portier learned of them by September 2017 because some of the disgraced clergyman’s supporters had personally approached him. Portier reported as much in emails to the Houma-Thibodaux diocese.
The emails collectively described a private investigator showing up at Portier’s home near Houma – in the area where he had been abused and where he still lived – “with an old priest … from … New Orleans”. He also said the church had somehow found time “to send attorneys” to intercept him at his home, at his job while he was on the clock, and as he attended his uncle’s funeral.
The visitors were “trying to get the priest that raped me out of jail”, Portier wrote.
“I know the old priest also went to the district attorney’s office and asked them to file a petition for end of life release” for Melancon, Portier added.
Portier warned his local diocese: “Please … inform all of [your] legal representation that the next time they show up at my home or family event I will press charges for harassment.”
An emailed reply from the Houma-Thibodaux diocese to Portier established that he soon spoke with the local liaison for clergy abuse victims, who previously had worked in Aymond’s administration. The email from the liaison – Carmelita Centanni – to Portier made clear “that the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux is not involved in any way in any effort to get Robert Melancon released from prison”.
A burst of other written communication around that time shows that the Houma-Thibodaux bishop Fabre spoke with Aymond and wrote to Taormina, who turned 87 in July.
In a letter to Taormina, Fabre stopped short of accusing him of being the “old priest” from New Orleans whom Portier described. Fabre also described being informed by a local journalist that both “an unnamed priest [and] unnamed bishop” had recently gone to the local district attorney “to speak about the possibility of getting Robert Melancon released from prison”.
But Fabre – who has since become the archbishop of Louisville, Kentucky – also didn’t accuse Taormina of being the priest who visited the DA. He only wrote: “If you are not the priest referenced and you know who [he] is, then I would appreciate knowing his name so that I can contact him and share my very serious concerns about the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux being perceived as participating in this effort in any manner.”
The campaign for Melancon to be freed from prison fizzled out there, by all indications.
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Melancon has been accused of additional sexual violence as recently as August, when a woman filed a claim in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy case accusing him of abusing her when she was 13.
ReplyDeleteThe woman, who is seeking damages, said Melancon fondled her genitals and forced oral sex with her on multiple occasions in his car while it was parked outside churches and down the street from a fair, among other settings.
Her complaint said her abuse began in the late 1960s, when Melancon reported to the New Orleans archdiocese because the Houma-Thibodaux diocese had not yet been founded. The claim was filed past a key bankruptcy deadline, but the woman said she hadn’t learned about the date until recently. So she requested special permission to pursue her claim, which remains unsettled.
Melancon died in prison of natural causes on 5 November 2018. Coincidentally, that was three days after Aymond published the first version of a list of priests and deacons who had ministered in New Orleans and were considered credibly accused of child molestation – a roster meant as a gesture of transparency and solidarity for abuse victims.
That list did not name Melancon, though a similar one released later by the Houma-Thibodaux diocese did.
Melancon’s death brought no closure to Portier, who never received an apology from his rapist.
“When a child is hurt like that, it never, ever goes away,” Portier told The Times of Houma/Thibodaux after Melancon’s death. “It is always there.
“I don’t know how a man of God would not try to close that, to go to his death without forgiveness.”
Furthermore, those campaigning for Melancon’s release had triggered Portier’s anxiety over his rape in a major way, his father said.
“He was on edge all the time that [Melancon] was going to get out and come back and get him,” Wilson Portier said. “His mental state was always locking the windows and making sure the door was locked. He called in the middle of the night [worried] somebody was trying to get into his house and stuff like that.”
Portier said his son had tried to treat his trauma by working with therapists. Kevin Portier was still in the middle of that fight when his father said he died of a heart attack on 23 March 2019, leaving behind his parents, his brother, his sister-in-law, a niece and a nephew to grieve.
Wilson Portier listened silently to some of the supportive words Aymond, Taormina and Wheeler wrote on behalf of his son’s rapist. Asked if there was any response he wanted to put on the record, he replied: “Well, I got a lot to say about it but I’m not going to say anything.”
Referring to his late son and the man who raped him, Wilson Portier said: “I’m going to let it rest – because they’re both dead, right?”
See the photos and links embedded in this article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/18/new-orleans-archbishop-gregory-aymond-robert-melancon-catholic-church
How US archdiocese helped priest accused of abusing deaf children
ReplyDeleteGerard ‘Jerry’ Howell was supported by New Orleans’s archbishop after credible sexual abuse allegations were made against him by dozens of children
by Ramon Antonio Vargas and David Hammer in New Orleans, The Guardian January 25, 2024
For decades, Gerard “Jerry” Howell had avoided punishment for what his own church considers credible sexual abuse allegations leveled against him by dozens of children – including many deaf youths whom he met through his work.
Now, he’s found another way around what little administrative accountability he eventually faced, this time with the help of New Orleans’s archdiocese and its archbishop.
A court order put a halt to retirement benefits paid to Howell and other similarly accused priests, but only after the archdiocese declared bankruptcy in 2020 as it continued to struggle managing the fallout of a decades-old clerical abuse scandal.
Nonetheless, in a private letter to a high-ranking Vatican official in the US, New Orleans’s archbishop Gregory Aymond made clear how little he thought of that court order, saying the mandate was “unjust and painful”.
Aymond also wrote that a high-ranking aide had sent Howell information about a nonprofit which financially “assists priests such as Father Howell” – even though the group’s leader had previously been shut down by Michigan’s attorney general for misusing donations and misleading donors about his organization’s purpose.
“We fervently pray that Father Howell’s pursuit of those outside resources is successful,” Aymond wrote in a letter to the Vatican’s US ambassador, archbishop Christophe Pierre. “My heart goes out to him.”
The Guardian and WWL Louisiana obtained secret correspondence between church officials about Howell as the news outlets continue reporting on the extent to which the archdiocese of New Orleans coddled suspected – and, in some cases, admitted or convicted – child molesters.
Letters between Howell and Pierre, between Aymond and Pierre and from the church’s own psychological evaluation of Howell provide the fullest account available of support Howell received from the archdiocese for decades, without interruption.
Howell as well as his late brother and fellow priest Rodney Howell are listed among more than 70 clergymen whom the New Orleans archdiocese considers to have been credibly accused of child molestation.
But Jerry Howell’s inclusion on that roster – first published in 2018 – came eight years after Aymond received a psychologist’s report warning that Howell “will always be [considered] ‘high risk’ due to the number of incidents of abuse he perpetrated against young children”.
“One of the few groups of sexual offenders that continue to abuse into the elderly years is pedophiles,” that report said, referring to Howell, now 84. “With a pedophile, one cannot count on the aging process to naturally diminish deviant arousal or extinguish sexually abusive behavior.”
One of Howell’s victims, Kathy Austin, said she had no idea the archdiocese had already reported the priest to law enforcement until WWL and the Guardian informed her. She also could not believe it when told the archdiocese – citing an obligation under church law – ignored the psychological evaluation of Howell and paid his full rent, insurance and utilities, along with a monthly stipend of $650, for another decade.
She was incredulous, too, that when the judge overseeing the archdiocese’s bankruptcy directed the church to stop providing such support to Howell and other credibly accused priests, the archbishop not only complained that the order was unfair – he also gave her abuser advice on how to effectively stage an end-run around the directive.
“That is so far out of the scope of his responsibilities,” Austin said of Aymond. “I do not believe that that is his job.
“There’s no punishment here. No punishment.”
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How US archdiocese helped priest accused of abusing deaf children
ReplyDeleteGerard ‘Jerry’ Howell was supported by New Orleans’s archbishop after credible sexual abuse allegations were made against him by dozens of children
by Ramon Antonio Vargas and David Hammer in New Orleans, The Guardian January 25, 2024
For decades, Gerard “Jerry” Howell had avoided punishment for what his own church considers credible sexual abuse allegations leveled against him by dozens of children – including many deaf youths whom he met through his work.
Now, he’s found another way around what little administrative accountability he eventually faced, this time with the help of New Orleans’s archdiocese and its archbishop.
A court order put a halt to retirement benefits paid to Howell and other similarly accused priests, but only after the archdiocese declared bankruptcy in 2020 as it continued to struggle managing the fallout of a decades-old clerical abuse scandal.
Nonetheless, in a private letter to a high-ranking Vatican official in the US, New Orleans’s archbishop Gregory Aymond made clear how little he thought of that court order, saying the mandate was “unjust and painful”.
Aymond also wrote that a high-ranking aide had sent Howell information about a nonprofit which financially “assists priests such as Father Howell” – even though the group’s leader had previously been shut down by Michigan’s attorney general for misusing donations and misleading donors about his organization’s purpose.
“We fervently pray that Father Howell’s pursuit of those outside resources is successful,” Aymond wrote in a letter to the Vatican’s US ambassador, archbishop Christophe Pierre. “My heart goes out to him.”
The Guardian and WWL Louisiana obtained secret correspondence between church officials about Howell as the news outlets continue reporting on the extent to which the archdiocese of New Orleans coddled suspected – and, in some cases, admitted or convicted – child molesters.
Letters between Howell and Pierre, between Aymond and Pierre and from the church’s own psychological evaluation of Howell provide the fullest account available of support Howell received from the archdiocese for decades, without interruption.
Howell as well as his late brother and fellow priest Rodney Howell are listed among more than 70 clergymen whom the New Orleans archdiocese considers to have been credibly accused of child molestation.
But Jerry Howell’s inclusion on that roster – first published in 2018 – came eight years after Aymond received a psychologist’s report warning that Howell “will always be [considered] ‘high risk’ due to the number of incidents of abuse he perpetrated against young children”.
“One of the few groups of sexual offenders that continue to abuse into the elderly years is pedophiles,” that report said, referring to Howell, now 84. “With a pedophile, one cannot count on the aging process to naturally diminish deviant arousal or extinguish sexually abusive behavior.”
One of Howell’s victims, Kathy Austin, said she had no idea the archdiocese had already reported the priest to law enforcement until WWL and the Guardian informed her. She also could not believe it when told the archdiocese – citing an obligation under church law – ignored the psychological evaluation of Howell and paid his full rent, insurance and utilities, along with a monthly stipend of $650, for another decade.
She was incredulous, too, that when the judge overseeing the archdiocese’s bankruptcy directed the church to stop providing such support to Howell and other credibly accused priests, the archbishop not only complained that the order was unfair – he also gave her abuser advice on how to effectively stage an end-run around the directive.
“That is so far out of the scope of his responsibilities,” Austin said of Aymond. “I do not believe that that is his job.
“There’s no punishment here. No punishment.”
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Howell didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Visitors to a New Orleans church website can still see local Catholic officials tout Howell’s appointment as the archdiocese’s first director of the local deaf apostolate.
ReplyDeleteIn a statement on Wednesday, 24 January, Aymond said he prays for abuse survivors daily – but that does not preclude him and “anyone else from praying for those who have committed sins, even one as heinous as sexual abuse of a child, or offering charity to sinners”.
“It is my deepest desire that this message of love and forgiveness help all to find grace and hope for survivors and their families,” Aymond’s statement said.
Aymond’s statement did not address questions about the legitimacy of the organization he recommended to Howell.
‘Quit and get a job’
Austin, her sister Darlene and about two dozen other people have alleged over the years that Howell molested them as children while at the Catholic Center for the Hearing Impaired that he started in 1967.
The Austin sisters went public with their stories of abuse at the hands of Howell as far back as 1992. As part of that reporting, WWL interviewed a therapist who treated Howell’s accusers and said the archdiocese simply refused to remove him from ministry.
“In this particular case, the church knows, and they’re not doing anything about it,” Linda Conner said to WWL, which also interviewed the Austin sisters for the 1992 report.
