Authorities have expanded an investigation of clergy sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church in New Orleans to incorporate senior church officials suspected of protecting predatory priests for many years and failing to report their crimes to law enforcement.
Louisiana State Police carried out a sweeping search warrant last week on the Archdiocese of New Orleans, looking for a long-secreted cache of church records and communications between local church leaders and the Vatican concerning the church’s handling of clergy sexual abuse.
The search signaled a recent phase of the investigation that may seek to find out what particular church leaders, including current and former archbishops, knew about claims that the warrant describes as “ignored and in lots of cases covered up.”
The warrant contained several recent details concerning the sex-trafficking investigation, including claims that some victims were sexually assaulted in a seminary swimming pool after being ordered to “skinny dip.” Separately, the warrant says, predatory priests developed a system of sharing victims by giving them “gifts” that they were instructed to pass on to clergymen at other schools or churches.
“It was said that the ‘gift’ was a type of signaling to a different priest that the person was a goal for sexual abuse,” state police investigator Scott Rodrigue wrote in an affidavit in support of the warrant.
The warrant sought an exhaustive range of personnel records, “files contained in any and all safes” and documents showing the extent to which the archdiocese continued supporting clergymen even after they were added to the so-called credibly accused list of suspected predators.
The warrant also confirmed a parallel FBI examination of clergy sexual abuse reported by The Associated Press nearly two years ago. That investigation has examined whether priests took children across state lines to molest them.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond didn’t reply to a request for comment and has rebuffed repeated calls by clergy abuse accusers to step down. The Vatican also didn’t reply to a request for comment.
“No one and no institution is above the law, especially once we are talking about protecting children from the horrors of kid sexual abuse,” said Kathryn Robb, executive director of Child USAdvocacy, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of kid sexual abuse accusers. “This warrant is the essential muscle of the criminal system to guard children.”
Many of probably the most explosive church records surfaced in a flood of sexual abuse lawsuits that drove the archdiocese to hunt Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection 4 years ago. The documents chronicle years of abuse claims, interviews with accused clergy and a pattern of church leaders transferring problem priests, but they’ve been shielded under a sweeping confidentiality order within the bankruptcy case that has long hampered the state and federal investigations.
“We have been forced, against our own skilled obligations, to maintain them secret,” said attorneys Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and John Denenea, who represent the accusers.
The search could deepen the legal peril for church leaders, exposing them to potential state court prosecutions at the same time as the U.S. Justice Department has struggled to discover federally prosecutable crimes related to clergy sexual abuse.
Last yr, an Orleans Parish grand jury indicted Lawrence Hecker, a now-92-year-old disgraced priest, on charges accusing him of sexually assaulting a teenage boy in 1975 — a rare prosecution that prompted the broader search of the archdiocese last week.
Hecker has pleaded not guilty to counts of rape, kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft. He is accused of choking the teenager unconscious under the guise of performing a wrestling move and sexually assaulting him.
The archdiocese didn’t report Hecker’s admissions to law enforcement while permitting him to work around children until he quietly left the ministry in 2002. Church officials reassigned Hecker even after he was sent to a psychiatric facility in Pennsylvania and “diagnosed as a pedophile,” the warrant says.
“Hecker was not the one member of the archdiocese sent to receive psychiatric testing based on allegations of kid sexual abuse,” Rodrigue wrote within the warrant.
The age of the Hecker case presents legal and evidentiary hurdles for prosecutors, who also face the political sensitivity of prosecuting a longtime clergyman in heavily Catholic New Orleans. Many predator priests have escaped criminal consequences in Louisiana for those reasons, making the scope of last week’s search much more notable.
One high-profile exception got here in 2019 within the case of George F. Brignac, a longtime deacon and schoolteacher charged with sexually assaulting a then-altar boy within the Seventies. Brignac died in 2020 while awaiting trial on the age of 85. He had pleaded not guilty.
Litigation involving Brignac turned up hundreds of still-secret emails documenting behind-the-scenes public relations work that New Orleans Saints executives did for the archdiocese in 2018 and 2019 to contain fallout from clergy abuse scandals.
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Associated Press reporter Nicole Winfield contributed from Rome.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/suggestions/
