New Orleans Archdiocese Announces Changes to How It Responds to Priest Abuse Claims

By David Hammer and Ramon Antonio Vargas
WWL-TV and New Orleans Advocate
February 11, 2021

https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/investigations/new-orleans-archdiocese-announces-changes-to-how-it-responds-to-priest-abuse-claims/289-80f97c67-4a31-4619-a46a-db3904c78c71

Archbishop says changes are borne from dialogue with local SNAP leader.

Weeks after pledging to collaborate with a clerical abuse survivors’ group, the Archdiocese of New Orleans on Thursday announced several changes to the way it plans to respond to people who claim they were molested by priests and deacons.

Most significantly, Archbishop Gregory Aymond has agreed to appoint an abuse survivor to his Independent Review Board, which reviews molestation claims and advises whether a clergyman should be added to a public list of clerics who are suspected of sexually abusing minors.

He also replaced the archdiocese’s victims assistance coordinator, who has been roundly criticized by survivors as ineffectual.

The announcement comes a little more than two weeks before a March 1 legal deadline for new victims of sexual abuse to come forward with claims for compensation against the local church, which filed for bankruptcy last year.

The archdiocese has not disclosed exactly who sits on the Independent Review Board, which is primarily made up of lay professionals. But the archdiocese’s statement said Aymond will invite a survivor to join the board for the first time on the recommendation of victims’ advocates, including Kevin Bourgeois, the head of the local chapter of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.

Previously one of the archbishop’s harshest critics, Bourgeois started a dialogue with Aymond in December aimed at improving the local Catholic Church’s treatment of people who disclose clerical abuse, especially those coming forward after years of silence.

Bourgeois, who settled with the church on claims that he was sexually abused by a New Orleans priest as a teen, had particularly harsh words for the archdiocese’s victims assistance coordinator, Marist Brother Stephen Synan, a pastoral counseling instructor at Notre Dame Seminary.