Howell himself, in the confidential records obtained by the Guardian, revealed just how long authorities were aware of his allegedly abusive behavior but did little about it.
He wrote that late New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan reported Howell to local district attorney Harry Connick Sr for possible criminal charges as far back as 1980 – a dozen years before Conner’s interview with WWL.
Connick, a famously pious Catholic who is the father of renowned singer Harry Connick Jr, never filed charges against Howell. Howell added that Hannan then sent him for psychiatric treatment in 1980 but ultimately let him return to ministry in various New Orleans churches.
It was not until a year after WWL’s 1992 report on Howell that late archbishop Francis Schulte ordered the priest to – as he put it – “quit and get a job”. Howell, however, appealed to the Vatican. And in 1995, Schulte let Howell “continue as a priest with full financial benefits”.
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Aymond became New Orleans’s archbishop in 2009. And a year after he assumed that role, Aymond sent Howell to a treatment center.
ReplyDeleteHowell more recently claimed in writing that he was cleared after that evaluation. But a letter to Aymond from the psychologist who evaluated Howell, Monica Applewhite, contradicts him.
Applewhite said Howell should still be considered a pedophile who could not be rehabilitated and warned it was unlikely that either she or the church knew his complete history.
“The archdiocese knows of at least 24 cases and given the young age and exceptional vulnerability of the children (many of whom were deaf) this is likely to be a significant underestimate of the full volume of cases,” Applewhite wrote, adding that Howell would “always be ‘high risk’”.
Aymond said he notified local law and church authorities in the Austin area about Howell’s abusive past to “ensure that he did not receive priestly faculties” enabling him to minister to the public.
Yet Applewhite said Howell blocked her efforts to notify his neighbors and acquaintances about his history. She said he became belligerent when she told him she wanted to talk to some of the families with children in his orbit to find out if they knew about his pedophilia.
“He said it was ridiculous … and couldn’t understand how people get a sadistic pleasure out of degrading other people,” Applewhite wrote. “Jerry stated clearly … that no, he would never accept a situation in which it could be possible for those families to talk with me and know his history.
“Jerry has not demonstrated the level of openness that can make living in a community a safe situation for a man with his history.”
‘I’m speechless’
Applewhite’s findings did not dissuade Aymond’s archdiocese from continuing to pay Howell his rent, insurance, utilities and a $650 stipend while he resided in Austin, where he had moved after living in a monastery in South Dakota for a time.
Howell’s arrangement with the archdiocese came to an end when New Orleans-based federal bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill ordered it shortly after the organization filed for Chapter 11 protection in May 2020. Yet Howell subsequently found a way around that order.
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In his own letter, Aymond wrote to archbishop Pierre, the Vatican’s US ambassador, and argued that church – or canon – law required New Orleans’s archdiocese to continue supporting him. In his own letter to Pierre, Aymond explained that the archdiocese had to prioritize Grabill’s order over canon law if it didn’t want its bankruptcy case to be struck down.
ReplyDeleteYet Aymond’s letter to Pierre also made it a point to express displeasure with Grabill’s order to stop paying Howell and the other similarly situated priests, only a small number of whom have faced criminal prosecution.
“This is unfortunate. … Needless to say, this situation is unjust and painful,” Aymond said. “My heart goes out to him, and I wish we could pay sustenance as proposed by canon law.”
As both Howell and Aymond’s missives to Pierre pointed out, Howell had not been left completely empty handed. He received social security, and Grabill later allowed medical benefits for priests like Howell to be left in place, the letters said.
But Aymond’s letter in particular added that one of his top deputies had directed Howell to contact the Men of Melchizedek in hopes that the organization could “supplement his social security [and] more fully replace the stipend” he’d been forced to give up.
Aymond described Men of Melchizedek as a nonprofit meant to help “priests such as Father Howell”. The group’s website says it assists priests – especially those behind bars because of criminal charges.
An Associated Press investigation in 2019 found that Michigan’s attorney general had previously shut down a similar nonprofit named Opus Bono Sacerdotii and run by the Men of Melchizedek’s founder, Joe Maher. The attorney general charged that Opus Bono had misused donations and misled donors. Maher settled the case against his group – whose name means “work for the good of the priesthood” – in part by agreeing to never run another nonprofit in Michigan again.
Yet just months later, Maher formed Men of Melchizedek, a reference to an Old Testament figure, and carried out a nearly identical mission. Men of Melchizedek was technically incorporated in Indiana, but the address of its office is in Michigan.
Men of Melchizedek did not respond to a request for comment about its relationship with Howell. The organization’s website touts the extent to which it goes to shield the identities of those involved with the group.
But there was a copy of a handwritten note posted on the Men of Melchizedek’s site which thanked the group and its founder for paying his stipend. The note was signed “Jerry” in what Austin fears could have been the same shaky hand that signed “Gerard Howell” on his 2020 letter to Pierre.
“I saw the thank-you note, and I saw the handwriting – I was like, that looks oddly familiar,” Austin said.
The Men of Melchizedek’s website had cut off the “Jerry” signature from the thank-you note after being asked about it by the Guardian and WWL on Tuesday, 23 January.
Austin could not believe her clergy abuser’s superiors would suggest he get in league with such a group. The suggestion wasn’t illegal, but it struck Austin as immoral and improper.
“I’m speechless because I don’t understand how this – I just don’t understand how this can happen,” she said.
see the links and video embedded in this article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/25/new-orleans-archbishop-priest-sexual-abuse-allegations
‘It wasn’t a big deal’: secret deposition reveals how a child molester priest was shielded by his church
ReplyDeleteby Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian in New Orleans and David Hammer of WWL Louisiana May 9, 2024
Longtime New Orleans Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker received a special honor from the Vatican in 2000 despite having confessed to molesting children. Then, for another two decades, church leaders in the city strategically shielded him from law enforcement and media exposure – while also providing him with financial support ranging from paid limousine rides and therapeutic massages to full retirement benefits, according to his own, previously unreported testimony.
A sworn deposition Hecker gave in private in 2020 shows exactly how high-placed Catholic church officials in New Orleans let him keep his elevated position for years, even after they had been advised to oust him from the clergy and – much later – publicly acknowledged that he was a child predator.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker said at the deposition about how his archdiocese coddled him despite his acknowledged abuse of children.
The scale of the cover-up shocks the conscience. As Hecker walked into New Orleans’ historic St Louis Cathedral in early January 2000 to be handed the honorary, Vatican-bestowed title of monsignor, he had already admitted molesting children he met through his ministry.
Hecker by then had been flown out of town and driven by limousine to a psychiatric facility, which diagnosed him as an inveterate pedophile. He had been forced to take a months-long sabbatical – which was to begin the week after his promotional ceremony, at a cost to the archdiocese of $6,000. And he had already spoken to the archbishop of New Orleans at the time and his predecessor about the allegations against him.
Hecker admitted that the archbishop who presided over his 2000 promotion – the late Francis Bible Schulte – told him he regretted sending his name to his superiors in Rome to be exalted, shortly before the priest confessed to being a serial child abuser.
“Archbishop Schulte told me – he said – ‘If I had known of this, I would not have sent in for your promotion,’” Hecker testified. “‘I would not have asked for you to be a monsignor.’”
But nothing was done.
To borrow one of Hecker’s favorite words when discussing his past, Schulte and his colleagues “evidently” got over it.
First, they went through with conferring the distinction of monsignor upon Hecker, with approval from the then pope, John Paul II. And then Schulte’s successors as archbishop – Alfred Hughes and the present incumbent, Gregory Aymond – ignored a previously hidden recommendation from an official review board calling on them to laicize Hecker, which would have expelled him from the priesthood.
As a result, Hecker avoided being publicly exposed as a predator for nearly two decades. He was also able to collect tens of thousands of dollars in assistance from the second-oldest US archdiocese before at last facing a meaningful consequence: a grand jury indictment in September of last year that charged him with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes.
According to a bombshell search warrant Louisiana state police troopers served on the church in late April, the investigation which produced those charges has evolved into an inquiry over whether members of the archdiocese – in Hecker’s case and others – operated as a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
During the 2020 deposition, an attorney for a number of Hecker’s abuse accusers asked the priest if he felt fortunate that he had managed to elude being criminally charged for so long after the truth had started to trickle out. Hecker replied: “I don’t think that was even thought about at the time.”
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The eight-and-a-half-hour deposition offers the most complete accounting yet of the lengths to which an organization serving a region with about a half-million Catholics went to shelter Hecker. He gave the testimony for a civil lawsuit seeking damages from him and the archdiocese.
ReplyDeleteThe plaintiff, Aaron Hebert, has publicly alleged he was an underage altar boy at a church in Gretna, Louisiana, in the late 1960s when Hecker lined him and other children up against a wall, ordered them to drop their pants and fondled their genitals. A May 2020 bankruptcy protection filing by the archdiocese put a halt to a wave of abuse-related lawsuits including Hebert’s, but his legal team, led by Richard Trahant, received special permission to privately question Hecker under oath.
Lawyers for the archdiocese have repeatedly gone to court to oppose public access to that deposition. But the Guardian and New Orleans’s CBS affiliate, WWL Louisiana, collaborated to obtain video of Hecker’s testimony and hundreds of pages of evidentiary exhibits.
The session, carried out over two days in December 2020, provides an unprecedented look at how Hecker, now 92, evaded accountability for so long. It comes as he and his accusers wait to see whether a judge agrees with a psychiatric opinion that Hecker is not mentally competent to stand trial.
Hecker’s testimony was enlightening even as he avoided answering many questions by invoking his rights against self-incrimination under the constitution’s fifth amendment. He did so a staggering 117 times – or about once every four minutes – in a sign of concern that eventually law enforcement could use his answers against him.
Neither the attorneys for Hecker nor the plaintiff commented on the deposition.
In written answers to detailed questions, an archdiocesan spokesperson said the church stood by how Aymond handled complaints against Hecker and referred questions about his predecessors to living members of their former administrations.
The church also maintained that it properly reported Hecker to law enforcement and district attorneys across south-east Louisiana, despite the fact that a 2002 letter that notified New Orleans police about him failed to mention his confession three years earlier, among other omissions.
A long history of molestation allegations
The deposition covered allegations dating back to the 1960s, from more than a dozen accusers. Yet it is unclear how many more people have claims against Hecker, including in the archdiocesan bankruptcy case. When Trahant asked “You have committed so many sexual felonies against children that you can’t remember them all, correct?”, Hecker pleaded the fifth amendment.
For decades, Hecker testified, his superiors did not take victims or their advocates seriously, even in the rare instances when they promised a vigorous investigation.
He said the then archbishop of New Orleans, Philip Hannan, confronted Hecker in 1988 with allegations from the parents of a boy who said he was molested in the late 1970s. Hannan then flew Hecker to a paid sabbatical in New York City, church documents show. There, Hecker took classes at Fordham University while he lived and worked at a Bronx church, St Mary’s.
Church records presented at the deposition show that a high-ranking New York archdiocese official wrote to Hannan asking him to vouch for Hecker.
Hannan wrote back that Hecker had permission to be in New York – without mentioning allegations of child sexual abuse.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker testified.
That comment prompted his criminal defense attorney, Eugene Redmann, to exclaim: “Wow!”
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Another complaint in 1996 by the mother of three boys prompted then archbishop Schulte’s top aide to confront Hecker, who admitted taking showers, swimming in the nude and sleeping in the same bed as the woman’s sons, according to documents referenced in the deposition. Yet Hecker insisted he stopped short of inappropriate contact with any of those children, and the archdiocese dismissed the complaint as unsubstantiated.
