The Church Knew, but Failed to Act

By Tim Morris
Times Picayune
February 23, 2019

https://www.nola.com/opinions/2019/02/the-church-knew-but-failed-to-act.html

People hold up pictures of young people they say were victims of sexual abuse by priests as they gather during a twilight vigil prayer near Castle Sant' Angelo, in Rome, Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019.

The failures, missed opportunities, mistakes and criminal neglect that allowed a culture of child sexual abuse to take root and grow in the Catholic Church are all found in the story of the disgraced Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe.

The first Catholic clergyman in the United States to be indicted for repeatedly sexually abusing children, Gauthe’s 1984 case not only revealed his own repulsive crimes but evidence of other pedophile priests and a church hierarchy complicit in a systemic cover-up.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the church refused to heed the warnings that could have stemmed decades more of abuse. It also could have opened the way to reconciliation and healing for the sins that have left one of the world’s most influential institutions crippled by the scandals 35 years later.

NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune reporter Kim Chatelain is not the first to tell Gauthe’s sordid story, but his “Catholic Church ignored 1985 report warning of child sex abuse crisis” should evoke a great weight of remorse as church leaders gather in Rome to make yet another attempt to address the problem.

The church clearly had enough information to confront the tragedy in the mid-1980s but chose not to.

Ray Mouton, the Lafayette lawyer who represented Gauthe three-and-a-half decades ago, says the priest’s history of abusing boys started before he was even ordained. Mouton said Gauthe was suspected of molesting children while he was a seminary student serving as a counselor at the former Hope Haven and Madonna Manor orphanages in Marrero.

Though the records were not publicly available to the reporter, Mouton told Chatelain there is no doubt that the church had evidence of Gauthe’s problem.

“I saw the files," he said. "This man should never have become a priest.”

Once ordained, Gauthe served in Abbeville, New Iberia and Broussard, all part of the Diocese of Lafayette. In 1977, he became pastor of St. John the Evangelist in tiny Henry, La., where he served until 1983.

At each stop, Chatelain reports, parents accused Gauthe of abusing young boys. In response, church officials quietly moved him to other ministries in other places.

In preparing his defense of Gauthe, Mouton said he traveled the country and soon concluded that the problem was much greater than one pedophile priest in Louisiana. The crisis likely involved hundreds of priests in hundreds of parishes.

Along the way, Mouton connected with Father Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the Rev. Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist and director of the St. Luke Institute in Maryland, who were seeing the same things Mouton was seeing.

In 1985, the three men drafted a 92-page report that became known as “The Manual.” It spelled out the depth of the clergy abuse and provided step-by-step guidelines for bishops to address abuse allegations. It urged the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to create committees to aggressively prevent abuse.

It should have been a moment that changed the course of history.

Confident in their findings and recommendations, the men sent their report to influential Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston.

For those familiar with the Catholic Church scandal, the blood runs cold in reading that line.

Law, the once respected archbishop of Boston, was forced to resign in 2002 after a Boston Globe investigation revealed that he and other bishops had covered up child abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese.

Law apologized at the time to the victims of John Geoghan, a priest who had been moved from parish to parish, despite Law's knowledge of his abuse of young boys. Geoghan was convicted in 2002 of indecent assault and battery on a 10-year-old boy.

Law was never charged with a crime and moved to Italy to serve as archpriest of the Papal Liberian Basilica of St. Mary Major, hardly a signal that the church was taking the matter seriously. Law died in 2017.

Gauthe pleaded guilty in 1984 to 11 counts each of child pornography, crimes against nature and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. In exchange, prosecutors dropped an aggravated rape charge that carried a mandatory life sentence.

He was released in 1995 after serving about half of his 20-year sentence. He moved to the tiny community of Ace, Texas, where he was arrested months later and charged with molesting a 3-year-old boy.

Citing a weak case and a lack of cooperation from Louisiana authorities, the Polk County District Attorney’s Office allowed Gauthe to plead no contest to a non-sexual charge of injury to a child, according to media reports. He was given seven years of probation.

He now lives in Houston, about 5,700 miles away from where the bishops are meeting in Rome.

It would be a good thing for the bishops to look back over those miles and 35 years to understand what happens when the church fails to act.