Clergy sexual abuse investigation targets Catholic church leaders in New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Authorities have expanded an investigation into clergy sexual abuse at the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans to include high-ranking church officials suspected of protecting predatory priests for decades and failing to report their crimes to law enforcement.

Louisiana State Police conducted a sweeping search warrant in the Archdiocese of New Orleans in late April, searching for a long-secret cache of church records and communications between local church leaders and the Vatican about the church’s handling of clergy sexual abuse.

The search opened a new phase of the investigation to determine what certain church leaders, including Archbishop Gregory Aymond and his predecessors, knew about allegations described in the warrant as “ignored and in many cases covered up.”

“The Archdiocese of New Orleans has openly discussed the issue of sexual abuse for over 20 years,” Bill Kearney, an archdiocese spokesman, said in a statement. “In this spirit, we are also committed to cooperating with law enforcement authorities in these endeavors.”

The warrant contained several new details about the sex trafficking investigation, including allegations that some victims were sexually assaulted at a seminar swimming pool after being ordered to take a “skinny dip.” Regardless, the arrest warrant says, predatory priests devised a system to distribute victims by giving them “gifts” to pass on to clergy at other schools or churches.

“It was stated that the ‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the individual was a target of sexual abuse,” state police investigator Scott Rodrigue wrote in an affidavit supporting the warrant.

The warrant sought a comprehensive set of personnel files, “files contained in all safes” and documents showing the extent to which the archdiocese continued to support clergy even after they were placed on the so-called suspected perpetrators list with credible defendants.

The warrant also confirmed a parallel FBI investigation into clergy sexual abuse that The Associated Press reported nearly two years ago. This investigation examined whether priests took children across state lines to molest them.

“No one or institution is above the law, especially when it comes to protecting children from the horrors of child sexual abuse,” said Kathryn Robb, executive director of Child USAdvocacy, a nonprofit that advocates for accusers of child sexual abuse. “This warrant is the necessary muscle in the criminal system to protect children.”

Many of the most explosive church records surfaced in a spate of sexual abuse lawsuits that led the archdiocese to seek Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection four years ago. The documents document years of abuse allegations, interviews with accused clergy and a pattern of church leaders transferring problem priests. But they were protected by a sweeping bankruptcy confidentiality order that has long hampered state and federal investigations.

“We were forced, contrary to our own professional obligations, to keep it secret,” said lawyers Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and John Denenea, who represent the accusers.

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment and rarely commented on developments in abuse cases involving local clergy. But for decades, Rome’s message to local church leaders was to keep clergy abuse files in secret archives.

So far, the Vatican still does not require cases of abuse to be reported to police around the world, although it now says local church leaders should comply with all applicable civil reporting laws. As the clergy abuse scandal has continued to create a credibility crisis for the Catholic hierarchy worldwide, Pope Francis in 2019 lifted the top secrecy covering abuse cases, known as the Pontifical Secret.

Previously, local church leaders routinely invoked pontifical secrecy as a reason to defy criminal subpoenas. In theory, removing the secret removed any official obstacle to such cooperation.

In New Orleans, the search could increase legal jeopardy for church leaders, potentially exposing them to prosecution in state courts, even as the U.S. Justice Department struggles to identify federally prosecutable crimes related to clergy sexual abuse.

Last year, an Orleans Parish grand jury indicted Lawrence Hecker, a now 92-year-old disgraced priest, on charges that he sexually abused a teenager in 1975 – an extraordinary prosecution that triggered a broader search of the archdiocese last week .

Hecker pleaded not guilty to the charges of rape, kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft. He is accused of strangling the teenager unconscious under the pretext of a wrestling event and sexually abusing him.

The archdiocese failed to report Hecker’s admissions to law enforcement while allowing him to work with children until he quietly left office in 2002. Church officials re-used Hecker even after he was committed to a psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania and “diagnosed as a pedophile,” an arrest warrant says.

“Hecker was not the only member of the archdiocese sent for psychiatric testing following allegations of child sexual abuse,” Rodrigue wrote in the warrant.

The era of the Hecker case presents legal and evidentiary hurdles for prosecutors who are also faced with the political sensitivity of prosecuting a longtime cleric in heavily Catholic New Orleans. For these reasons, many predatory priests in Louisiana have escaped criminal prosecution, making the scale of last week’s search even more remarkable.

A high-profile exception occurred in 2019 in the case of George F. Brignac, a longtime deacon and school teacher who was charged with sexually assaulting a then-altar boy in the 1970s. Brignac died in 2020 at the age of 85 while awaiting trial. He had pleaded not guilty.

In a lawsuit involving Brignac, thousands of still-secret emails were found documenting the behind-the-scenes public relations work that New Orleans Saints executives did for the archdiocese in 2018 and 2019 to deal with the fallout from abuse scandals Contain clergy.

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Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield contributed from Rome.

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