ReplyDelete‘I did a good job’
A fresh complaint was filed against Hecker in October 1999, about a month after Schulte announced that Hecker would be promoted to monsignor the following year. On 4 November, Hecker provided a typed statement to the archdiocese in which he acknowledged “overtly sexual acts” with, or harassment of, multiple children.
Soon after, Hecker said a limousine driver who picked him up from the airport delivered him to a psychiatric clinic near Philadelphia, where he was evaluated over the course of a few days. The clinic concluded that Hecker was a pedophile who “takes little responsibility for his behavior” and recommended he refrain from ministering to “children, adolescents or other vulnerable individuals”.
In the deposition, Hecker took pains to avoid admitting his official diagnosis. Trahant established that the archdiocese withheld Hecker’s treatment records for the session. But Trahant had medical insurance coding records – and he directed Hecker to read the code for his diagnosis as well as to say what it meant.
Hecker balked. He told his attorney, “This seems like a trap,” before finally acknowledging the numerical code referred to pedophilia.
He returned from receiving his diagnosis, accepted his promotion to monsignor, then went on another forced sabbatical – this time to San Antonio, Texas. To do so, he had to resign his position as pastor from a church in Terrytown, Louisiana.
In a letter to congregants, he attributed the break to physical fatigue and “aging”.
Thomas Rodi – now the archbishop of Mobile, Alabama, at the time an aide to Schulte – signed an invoice authorizing a $6,000 payment to cover the sabbatical. Deposition records suggest at least some of that money went to cover $35-an-hour therapeutic massages, although Hecker denied getting more than one.
When Hecker returned, Schulte assigned him to St Charles Borromeo church in Destrehan, Louisiana, which has a grammar school attached. Copied on the letter informing Hecker of his new assignment are Rodi and Aymond, then senior Schulte lieutenants, now among the highest-ranking Catholic church officials along the US’s Gulf coast.
Rodi didn’t respond to a request for comment. An archdiocesan spokesperson said Aymond, then a vicar general and auxiliary bishop, had no administrative role overseeing Hecker at the time.
Hecker at his deposition said they didn’t limit his authority at St Charles Borromeo, but the pastor there was supposed to keep an eye on him. Pressed on whether the pastor could effectively do that, Hecker said: “Frankly, obviously he couldn’t watch me … every moment. No.”
Hecker defended the archdiocese’s decision to let him resume his clerical career despite his confession and two abuse-related sabbaticals.
“You know, like, I did a good job,” Hecker said. “Any time I was asked to do something, you know, I cooperated and so on.”
Keeping it quiet
Hecker retired with full benefits – providing him everything from housing and insurance to retirement income – in 2002, just when a clerical abuse and cover-up scandal in Boston hit fever pitch.
New Orleans’s archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, had come from Boston – an attorney general’s report published later said he helped “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse there.
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A New Orleans review board advising Hughes on managing fallout from the Boston crisis urged him to laicize Hecker, according to documents provided for the priest’s deposition.
ReplyDeleteLaicization would have ejected Hecker from the clergy and demoted him to a member of the laity. At his deposition, he admitted he would probably have forfeited lucrative retirement benefits if Hughes had followed that recommendation, which has never before been reported and which Hecker said he only learned about from Trahant’s questioning.
But Hughes ignored that recommendation. Instead he wrote to Hecker to order him not to dress as a priest or celebrate masses in public. Hecker showed his displeasure in a letter of his own.
“If I never dress as a priest, fellow priests and family members will almost certainly talk about it and before long the word would be out,” Hecker wrote.
The archbishop said he would be “happy” for Hecker to work as a volunteer at the archdiocesan archives, where workers could “dress informally”. That way, no one would find it odd Hecker was not dressing as a priest any more.
The late monsignor Raymond Hebert, who once served as the archdiocese’s director of clergy, put it even more pointedly.
“Our only concern is that someone in [Hecker’s] past might decide to go public,” Hebert wrote to another top Hughes aide in 2000.
Hecker confirmed to Trahant that the archdiocese by then was invested in keeping his misdeeds – whether acknowledged or alleged – under wraps.
“We all, you know, didn’t want big publicity or anything,” Hecker said. “Oh, yes.”
As an example, Trahant called attention to a 2002 letter that attorneys for the archdiocese – who reviewed personnel files – wrote to New Orleans police, ostensibly to notify officers of accusations against Hecker.
But that letter only mentioned a single person’s allegations, including a purported, out-of-state crime that happened outside the agency’s jurisdiction. The letter made no mention of Hecker confessing to several abusive acts. Police made no move against him.
An archdiocesan spokesperson said: “Archbishop Hughes is responsible for reporting Mr Hecker to law enforcement,” and referred questions to the retired archbishop emeritus. Hughes did not respond to requests for comment.
What Aymond knew
Aymond succeeded Hughes as archbishop in 2009. Though the church continued to suppress the reason for Hecker’s retirement seven years earlier, allegations flowed in.
A 2011 memo written by a nun serving as Aymond’s abuse victims assistance coordinator informed the archbishop that “Larry” – Hecker’s nickname – “was known among … boys as a predator.” The memo told Aymond that Hecker spoke of wanting “to put the past behind him” in a conversation with Hebert in 1996, but he “nevertheless continued to perpetrate through 1997”.
No additional details are available in the deposition exhibits. And the archdiocese said it had no further details about those allegations.
But the memo contradicts repeated claims that Hecker had stopped abusing in the 1980s – assertions he made to the archdiocese and to the psychiatric facility that diagnosed him with pedophilia.
At Hecker’s deposition, Trahant asked if he knew the archdiocese had paid more than $30,000 for his treatment from a local social worker, many of the payments approved by a top Aymond aide, the vicar general Patrick Williams. Hecker said he didn’t.
Hecker also said he was mostly unaware of abuse complaints that came in under Aymond’s watch, costing the archdiocese at least $332,500 in out-of-court settlements over 10 years beginning in 2010.
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Those agreements were among more than 130 abuse-related settlements the archdiocese paid out in the decade before it declared bankruptcy. Many were negotiated by the archdiocese’s general counsel from 2012 to 2019, Wendy Vitter. The US Senate confirmed Vitter as a federal judge in 2019, after she was nominated by then president Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteIn a strange moment during his deposition, Hecker described receiving an instruction – from someone he swore he could no longer remember – to never contact Vitter under any circumstances.
He didn’t elaborate on why he thought that was, but in addition to her legal career, Vitter is married to David Vitter, a former US senator.
A federal judiciary spokesperson said Vitter was unsure who had instructed Hecker not to speak with her – or why.
Ultimately, acting in part on advice from Wendy Vitter, Aymond decided to include Hecker on the first version of a list of 57 clergy credibly accused of molesting children or vulnerable adults. That list has grown to include nearly 80 names. But Hecker’s deposition revealed how reluctantly the archdiocese acted against him.
Just 11 days before that list came out in November 2018, the archdiocese fielded a new complaint accusing Hecker of spending a weekend in the early 1970s molesting a boy he met at a high school, records mentioned at the deposition show. The accuser said he had tried to report Hecker to a well-known priest named William Maestri, who at various points has been the archdiocese’s spokesperson and superintendent of parochial schools.
The complainant “was not impressed” with the response from Maestri, whose name is misspelled as Maestre in deposition records.
“Yes, we heard stories about things like this,” Maestri reportedly said, according to a written document provided for the deposition. “We did move him around but eventually had to retire him.”
The complainant reportedly said he wanted to see Hecker’s name on the credibly accused list, which the church had announced would be released soon. But before that, Aymond spoke openly about how difficult it would be to determine exactly who would merit inclusion.
In an email to Aymond, a top aide said he told the complainant it “might not be possible” to include Hecker on the list.
When asked about that comment, the archdiocese said that the aide – victims assistance coordinator Stephen Synan – was not involved in creating the list.
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Hecker charged with rape
ReplyDeleteHecker’s entry on the 2018 credibly accused disclosure makes no mention of how many separate accusations of child molestation he has faced. It says the first allegation reported against Hecker arrived in 1996, apparently ignoring the one Hannan addressed with him in 1988.
“That is not true, is it?” Trahant asked Hecker at the deposition. After resisting answering the question, Hecker said: “Yeah. Evidently, that must be an error.”
The archdiocese said it had no record of any complaint to Hannan in 1988, despite Hecker’s written confession and testimony that it existed.
After the list’s release, archdiocesan officials sought to assure parishioners that Hecker for years had been restricted from presenting himself as a priest – much less saying mass. But at his deposition, Hecker recounted how during the last 18 years he had presided over masses for residents at a priests’ retirement home where he had lived.
He even detailed how Aymond himself went to a mass and brunch there in July 2019, breaking bread with Hecker and at least two other priests on the credibly accused list, confirming a long-held rumor that offended clergy molestation survivors and their advocates.
“Yes, I’ve been celebrating the mass there,” Hecker said, of the retirement home. Asked if archdiocesan officials were aware, Hecker said: “Yeah, they knew.”
An archdiocesan spokesperson said that church law allows priests to continue saying mass in private without a “congregation”. But church law expert Tom Doyle – who used to serve as the staff canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC – said that in cases like Hecker’s, private mass cannot involve anyone other than the priest and perhaps an altar server.
Eventually, Hecker’s inclusion on the 2018 roster produced the most serious ramification for him. A member of the US military went to law enforcement and reported that he was a teenager in 1975 when Hecker, then a staff member at his high school, strangled him unconscious in a church bell tower – pretending to teach him a wrestling move – then sodomized him.
The archdiocese of New Orleans waited to turn over Hecker’s complete personnel file until June 2023, when it received a subpoena from the local district attorney. Three months later, a grand jury empaneled by the DA charged Hecker with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft.
He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted as charged, he would receive mandatory life imprisonment.
In August 2023, the Guardian and WWL asked Hecker about those allegations. He flatly denied choking and raping anyone.
But he had already been asked the question. At his 2020 deposition, Trahant asked Hecker if he raped the victim at the center of the only criminal case ever opened against him.
Under oath, he invoked his fifth amendment rights.
see the links, photos and video embedded in this article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/may/09/new-orleans-catholic-church-abuse
New Orleans Catholic Church Exposed for Ties to Child Sex-Trafficking
ReplyDeletePriests in the Archdiocese of New Orleans allegedly transported children out of state to abuse them.
by Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, The New Republic May 3, 2024
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans has come under fire as the target of a Louisiana sex-trafficking probe, according to an 11-page search warrant made public Tuesday. But a recent ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court might stand in the way of any victims seeking to hold the church accountable.
The document requested that the archdiocese hand over “ANY and ALL documents that pertain in any way to the sexual abuse of a minor by clergy members employed or otherwise associated with the Archdiocese of New Orleans,” specifying that those records violate the state’s child sex-trafficking laws.
The warrant also demands any and all communications between Gregory Aymond, the archbishop of New Orleans, and “ANY department within the Vatican pertaining to child sexual abuse.”
Aymand reportedly led a cover-up of the sprawling child sex-trafficking scheme that targeted children for several decades, going so far as to ignore pleas by his advisers to punish and publicly reveal the identities of priests and deacons in at least six separate cases that the church had determined were credible accusations of sexual misconduct with minors, according to a bombshell 48-page memorandum leaked in 2023 to The Guardian.
The warrant, which was filed last week, included disturbing details of the pedophilic scheme—including that, in some instances, “‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” noting that the “‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.” Abuse was also a common occurrence at the New Orleans Seminary, where children were encouraged to skinny dip in front of other members of the Archdiocese before being assaulted, according to the warrant.
But a judgment by the Bayou State’s highest court has effectively stripped sexual assault survivors of an avenue of justice against the church. The judges ruled 3–4 in March that it’s the due process rights of priests and their enablers to not be held accountable in instances of sexual assault.
The case, Bienvenu v. Diocese of Lafayette, was brought by Douglas Bienvenu and several other plaintiffs who claimed they were sexually molested by a Roman Catholic priest during the 1970s, when they were between the ages of 8 and 14.
In its majority opinion, issued on March 22, the court argued that while the facts of the case were largely undisputed, the priest—and the religious institution he was a part of—was actually protected under the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause. Therefore, a sexual assault “look-back” window established by the Louisiana legislature in 2021 was actually, according to the court, unconstitutional.
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https://newrepublic.com/post/181266/horrifying-probe-new-orleans-catholic-churchs-child-sex-trafficking
Roman Catholic priest jailed for child abuse images charged in Texas with sexual assault
ReplyDeleteNew charges filed against Anthony Odiong after eight accusers came forward alleging unwelcome sexual conduct
by Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian July 19, 2024
Days after being jailed in Florida on counts of possessing child abuse imagery, a Roman Catholic priest with ties to south-east Louisiana and Texas has been charged with two counts of sexual assault.
Police in Waco, Texas, announced the new charges against Anthony Odiong late on Thursday in a statement. It said a total of eight victims had come forward alleging Odiong, 55, tried to use his influence as a priest to pursue sexual contact they either did not welcome or to which they could not consent.
Texas is one of about a dozen states with a law that criminalizes sexual activity between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice. Furthermore, Texas deems statutes of limitation – or filing deadlines – irrelevant if a “defendant has committed the same or similar sex offense against five or more victims”, according to officials.
The investigation which led to Odiong’s arrest began after the Guardian published a report in February detailing prior allegations that ranged from sexual coercion and unwelcome touching to financial abuse. That report prompted an unidentified person to walk into the Waco police department and accuse Odiong of sexually assaulting her in 2012.
A judge subsequently granted permission for police to access an email account belonging to Odiong and found messages from another woman who had not come forward, but explicitly detailed sexual encounters with the priest, including one which wounded her colon.
Bradley DeLange, a Waco detective, later spoke with the woman, who allegedly confirmed that Odiong had subjected her to some of the behavior his prior accusers had described.
A judge then permitted police to search Odiong’s iCloud data storage account. DeLange later wrote under oath he “discovered images depicting a clearly prepubescent [disrobed] child”, which had been saved to the account in September 2020.
DeLange said there were two more images of who is believed to be another child with someone who appears to be an adult touching an unclothed body part.
Waco police secured a warrant to arrest Odiong, and authorities took him into custody at his home in Ave Maria, Florida, on Tuesday. That day, DeLange issued a statement through his department asking anyone else “victimized by Anthony Odiong anywhere in the United States” to cooperate with his investigation.
Several new accusers had apparently come forward between Tuesday and Thursday, clearing the way for the new sexual assault charges against Odiong.
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Odiong was ordained in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993. He was invited to work within the diocese of Austin, Texas, in 2006 by the then bishop Gregory Aymond. Odiong was then invited to work in Luling, Louisiana, in 2015, about six years after Aymond became the archbishop of nearby New Orleans.
ReplyDeletePlaces to which his assignments brought him over the years included the St Peter Catholic student center on the outskirts of Baylor University’s campus in Waco as well as St Anthony of Padua in Luling.
Odiong was able to build a loyal following in Texas and Louisiana largely by claiming to have a special understanding with the Virgin Mary through prayer. The charismatic clergyman would hold so-called healing masses after which some parishioners reported recovering from major medical ailments, improving church attendance as well as boosting his popularity with both congregants and diocesan officials.
But Odiong came under scrutiny after his various accusers spoke out against him – including a Pennsylvania native who reported him to the sheriff’s office in Luling, which said it could not determine if the clergyman had committed a crime.
The Austin diocese decided to prohibit Odiong from being able to minister in its region in 2019. Its counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same.
In a statement after Tuesday’s arrest in Ave Maria, the New Orleans archdiocese made it a point to say the charges against Odiong “stemmed from allegations reported in Waco”. But on Thursday, a source with direct knowledge of the investigation told the Guardian that at least one of the new accusers who made possible Thursday’s sexual assault charges against Odiong resided in the community of Luling, about 22 miles (35km) from the archdiocese of New Orleans.
Odiong remained in custody in Florida late on Thursday, jail records show. He had been ordered held without bail. It was not immediately clear when he may be transferred to Waco.
Attempts to contact an attorney who has previously represented Odiong have been unsuccessful since Tuesday. Before his arrest, Odiong had posted an open letter on social media dismissing the allegations against him as “a false, salacious, one-sided smear campaign”.
It remained to be seen on Thursday whether Odiong’s arrest would attract the attention of Louisiana state police troopers who served a search warrant on the archdiocese in April as part of an investigation into whether the church and its local leadership had operated as a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was then “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/catholic-priest-jailed
‘Maybe I lived a naive life’: New Orleans archbishop denies knowledge of widespread child sex abuse in 1970s
ReplyDeleteGregory Aymond blames three predecessors as memo says he socialized or lived with 48 allegedly abusive clergymen
by Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian July 22, 2024
The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans has said the allegations at the heart of a child-sex trafficking investigation being conducted by state police against his archdiocese are a “sin”, “evil” and a crime – but he has insisted he was oblivious to them when they unfolded during a bygone era earlier in his career.
Gregory Aymond’s comments, in an interview published on Sunday by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper, were his first about an investigation which erupted into public view in April as Louisiana state troopers served the archdiocese’s headquarters with a search warrant that accused the institution of potentially having run a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades”.
A sworn statement attached to the warrant added that the institution – which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 when faced with dozens of lawsuits stemming from the decades-old clerical molestation crisis engulfing the global church – also purportedly covered up the abuse and failed to report it to law enforcement.
The inquiry which Aymond addressed in Sunday’s interview started in part after attorneys representing clergy abuse claimants seeking damages from the archdiocese provided a 48-page memorandum asserting that there was evidence of many of the allegations cited in April’s warrant within internal documents that the church was compelled to produce during the bankruptcy.
That memo recounted how Aymond “worked, socialized and/or lived with at least 48” clergymen accused in bankruptcy claims alleging child sexual abuse, starting in 1973 – when he became a teacher at a New Orleans high school primarily catering to boys interested in the priesthood – through 2000, which was his 14th and final year as the rector-president of the city’s Notre Dame seminary.
The state police warrant alleged that investigators had spoken with victims who reported being brought to swim nude in the pool at the seminary – which trains priests – and get “sexually assaulted or abused … [while] members of the archdiocese were present”.
Yet Aymond told the Times-Picayune that he “never experienced any of those things”.
“Maybe I lived a naive life,” Aymond said to the newspaper. “I don’t think so. But they say these things happened and I would love to know where, when and by whom?”
Aymond made clear that he viewed the fallout of the clergy molestation scandal as a mess that he inherited from the three preceding New Orleans archbishops: Philip Hannan and Francis Schulte, who have died; and Alfred Hughes. He said the abuse that spurred the scandal “should have been reported”, and it was “wrong” for it to not be.
“But it was a sign of the times” when pedophilia was less understood, Aymond remarked to the Times-Picayune.
Aymond served various roles under Hannan and Schulte, including as a high-ranking aide known as a vicar general whose responsibilities would have included administering misconduct complaints against archdiocesan clergymen. He became the bishop of Austin, Texas, in 2000 and returned to New Orleans to succeed Hughes as archbishop in 2009.
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Reportedly, while in his home gazing at a photograph of him, Hannan, Schulte and Hughes all standing together, Aymond told the Times-Picayune: “I don’t think any of those men … intentionally tried to hurt people.
ReplyDelete“Did they knowingly or unknowingly make terrible mistakes? Yes, knowingly or unknowingly they made terrible mistakes that have cost the church reputation and financially.
“But I cannot judge their hearts.”
Despite Aymond conceding that his predecessors’ management of the clergy molestation scandal hurt people, his administration has left Hannan’s name on an archdiocesan-run high school. And Schulte’s name still graces an imposing building at Notre Dame seminary.
‘I know my legacy’
In other parts of the wide-ranging interview, which the Times-Picayune reported conducting over three days, Aymond for the first time pledged to make archdiocesan files detailing the local church’s clergy abuse scandal publicly accessible after resolving the bankruptcy. He also indicated his willingness to meet privately with small groups of abuse survivors to hear their stories.
And he said he’s frustrated that the focus on the child molestation scandal enveloping his archdiocese has overshadowed some of the good things he described the church having accomplished. He mentioned increased mass attendance, how 200 adults had recently been baptized and confirmed within the archdiocese, and growing youth ministries, among other things.
“I know my legacy will be ‘he dealt with sexual abuse,’ but I did more than that,” said Aymond, 74. “I have taken seriously the role of bishop, being a pastor and being a shepherd.”
As the Times-Picayune noted, Aymond’s interview with the outlet came more than five years after he released a November 2018 list disclosing the names of about 50 clergymen faced with substantial child molestation allegations while working locally. He meant the move to be a conciliatory gesture over the ongoing clergy abuse scandal.
But Aymond has drawn criticism as the list has since grown to about 80 names. And the number of priests, deacons, nuns, religious brothers and lay staffers named in abuse claims filed as part of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy is more than 300, the bulk of whom the church has not labeled as credibly accused.
At the time his archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, Aymond indicated his administration believed it could resolve the proceeding at a cost of about $7m, including compensation for abuse victims. Yet the unsettled bankruptcy had cost the church about $40m just in fees for legal and other professional services while abuse claimants still had not gotten a cent as of Sunday.
The archdiocese’s bankruptcy attorneys at one point were prepared to argue that most of the abuse claims were worth relatively little because they had been brought past filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation. But that strategy absorbed a blow when the Louisiana state supreme court in June upheld the constitutionality of laws temporarily allowing child molestation victims to pursue civil damages no matter how long ago their abuse was.
Furthermore, the archdiocese anticipated the documents spelling out its history of clergy abuse would remain under a court seal while the bankruptcy was unresolved. But they have repeatedly leaked into news media reports, showing how the church had gone to unusual lengths to suppress the truth about the abusive conduct of some of its priests and deacons – and to generously provide for them financially, including under Aymond.
Another source of unflattering headlines for the archdiocese: the pending prosecution of retired priest Lawrence Hecker, 92, who was criminally charged in September with raping a child in 1975 or 1976 at a church attached to the New Orleans high school dedicated to educating prospective priests.
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Aymond was either in his third or fourth year on the school’s faculty at the time the purported rape occurred. And in 1976, the year after his ordination into the priesthood, Aymond assumed the title of “business manager” at the school, according to his archdiocesan personnel file.
ReplyDeleteThat same year, as he has acknowledged, Aymond confiscated sexually suggestive, handwritten letters which another priest – Robert Cooper – sent two of the school’s students. The letters have since purportedly disappeared yet led to Cooper’s dismissal from the school.
Meanwhile, Hecker’s alleged victim maintained he reported his alleged rape to the principal of the school, Paul Calamari, who – along with Cooper – was later named in Aymond’s 2018 list as a credibly accused clergy predator.
Hecker appeared on the 2018 list, too. He had confessed in writing to his superiors in 1999 that he had molested several other children whom he had met through work – but the archdiocese let him minister for three more years before allowing him to quietly retire with lucrative benefits, some of which he still gets.
Aymond was carbon-copied on an archdiocesan letter welcoming Hecker back to work after his acknowledgment to abusing minors repeatedly. He was a high-ranking aide to the New Orleans archbishop at the time, Schulte.
The credibly accused list which Aymond released nine years into his tenure as Hughes’ successor was the archdiocese’s first public acknowledgment that Hecker retired in the wake of his admitted serial child molestation, according to investigative reporting conducted by the Guardian as well as the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana.
The former student pressing the criminal case against Hecker has told authorities that his school paid for him to receive mental therapy after the abuse – yet campus administrators never notified police about the crime. He finally took matters into his own hands and denounced Hecker to law enforcement in the summer of 2022.
‘Blind, incompetent or a liar’
The ensuing investigation not only resulted in criminal charges being filed against Hecker. It also spurred the child sex-trafficking investigation that Aymond commented on in his interview Sunday with the Times-Picayune.
Mere days before the interview’s publication, a priest ordained in Nigeria who Aymond invited to work in Texas and near New Orleans was charged in Florida with possessing child abuse imagery and sexually assaulting two women for whom he served as a spiritual adviser.
Church officials in Austin first suspended Anthony Odiong from ministering in that region in 2019. Their counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same. That second suspension came two years after one of the women to speak out against Odiong had filed a clergy abuse claim in 2021 in Aymond’s archdiocese’s bankruptcy case.
Aymond on Sunday did not address Odiong’s arrest.
Lawyers who have the largest contingent of clergy abuse claimants in that bankruptcy issued a statement Sunday saying it beggared belief for Aymond to portray himself as having been unaware of the predatory and abusive behavior around him during his rise in the church.
“He is either deaf and blind, incompetent or a liar – and we know which one he is,” said the statement from Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and Johnny Denenea.
Aymond told the Times-Picayune that “it is simply not true” to call him a liar.
“I am a man of integrity,” he reportedly said, “and I do not lie.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/22/new-orleans-archbishop-gregory-aymond-child-sex-abuse-ignorance
She accused a New Orleans priest of sexual assault. The church quietly moved him out of state
ReplyDeletePolice called Lisa Friloux’s complaint against Gilbert Enderle ‘unfounded’. After a Guardian investigation, they’re now examining whether the clergyman committed battery
Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans, The Guardian August 19, 2024
A woman says she was left feeling brushed aside by Roman Catholic church officials and police in New Orleans after she alleged to both that she fought off an attempted sexual assault this past spring by an elderly priest, who initially appeared to have been spared a criminal investigation and then was sent by his superiors to a midwest retirement home – all with the public kept in the dark.
But after Lisa Friloux told the Guardian about her struggles with pursuing a complaint against Gilbert Enderle, and the outlet asked New Orleans police for comment on her account, the agency said it had opened a separate follow-up investigation into the clergyman. That investigation, which was examining whether he committed battery rather than sexual assault, remained pending as of Thursday, police said.
Friloux, 63, said her experience with Enderle – who now claims to be so stricken with dementia that he does not even remember her – reinforced conceptions that key figures in the church continue to fall short of living up to its promises of transparency in cases of alleged sexual misconduct.
After decades of being mired in an ongoing clerical molestation and cover-up scandal, the global Catholic church now clearly defines as abusers priests and deacons who sexually prey on children and adults with developmental disabilities. But the church, with rare exceptions, has generally been less willing to apply the label of abuser to priests or deacons who pursue sexual contact with people to whom they minister or over whom they hold a spiritual authority.
Some US states have forced the issue, including Texas, which has a law criminalizing sexual activity between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on them. That law mirrors others which similarly outlaw sexual relationships between teachers and students of age, as well as corrections officers and incarcerated adults, given the imbalance of power at play.
Notably, in July, that Texas law was used by police in Waco to file criminal charges against a priest who was accused by several women of sexually abusive conduct while working in that state as well as in south-east Louisiana – within the boundaries of the archdiocese of New Orleans.
Louisiana does not have a law like the one in Texas. But Friloux, a registered nurse, hopes her story prompts state legislators to consider passing such a law – especially after she said police at first seemingly tried to dismiss her complaint against Enderle in late March as an “awkward” date and then relied on that characterization to deem the sexual aspect of her allegations as unfounded.
She also wishes the Catholic church will one day install leaders who take complaints like hers more seriously, beginning with Enderle’s religious order as well as the New Orleans archdiocese, the latter of which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 as it wrangled with the financial fallout of the worldwide church’s entrenched clergy abuse crisis.
After Friloux first came forward to the archdiocese in March, officials wrote to her that her “concern” over Enderle had prompted him to be “reassigned” to an assisted living facility in Missouri where he would be cared for and monitored by the Redemptorist order of which he is a member. But the community at large was not given notice of the reasons behind Enderle’s transfer in the way the church’s own policies would have required if it regarded him as a possible clergy abuser, potentially with more victims who have yet to come forth.
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Parishioners at the church where Enderle worked instead were provided with a bulletin in April titled “Thank you Fr Gil!” informing them that – for no stated reason – he was taking his trademark “smile and … kind heart” to a new home.
ReplyDeleteFriloux said she was offended at the bulletin’s lighthearted tone and that it reminded her of a pattern seen at the height of the Catholic clergy abuse scandal, when the church would furtively move those accused of misconduct from one place to the other.
Furthermore, just days before that bulletin, Louisiana state police had served a search warrant on the archdiocese as part of an investigation into whether the organization once ran a sex trafficking ring responsible for widespread sexual abuse of children that dated back decades – before then seeking to systemically conceal it all.
“We need a clean slate across the board,” Friloux said. “We need an overhaul.”
Neither the archdiocese of New Orleans nor the Redemptorist order immediately responded to requests for comment about Enderle.
An earlier accusation
Enderle, who is about 88, was ordained a priest in December 1962. A church-published biography explains how the native of San Antonio, Texas, earned a doctorate in historical theology while also teaching for more than 30 years across the US and in Nigeria. He later worked as a biographer, author and editor for a historical institute based at the Redemptorists’ worldwide headquarters in Rome from 2005 to 2013.
And then, with the permission of the city’s archdiocese, he was eventually stationed at New Orleans’s Saint Alphonsus church, whose distinctive, two-century-old Italianate architecture landed it on the US’s national list of historical landmarks.
At Saint Alphonsus, Enderle took charge of promoting efforts to secure sainthood for Francis Xavier Seelos, a fellow Redemptorist priest who ministered to people with yellow fever in New Orleans during the 1860s before he himself was fatally infected with the disease.
Enderle was in that role in 2019 when he gave a crucifix from a shrine in honor of Seelos – housed at an adjacent Catholic church – to a congregant who then took the cross to a local family with an ill newborn.
The baby had nearly died during birth and was thought to have suffered substantial neurological damage. The parishioner prayed for the child’s health while placing the crucifix on the boy’s body. The next day, the baby began a recovery to full health which culminated without any of the feared neurological damage, leaving Enderle and other devotees of Seelos to ponder whether they had witnessed a miracle supporting the late Redemptorist’s cause of being canonized, according to viral news media stories that outlined the sequence of events.
But there was more to Enderle than his publicized achievements and devotion to Seelos. In 2002, when the global Catholic clergy molestation and cover-up scandal hit a boiling pitch in the archdiocese of Boston, a man reported to New Orleans church officials that he had been molested as a child by Enderle more than 20 years earlier.
Enderle, at the time of the allegation, was the principal of a Redemptorist high school, about 40 miles (64km) north of New Orleans, where the accuser was a student.
Confidential church records obtained by the Guardian through reporting on the archdiocese’s bankruptcy show it forwarded the accusations – along with some made against six other priests – to law enforcement authorities with jurisdiction over the region that included the high school in question. None of those priests were prosecuted, and Enderle was among three from that group who were omitted from a published list of about 80 clergymen whom the archdiocese of New Orleans considers to be credibly accused.
Little is known about that allegation against Enderle, which if not substantiated has not been proved false either. The records said Enderle “totally and completely” denied the claims at the time they were made, ...cont'd below
but to what extent he was investigated beyond that remains unclear. Lately, an attorney who represented Enderle after the accusation dismissed the allegation as “a bunch of shit”, not elaborating but citing the results of a private investigation into the claimant.
ReplyDeleteThat accuser has since died. And the lawyer who represented the 2002 claimant against Enderle told the Guardian that she did not remember the case. All Friloux knows is that she had no idea about that earlier chapter in Enderle’s otherwise unimpeded career when she met him in 2015.
‘He would not let go’
Friloux first met Enderle while they both attended a picnic hosted by a church where he would also spend time near her home town of Pass Christian, Mississippi, about 65 miles (104km) from New Orleans.
She remembers being impressed while listening to Enderle talk about his time in Rome and Africa. In turn, he was interested in a nutritional supplement that she was distributing that day, and they made arrangements to continue their dialogue.
That then led to more conversations as well as walks in the park or at the beach alongside Mississippi’s gulf coast. Friloux described mostly talking about their lives, the pair’s mutual Catholic faith and his admiration of the beloved Redemptorist figure affectionately known to many as the Blessed Father Seelos.
But, as Enderle grew more comfortable with her in what she interpreted to be their friendship, he would increasingly veer into territory that she found strange.
One time it was his suddenly grabbing her hand. Another time it was Enderle’s begging Friloux to see her caesarean section scar. A particularly off-putting episode involved him visiting her at her home and trying to pull her down into a bed with him – until he became startled by a tall floor lamp that he knocked over, which provided her the opportunity to pull away.
Friloux said she told Enderle she had started to become uncomfortable with his behavior, which in retrospect she regarded as grooming. But she wasn’t ready to give up on their friendship and cut him out of her life, wondering if at least some of his conduct was possibly no more than a collection of “senior” moments.
Yet she realized she would not be able to carry on as she had with him on Sunday 17 March 2024. That day, they had made plans for her to pick him up from his rectory in New Orleans to go see a biographical film about the saint and late Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini at the theater. And when she arrived, she asked to use his bathroom because her bladder was full from the hour-long drive.
Friloux said Enderle was waiting for her at the bathroom door when she emerged. She recalled him embracing her in an “unrelenting bear hug” from which she could not free herself. She said he then tried to kiss her, took her hands into his, held on tightly – and then pressed himself against her as he talked about how fascinated he was with her body.
“I couldn’t move,” Friloux said. “He would not let go.”
She said she never stopped resisting and in the end managed to physically rebuff Enderle, loosening his grip enough for her to slip away from his grasp. Friloux said she gathered her keys and phone, began walking to her car and told Enderle he needed to respect personal boundaries.
She remembered announcing her intention to go to the movie by herself if necessary while Enderle followed her and with an agitated tone said to her: “We can visit here.”
But she left alone. And a week later, she reported Enderle to New Orleans police.
‘Thank you for your concern’
An initial, single-sentence summary of Friloux’s complaint against Enderle was distributed to local media as part of a daily log of major criminal offenses shortly after its filing. “Victim was sexually assaulted by suspect,” it said.
However, a more complete police report written later described Friloux’s complaint quite differently. The report said she went “on a date with an acquaintance who hugged her for a long period that felt awkward and ...cont'd below
... made her uncomfortable – but … nothing sexual occurred”.
ReplyDelete“This investigation is classified as unfounded due to no sexual offense occurring,” the police report said.
Friloux disputed telling police that her encounter with Enderle was either a date or simply awkward.
“I argued with the police officer when he used the word ‘date’,” Friloux said. “I said it was not a date.”
Friloux said she realized what she reported fell short of a rape. But she was curious whether police had a basis to investigate a lesser yet still serious charge such as battery or assault.
She said she suspected “police have priorities” which her case simply did not meet.
“They are here to mop up blood,” Friloux said. “They did not see this as something … that needed their emergency attention.”
Police on Thursday issued a statement to the Guardian which said investigators had only determined “a sexual assault did not take place”. But the statement assured that police had initiated “a separate simple battery investigation” in connection with Friloux’s allegations.
The statement said investigators could not comment further because Friloux’s case was “active and ongoing”.
Hours later, Friloux said she spoke with another New Orleans police officer, and she detailed her allegations against Enderle once more. She told the officer she would eagerly anticipate hearing from him again.
Meanwhile, Friloux said she called the New Orleans archdiocese’s director of clergy, relayed what had happened with Enderle and shared her belief that – in addition to everything else – he needed a psychiatric evaluation, along with other medical care.
The New Orleans clergy director, Pat Williams, wrote to Friloux on 29 April 2024 saying Enderle had been transferred to the St Clement Redemptorist mission community and assisted living home in Liguori, Missouri, near Saint Louis. “He will be under the direct care and monitor of the Redemptorists,” Williams said to Friloux. “Thank you for the concern you have expressed … and for making us aware of his situation. You will be in my continued prayers.”
The bulletin announcing Enderle’s departure to the community at Saint Alphonsus had come out eight days earlier. Beside providing a brief recap of his professional accomplishments and his advocacy for Seelos, the bulletin mentioned how he would often be seen “tinkering in his woodshed”, praying with the sick and jovially cutting some of his colleagues’ hair, too. It made no mention of what Friloux had reported to the archdiocese – or that he had even been sent off to the Saint Louis area.
Additionally, Saint Alphonsus’ website listed Enderle as a priest in residence until as recently as 10 July.
As has been seen with other Catholic clergymen faced with allegations of sexually abusive misconduct, Enderle told the Guardian that he was battling illness and had no idea who Friloux was. He said he had no plans of returning to New Orleans. Also, he repeatedly said he was well into his 80s, asked multiple times to be reminded with whom he was conversing and what the topic was, and ultimately declared: “I didn’t assault anybody … I never assaulted anyone.”
Friloux said she has some personal reservations about whether Enderle’s dementia is as severe as he now claims. She also said she is unbothered at Enderle’s claims of not remembering her. Friloux said she has phone records that corroborate how long they knew each other and a long list of people – from the mayor of her city to Redemptorist office assistants – who can confirm her acquaintance with Enderle.
She recounted the way she would often introduce him to people who had not yet met him: “This is Father Gil Enderle. He’s a Redemptorist.”
Friloux finally scoffed at the memory, saying: “Well, guess who needs redemption now?”
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/19/new-orleans-priest-assault
New Orleans Catholic church offers $62.5m after abuse victims seek $1bn
ReplyDeleteArchdiocese’s proposal comes as survivors of sexual abuse by clergy request ‘very reasonable’ $1bn to settle claims
by Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans and David Hammer of WWL Louisiana
The Guardian September 14, 2024
With a self-imposed deadline looming to file a plan to reorganize New Orleans’ bankrupt Roman Catholic archdiocese, a committee representing about 500 survivors of clergy sexual abuse in south-east Louisiana on Friday proposed that the organization, its affiliated churches, ministries, schools and their insurers should pay more than $1bn to settle their claims.
The archdiocese quickly answered with its counter-proposal: $62.5m, or more than $900m less.
Looking at it another way, the survivors are seeking $2m per claim – the church is offering $125,000 on average.
The vast majority of the money in the abuse claimants’ proposal – roughly $800m – should come from insurance companies, according to the plan filed on Friday in US bankruptcy court by a negotiating committee representing the abuse creditors. Meanwhile, the archdiocese should pay $84m and its affiliates – known as apostolates – should chip in $133m.
In the church’s competing plan, the archdiocese was prepared to offer $50m and its apostolates $12.5m. Nothing additional would come from the archdiocese’s insurers.
The church’s proposal includes non-monetary considerations, but it did not immediately file any of those details. New Orleans’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond, has said he planned to disclose documents on clergy abusers that the church has long fought to keep secret.
In a letter to Catholics in the region, Aymond said the church was negotiating “actions that we publicly pledge to take to continue our commitment to ensuring our parishes, schools, and ministries are safe places for all to grow in faith, be educated, and to participate in ministry”.
The archdiocese has already paid about $40m in legal and professional fees to go through the bankruptcy process so far – well over the $7m that the church initially claimed that the proceeding could cost. And none of those costs will be paid by insurance, church officials have told WWL Louisiana, a CBS affiliate.
Any final settlement plan would have to be approved by the majority of abuse survivor claimants.
The San Diego archdiocese’s 2007 bankruptcy settlement was the most lucrative for abuse claimants, with the church and its insurers paying more than $198m to 144 victims – an average of $1.4m per claim. San Diego’s archdiocese declared bankruptcy again in June.
James Adams, an abuse survivor, former president of the New Orleans archdiocese’s fundraising board and ex-member of the creditors’ committee, said the victims’ initial offer is more than fair. Adams alluded to how Aymond, early in the proceeding, informed the Vatican in writing that insurance would cover “the vast majority” of the bankruptcy – and that is the case in Friday’s proposal from abuse victims.
He noted how the archdiocese is embarking on a $75m restoration project for its Saint Louis Cathedral, which is $12.5m more than what the church was offering victims to settle the bankruptcy.
“Is a soul less valuable than a building?” Adams said. “Archbishop Aymond’s long-awaited plan gives his answer loud and clear.”
One of Adams’ attorneys, Soren Giselson, echoed him, saying in a statement that the survivors committee’s proposed plan would fairly compensate more than 500 people were abused as children “by pedophile clergy enabled by the archdiocese”.
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The creditors’ plan also lays out exactly how each abuse claim would be valued by a neutral reviewer. It proposes using a score of one to 100 for each claimant based on the severity, duration and frequency of the abuse they allegedly suffered, how many church officials allegedly abused them, and how they were affected for the rest of their childhood and through adulthood.
ReplyDeleteThe creditors’ proposal also would require the church to change the way it reports and responds to child molestation allegations, which, for decades, were handled internally without being reported to police.
The proposal would require the archdiocese to report to law enforcement all abuse whether or not the abuser is dead, the victim is now an adult and no matter how many years have passed since the crime, which is the opposite of how the church dealt with such claims during the decades-old clergy molestation crisis that preceded the archdiocese’s bankruptcy.
This is just the opening public salvo in the negotiations for a settlement. It comes after more than four and a half years of expensive legal wrangling, marked by acrimony, secrecy and even a criminal investigation into cover-ups with sworn police statements describing an alleged child sex ring at the archdiocese.
US bankruptcy judge Meredith Grabill has recently put the first public pressure on the two sides to reach an agreement or pull the plug on chapter 11 reorganization. She assigned a business turnaround expert to determine whether it was viable for the church’s bankruptcy to be resolved successfully, with a public report on the question due on 23 October.
One reason for the difference of opinion in the value of the proposed settlements was the Louisiana supreme court’s decision to uphold a 2021 law allowing child-molestation victims to pursue monetary damages over long-ago abuse. Church institutions have consistently argued that it is unconstitutional to force them to potentially pay damages on abuse allegations that were filed in court too late while abuse victims’ advocates say the upholding of the law has considerably driven up the potential value of their claims.
In August, attorneys for the archdiocese and the creditors promised Grabill that the two sides would present their dueling reorganization plans to the court by Monday.
Aymond, who is the corporate leader of the archdiocese and each of the church’s 188 apostolates, announced that affiliated parishes and schools would also have to share in the cost of settling the bankruptcy.
One of the apostolates on the hook for a portion of the settlement is Christopher Homes, about a dozen apartment complexes the church owns and operates as low-income and senior housing. A major Boston-based real estate investment firm, Hayden Glade, made an offer shortly after the start of the archdiocese bankruptcy case to purchase Christopher Homes for $150m. Sources tell WWL the deal would have let the church pay off the business’s debts and clear about $75m.
Hayden Glade managing partner Elliott White, himself a survivor of child sexual abuse, said the archdiocese dismissed his offer out of hand. But he has not given up hope that the church might ultimately accept his offer, which would cover more than half of the total amount survivors are demanding from all of the archdiocese’s affiliates.
“I made an offer, and to move forward, [the church said] I’d have to release what I’m guessing would be several million dollars to the church, but without having a purchase contract,” White said. “We didn’t have the opportunity to say we need to see this money go to aid the victims. We just were sort of told ‘no.’”
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New Orleans clergy abuse: details emerge after retired priest admits to kidnapping and child rape
ReplyDeleteVictim was going to testify about being forced to see a psychiatrist for lying or face expulsion from school after rape by Lawrence Hecker, now 93
by Ramon Antonio Vargas and David Hammer of WWL Louisiana in New Orleans, The Guardian December 4, 2024
The star witness in a clerical molestation case that has rocked one of the most Catholic cities in the US was going to tell a jury that his high school principal forced him to see a psychiatrist for “anger issues and fantasy stories” – or face expulsion – after reporting that a priest had raped him on campus.
Such shocking testimony was set to be delivered in a criminal trial against the retired priest, 93-year-old Lawrence Hecker, that was scheduled to begin Tuesday in New Orleans. But it was upended when the clergyman unexpectedly pleaded guilty to charges of child rape and kidnapping, a decision that guarantees him a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
The most complete account yet of the case that state prosecutors in New Orleans were prepared to present against Hecker – after he had long benefited from a complex cover-up largely engineered by his church superiors – is contained in court documents obtained by the Guardian and WWL-TV upon the sudden conclusion of the case.
According to a 13-page filing from the office of the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, the victim who pursued the case against Hecker was about 16 when the priest raped him in 1975.
Hecker at the time had hired the teen to help set up masses at New Orleans’ St Theresa the Little Flower church to satisfy a pastoral service requirement at his school next door, St John Vianney Prep. Hecker would also encounter the teen at weekly pool parties for students at the local seminary.
One Sunday after mass, as was his habit, the teen was working out in a weight room in St Theresa’s bell tower. Hecker showed up unannounced in the weight room that day and spoke with him about the teen’s hopes of making one of the sports teams at adjacent St John.
The priest told the child that he had heard St John would soon be starting a wrestling team. He purported to teach the teen some moves to help him make the squad. The ruse allowed Hecker to position himself behind the boy and put him in a chokehold.
Authorities would later assert that the teen felt Hecker rape him before he lost consciousness as he tried to fight his attacker off. When the teen woke up, he realized the back of his shorts were wet, so he discarded them as he went home. He said he then noticed it was much later in the day because of the way the sunlight was hitting the bell tower – and that he was alone.
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The teen later told his mother about the rape – as well as his principal, Paul Calamari, who summoned the boy to his office after he had gotten into a fight with a friend.
ReplyDelete“Calamari immediately became angry and asked … who he told about the incident,” prosecutors later wrote in court filings. The boy described telling his mother, prompting Calamari to set up a meeting with the child’s parents.
“Calamari told [his] parents that [he] needed to see a psychiatrist due to his ‘anger issues and fantasy stories’ or he would be expelled,” prosecutors would later write. “The thought of expulsion scared [him], so he agreed to go to a therapist for the next several months.”
The boy suspected the Catholic church must have paid for the therapist because he knew his parents could not afford it.
Much later, long after St John Vianney and St Theresa both were shuttered, it would become clear to the victim – now 65 – that he was far from the only boy Hecker had preyed on.
In 1999, Hecker admitted in writing to Catholic church leaders in New Orleans that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met in prior decades through his ministry – work that also saw him involved with the Boy Scouts, another organization plagued with a history of child abuse.
The New Orleans archdiocese nonetheless allowed Hecker to return to work before he retired with lucrative benefits a few years later. The local church then waited until 2018 to notify its congregants that Hecker – along with Calamari and dozens of their fellow clergymen – had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations. But even then, it only acknowledged receiving a complaint against Hecker documented in 1996, long after the rape at St Theresa and almost a decade after the archdiocese had called Hecker in to address another molestation complaint.
Hundreds of abuse claims against its clergy eventually drove the institution with a half-million followers in its region to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
Two years after Hecker’s unmasking as a child predator, the former St John Vianney student spoke to law enforcement about his rape. But his case was slow to progress.
Eventually, in June 2023, the Guardian managed to get a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and exposed them to the public for the first time despite a seal of confidentiality on information associated with the church bankruptcy.
The Guardian provided the confession to WWL-TV Louisiana in August 2023, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera. Hecker told the outlets that his written confession about “overtly sexual acts” with underage boys who were “100% willing” was accurate and authentic, but he denied ever choking anyone or raping anyone.
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A couple of weeks later, with the help of Louisiana state police investigator Scott Rodrigue, Williams – the New Orleans district attorney – secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape and kidnapping.
ReplyDeleteThe case was delayed for more than a year over questions about whether Hecker had the mental competence needed to withstand trial. The judge who had the case for a year, Benedict Willard, suddenly recused himself on an earlier trial date in September, ensuring another delay.
But as it became clear that the trial in front of Judge Nandi Campbell would proceed on Tuesday, at least 10 witnesses who alleged a range of sexually abusive acts by Hecker from the 1960s to the 1980s stood prepared to testify against him.
Many had served Hecker as altar boys and accused him of fondling them, including while swimming.
One described taking a walk with Hecker in some woods outside New Orleans when the priest put him in a wrestling hold, began trying to rape him and then sauntered off as if nothing happened when another child approached upon hearing the commotion. After that boy grew up, Hecker officiated his wedding because the bride’s family was close to him – a shocking turn of events to which Williams alluded on Tuesday while speaking with reporters outside the courthouse.
“Lawrence Hecker married him and his fiancee because his bride’s family was that close to Lawrence Hecker,” Williams said. “Understand the complexities of this thing.”
Hecker on Tuesday pleaded guilty as charged while the first set of prospective jurors who might have been chosen to hear about some of those acts gathered outside Campbell’s courtroom.
None of Hecker’s superiors were charged alongside him. Rodrigue interviewed Calamari, though it was never clear whether Williams’ office intended to call him as a witness.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether Hecker factors into a broader, pending state police investigation aiming to determine whether the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to law enforcement, as Rodrigue put it in April in a sworn statement.
Yet Tuesday still marked a stunning outcome because it has been rare for Catholic clergymen in New Orleans to be charged – much less convicted – in connection with the worldwide church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal.
“There is no better result the district attorney could have gotten,” said Richard Trahant, the attorney for the star witness in the case against Hecker. “There just isn’t.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/new-orleans-clergy-child-sex-abuse-lawrence-hecker
‘They covered up child rape’: how the New Orleans archdiocese protected a priest who preyed on children
ReplyDeleteAn elderly priest’s guilty plea exposes the church’s history of shielding predators in its midst for decades
by Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans, The Guardian December 8, 2024
In the case of serial child molester and retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, the cover-up failed.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying by a coalition of high-ranking church officials and sympathetic judges, who prioritized the predator’s comfort above justice for his innumerable victims until the evidence against him was so overwhelming that – rather than stand the humiliation of a public trial – he pleaded guilty last Tuesday.
The 93-year-old’s decision not only saddled him with an automatic life sentence. It also exposed how Catholic bureaucrats in Hecker’s home town of New Orleans, one of the church’s strongholds in the US, repeated the same sins that produced an eerily similar scandal in Boston two decades earlier – events later immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.
This is the only conclusion to draw from years of reporting and studying the church files, court records, legal proceedings and and law enforcement documents outlining the campaign of terror to which Hecker subjected so many children raised in one of the most reliably Catholic regions remaining in the US.
Files held by New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese establish that Hecker was molesting children virtually immediately upon his ordination in 1958. Chronologically speaking, one of Hecker’s earliest victims was a preteen altar boy who described attending nude swimming parties with the priest – gatherings that would culminate in sexual assaults by the attacker.
Hecker eventually instructed that boy to bring a box containing a feather to a particular fellow priest at another nearby Catholic school and church. In short order, the second priest sexually attacked the boy – and the victim said he came to realize Hecker had used the feather to mark him as vulnerable to molestation.
Unsurprisingly, Hecker’s superiors became more than aware of his crimes. Accusations against him piled up at each of the major milestones in the US church’s reckoning with Catholic clergy sexual abuse, which began in the 1980s when Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in criminal court to molesting several boys.
Around that time, then New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan received a child molestation complaint against Hecker. Hannan’s response – carried out in private – was to fly Hecker to a sabbatical in New York City before letting him return to work once things back home cooled off.
More such claims against Hecker came in the 1990s, when another Louisiana priest – Robert Melancon – was convicted of raping an altar boy. The ensuing scrutiny prompted Hecker to confess in writing to church officials that he had sexually molested or otherwise harassed several children whom he had met through his ministry.
Retiring under duress
This time, Hannan’s successor as archbishop, Francis Schulte, was in charge of responding. Schulte sent Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric care facility that diagnosed him as an incurable pedophile who should not work with young people. Upon Hecker’s return, Schulte assigned him to work at a church with a grammar school attached to it.
Hecker retired under duress in 2002. As Spotlight famously chronicled, the Boston Globe had just exposed its local Catholic archdiocese for having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, and it ignited a scandal that saw the worldwide church promise reform, such as by no longer tolerating the likes of Hecker.
But, despite pledges of transparency, New Orleans’ archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, chose to hide from congregants the fact that Hecker had retired in hopes of keeping secret his career as a serial child molester.
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Archdiocesan attorneys back then did send a confidential memorandum to police notifying them that there had been an accusation naming Hecker as an abuser. But the note mentioned only a single case while failing to mention Hecker’s 1999 confessions. And Hughes ignored his advisers’ recommendation to oust Hecker altogether from the priesthood instead of merely letting him retire, a break that allowed the clergyman to collect lucrative retirement benefits.
ReplyDeleteSuch maneuvers were on brand for Hughes, who had worked as an administrator in Boston’s archdiocese in the 1980s and 1990s and sought to “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse in that city, a report from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office ultimately found.
That scheming was effective in further suppressing the truth about Hecker – who would spend decades more free, even while Hughes’ successor as New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, continued dealing with the priest’s crimes after being appointed in 2009.
For instance, in 2012, Aymond authorized a $37,000 payment to settle out of court with a former altar boy who alleged having been molested by Hecker.
Aymond, nonetheless, would not publicly unmask Hecker as a child molester for years. In fact, in April 2018, the archdiocese touted the looming 60th anniversary of Hecker’s ordination into the priesthood in its newspaper.
About seven months after that celebratory announcement, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania established that clergy abuse within the state’s Catholic institutions was more widespread than ever thought previously. Aymond at last accepted that he could no longer completely suppress Hecker’s past.
The archbishop outed him in a list of dozens of local clergymen who had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations – though the roster lacked any details about the sheer volume of molestation cases facing Hecker or how far back they dated.
Hundreds of abuse claims against the New Orleans archdiocese’s personnel – both on the clergy molester list and not – eventually drove the organization to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
In theory, the bankruptcy filing should have metaphorically locked the truth about Hecker away because most information associated with the case was automatically placed under a confidentiality order.
The federal judge presiding over the church’s bankruptcy, Meredith Grabill, at one point ruled that the seal on case-related information was so sacrosanct that it could not be lifted even with respect to Hecker and his potential crimes. In reaching that decision, Grabill said she intended to “destroy any [sealed] information that this court received” while litigating the issue about whether Hecker deserved to benefit from the bankruptcy’s secrecy.
Still, the truth got out.
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They covered up child rape
ReplyDeleteOne reason for that: the Guardian obtained a copy of Hecker’s 1999 admissions and reported them publicly for the first time despite the bankruptcy’s confidentiality. The Guardian then provided the confession to WWL-TV Louisiana in August 2023, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera.
Hecker remarkably stood by his written confession about illicit and “overtly sexual acts” with multiple underage boys. The outlets, furthermore, later secured a copy of a video deposition that Hecker gave privately in 2020 during civil litigation stemming from one of the complaints against him. The deposition explored – in Hecker’s own words – how New Orleans’ last four archbishops had helped him avoid accountability over the course of decades.
Hannan and Schulte are dead. Hughes and Aymond are still alive, though they have not commented in detail about their management of Hecker.
In the end, the serial molester’s downfall resulted from law enforcement’s speaking with a man who told investigators that he had been an underage student at a New Orleans Catholic high school in 1975 when Hecker choked him to the point of unconsciousness at a neighboring church and then raped him. The victim recalled reporting the rape to his principal at the time, Paul Calamari.
However, Calamari – later named in Aymond’s 2018 list of clergy molesters – failed to report Hecker to police, according to the victim. The victim said Calamari instead threatened to expel him and compelled him to go to psychiatric treatment for “anger issues and fantasy stories”.
(Coincidentally, Aymond joined the clergy the same year as the rape. And at the time, he was a young member of the faculty of the school where Calamari was the principal.)
Authorities knew Louisiana allowed instances of child rape to be criminally prosecuted no matter how old the cases were. And, given Hecker’s prior admissions as well as the number of accusations against him, they also knew building a strong case was viable.
With the help of Louisiana state police investigator Scott Rodrigue, the office of New Orleans’ district attorney, Jason Williams, secured a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes in September 2023. Rodrigue as well as assistant district attorneys Ned McGowan and Andre Gaudin lined up nearly a dozen witnesses who alleged a range of sexually abusive acts by Hecker from the 1960s to the 1980s – and who would bolster the credibility of the victim pressing the charges in question.
Even then, it seemed evident some cogs in the justice system preferred for Hecker to die without meeting justice. New Orleans criminal court judge Benedict Willard delayed the case more than a year amid questions about whether Hecker – at his advanced age – retained the mental competence required to withstand trial.
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Doctors eventually determined that Hecker had dementia – specifically, Alzheimer’s disease – but fit the criteria to stand trial. Then, on the morning of a trial date tentatively scheduled for late September, Willard suddenly recused himself from handling the case, citing nothing more than a clash of personalities with McGowan.
ReplyDeleteThe abrupt move delayed the case by a couple more months, which was not insignificant given Hecker’s age. Willard has declined to publicly discuss his recusal with the news media. Yet it prompted questions in some quarters about whether Willard – a lifelong New Orleanian and graduate of one of the city’s influential Catholic high schools – had done the church a last-ditch favor to see whether a declining Hecker would die while his case remained unresolved, sparing the archdiocese the painful spectacle of a trial.
Soon enough, the judge who took over Hecker’s case – Brooklyn-born Nandi Campbell – ensured Hecker’s trial would begin on Tuesday with jury selection unless otherwise resolved. Hecker preferred the latter option, pleading guilty as charged to crimes including child rape, guaranteeing him life imprisonment at a sentencing date tentatively scheduled for 18 December.
All eyes now turn to whether any of Hecker’s enablers will be prosecuted.
Though none had been charged at the time of the guilty plea, it’s well-known that the Hecker case birthed a broader, ongoing inquiry into whether the archdiocese ran a child-sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities, as a statement sworn under oath by Rodrigue in April put it.
Asked if any of his client’s former superiors put pressure on him to plead guilty and avert a trial that would embarrass the church, Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, denied that happened.
“It was his decision, and he made it on his own free will,” Hjortsberg said as Hecker was taken out of Campbell’s courtroom in a wheelchair. He later added at a news conference: “He’s taking responsibility for his actions, and everyone will have an opportunity to move forward in any way they can.”
Williams alluded to how steep the odds of convicting Hecker had been. The last clergyman to be charged with child rape in New Orleans’ criminal courthouse – deacon George Brignac – had died four years earlier after the coronavirus pandemic delayed his trial, marking the last of four attempts to try him on counts of clerical molestation.
“It should not be this difficult to investigate and prosecute an admitted rapist,” Williams said. “And [yet] it was.
“The press pushed this. The press pressed something that it seemed like the system and institutions wanted to look away from and forget about – and that also feels criminal.”
Overcome with emotion about the role he played in bringing Hecker to justice, the case’s star witness declined comment. But his attorney, Richard Trahant, met with journalists documenting Hecker’s guilty plea and aptly summarized the legacy of the case.
“These men who wear pointy hats and carry staffs and wear robes and wear fancy jewelry and gold chalices – they covered up child rape,” Trahant said.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/08/new-orleans-catholic-church-child-sex-abuse-analysis
Two inveterate US clergy abusers preyed on same victim in New Orleans
ReplyDeleteLegal records show Lawrence Hecker and Gilbert Gauthe targeted the same altar boy in 1970s before being convicted of other crimes
by Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans, The Guardian December 11, 2024
Two of the most inveterate abusers in the history of the US Roman Catholic church’s clergy molestation scandal once converged on the same victim – before each was brought to justice years later for other crimes.
An altar server and former Boy Scouts member who grew up in New Orleans endured a wide range of abusive acts by Lawrence Hecker and his fellow priest Gilbert Gauthe in the early 1970s, according to legal documents summarizing the victim’s experience which were obtained by the Guardian.
Hecker abused the boy after taking him to swim nude at a local health club, during trips to catch crawfish that involved overnight stays in motels and at a since closed New Orleans church colloquially known as Little Flower, among other instances, between 1970 and 1973.
Little Flower would host meetings of the Boy Scouts, with which both Hecker and Gauthe were involved. The altar server recalled encountering Gauthe at those meetings, getting rides home from him and going on camping trips that the priest would take as well.
Gauthe molested the victim during those rides home, camping trips and at least during a detour to a department store parking lot from about 1971 to 1972, he wrote in the legal documents reviewed by the Guardian.
The victim explained how both predators kept him quiet. Hecker “always said I was his favorite and best altar boy”, the victim wrote. “He made sure everything looked like innocent fun and games.”
Meanwhile, the victim recounted, Gauthe “said I couldn’t tell any one because I would get in a lot of trouble and my parents would be really mad”.
Gauthe eventually ignited the US church’s reckoning with clergy abuse after pleading guilty in Lafayette, Louisiana, in 1985 to molesting several boys. He served 10 years in prison, now lives in Texas, and is still being named in lawsuits from victims who are seeking damages over their abuse at his hands.
As part of the ongoing fallout from that reckoning caused by Gauthe, the Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans in 2018 published a list of dozens of priests and deacons faced with substantial allegations of child molestation. That roster was the first time the public learned Hecker – who had retired 16 years earlier – was an abuser.
During the following year, the former Little Flower altar server and Boy Scout whom Hecker, 93, and Gauthe, 79, molested decided to participate in mediation talks with the archdiocese over his abuse. The talks produced a $275,000 settlement to the victim for the abuse he described being subjected to Gauthe, Hecker and a third priest: James Kilgour, who was on the New Orleans archdiocese’s list, too, and died in 2021.
That agreement was among more than $11.6m in clergy abuse settlements that the New Orleans archdiocese paid between 2010 and 2020, when the church filed for bankruptcy protection – a process that has remained unresolved.
In 2022, a former student of a now-closed high school that was adjacent to Little Flower went to law enforcement authorities and accused Hecker of raping him in the church’s belltower in 1975, when he was about 16.
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That victim recalled reporting the rape to his principal at the time, Paul Calamari. However, Calamari, later named in the New Orleans archdiocese’s 2018 list of clergy molesters, failed to report Hecker to police. Calamari instead threatened to expel the boy unless he went to the therapy for “anger issues and fantasy stories”, as the victim put it.
ReplyDeleteThat case – which had no filing deadline because of its nature – progressed slowly until the Guardian uncovered a statement which Hecker provided to his superiors in 1999 that showed him confessing to either sexually abusing or harassing several children he met through his ministry, though it was a fraction of the victims he had preyed on.
The Guardian later provided the confession to New Orleans’s CBS affiliate, WWL Louisiana, and both outlets confronted Hecker on camera in August 2023. Hecker acknowledged the confession was authentic, and New Orleans state prosecutors indicted him in September 2023 in connection with the belltower rape.
Hecker pleaded guilty on the morning of 3 December, when his trial was supposed to start, to child rape and other crimes, ending a chain of events that WWL Louisiana is exploring in an hour-long special airing Wednesday at 9pm local time. It was the first time in recent memory that a clergyman was convicted of clerical molestation within the city limits of New Orleans, one of the US’s Catholic strongholds.
He is tentatively scheduled to receive a mandatory life sentence on 18 December.
It remains to be seen whether any of Hecker’s enablers are at risk of criminal charges, though his prosecution did spur a broader, ongoing Louisiana state police inquiry into whether the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities, as investigators have alleged in a statement sworn under oath.
The attorney of the Hecker and Gauthe victim who was paid $275,000 for his abuse said his client’s experience lends credence to investigators’ allegations.
“What it tells me is that … pedophiles hang together,” said the lawyer, Roger Stetter.
Alluding to how the Boy Scouts have also been plagued with a history of child abuse, Stetter added: “They have networks, and they pass children on to one another. They know who is going after children, and they assist each other.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/11/clergy-abuse-new-orleans
Clergy abuse survivors say there’s still ‘long ways to go’ after sentencing of New Orleans priest
ReplyDeleteOne survivor says local archbishop ‘should have been sitting right there next to’ abuser Lawrence Hecker at his hearing
by Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans, The Guardian December 19, 2024
The clergy abuse survivor who successfully pursued a child rape charge against retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker in New Orleans says the local archbishop “should have been sitting right there next to” the serial molester clergyman at his criminal sentencing hearing on Wednesday.
A statement issued by the survivor after the 93-year-old Hecker received a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment Wednesday alluded to how New Orleans archbishop Gregory Aymond has repeatedly expressed a desire in the media to “walk with” the victims of the worldwide Catholic church’s decades-old clergy molestation scandal.
But the survivor, who requested that his name be withheld, took note of how Aymond did not appear at Wednesday’s sentencing, which capped off a legal saga that exposed how the church took steps to hide the truth about Hecker’s abusive past from the public for as long as possible.
“[Aymond] and the archdiocese had the perfect chance” to walk with survivors at a proceeding where two other victims also spoke about the lifelong trauma Hecker’s abuse of them inflicted, the statement said. “But neither [Aymond] nor anyone from the archdiocese showed up to support the survivors.
“Aymond’s words are hollow and false. Aymond should have been sitting right there next to Hecker.”
The archbishop later responded in a statement saying that he as well as the archdiocese hoped and prayed “that the survivors of abuse perpetrated by Lawrence Hecker have some sense of peace in his sentencing”.
“We offer our sincere and heartfelt apologies to the survivors for the pain Hecker has caused them to endure for decades,” Aymond’s statement said in part. He also commended the “bravery” of the Hecker abuse survivors who spoke out against him. And he renewed a promise to meet with clergy molestation victims who wanted once the archdiocese resolves a pending bankruptcy protection case that it filed in 2020 while attempting to manage the fallout of the church’s clerical abuse scandal.
The verbal exchange between the survivor who proved to be Hecker’s downfall and Aymond unfolded after the victim went into gut-wrenching detail about how his life was ruined in 1975 by his abuser and those who then shielded the clergyman from accountability.
In his first time speaking publicly about his ordeal, the survivor testified on Wednesday that he was a teenaged student at New Orleans’ St John Vianney high school – which primarily catered to boys interested in joining the Catholic priesthood – when Hecker befriended him. He was an aspiring athlete at the time and would work out in a weight room fashioned out of a space in the bell tower of an adjacent church colloquially known as Little Flower, which – like St John Vianney – has since closed.
Hecker showed up unannounced in the weight room one day and made small talk with the boy about sports. He suddenly put the child in a wrestling-style headlock until he was unconscious and raped him, according to court filings.
The survivor later told his mother and school officials about the rape. But he said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police. Instead, Calamari threatened the survivor with expulsion unless he underwent psychological treatment for what the school official dismissed as “anger issues and fantasy stories”.
Hecker initially denied those accusations. But in 1999, he did admit in writing to his church superiors that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met through his ministry.
The church then allowed Hecker to return to work before retiring a few years later. The archdiocese then waited until 2018 – nine years into Aymond’s leadership – [cont' below]
...to finally notify the public that Hecker, Calamari and dozens of their fellow clergymen had been faced with substantial child sexual abuse allegations that eventually drove the organization into bankruptcy.
ReplyDeleteAfter Hecker’s unmasking as a child predator, the former St John Vianney student worked with a civil attorney, Richard Trahant, to file a formal complaint with law enforcement about his assault. The case made slow progress until the Guardian and WWL Louisiana began publishing a series of reports on Hecker’s 1999 confession – as well as actions that the church took to hide that disclosure. The outlets managed to publish those reports despite the fact that the bankruptcy thrust most archdiocesan matters under a court-mandated seal of confidentiality.
Ultimately in September 2023, Louisiana state police and the office of New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams obtained a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape and other crimes in connection with the 1975 attack at St John Vianney.
He pleaded guilty on the morning his trial was supposed to start on 3 December. That not only produced one of only a handful of Catholic clergy molestation convictions in recent memory in Louisiana, which is home to about a million of the church’s followers. It also set the stage for Hecker to get his life sentence Wednesday.
Two other victims of Hecker who were prepared to testify in support of the former St John Vianney student had the trial gone forward addressed him Wednesday. One, who has publicly identified himself as Aaron Hebert, dismissed Hecker as “Satan in priest clothing”. The second of those survivors called Hecker “an animal” – while the self-acknowledged child rapist occasionally wept, wiped at his eyes and audibly groaned but declined to apologize.
The former St John Vianney student then testified that his being raped by Hecker negatively affected his personal relationships for the rest of his life – including with his wife and children. “I have zero friends,” he said. “I pushed everyone away.”
And in his opinion, “the archdiocese should be sitting there” in the courtroom with Hecker – “because they are complicit in this as well”.
Supporting that notion was a number of clergy abuse survivor advocates who attended Wednesday’s sentencing and urged authorities to remain committed to a broader investigation spurred by the case against Hecker.
Law enforcement statements sworn under oath as part of the wider investigation explicitly outline suspicions that the archdiocese allegedly ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities. But no one other than Hecker had been charged at the time of his sentencing – something advocates would like to see changed.
Richard Windmann of the Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse (SCSA) said being satisfied with Hecker would be “a day late and a dollar short”. “They need to cast that net wider,” Windmann remarked.
“There still are others” deserving of justice, said Jillian Coburn, who co-founded SCSA along with Windmann. “So many others.”
Brian Manix – a survivor of abuse by the late George Brignac, a deacon who was arrested four separate times on child molestation charges and never convicted before dying while awaiting trial in 2020 – said: “It’s a start, but we got a long ways to go. I mean, there’s a lot of hiding – we all know now.”
For her part, Dana LaCombe, the research director of the clergy sex abuse survivor group TentMakers of Louisiana, urged the state police investigator and FBI agent who together pursued Hecker and then widened their work beyond him to “continue the fight no matter the road blocks they come across”.
“Children,” she said, “are worth fighting for.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/19/clergy-abuse-survivors-lawrence-hecker-sentence