UNITED STATES
The Amrican Conservative
By ROD DREHER • July 21, 2014
Minnesota Public Radio’s Madeleine Baran is doing an incredible job of reporting on the roots of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis’s current clerical sex abuse scandal. I was stunned to discover from her reporting that the present-day scandals there have their roots in the Diocese of Lafayette, La.
She got her hands on some unsealed court records and went down to south Louisiana to talk to people who knew former Minneapolis bishop Harry Flynn when he was made a bishop and sent to Lafayette to clean up the mess left behind by his predecessor, who allowed the convicted child molester Fr. Gilbert Gauthe stay in ministry, despite knowing that he was raping boys. Bishop Flynn came to town with an agenda to heal the Church. When he left town years later, his reputation as a caring bishop who went the extra mile to rebuild the diocese and to help the families of the abused boys carried him to Minneapolis. Later, after Boston broke big, he became the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ point man on dealing with the sex abuse scandal. Who better than Harry Flynn, right?
Except, reports Baran, everything people thought they knew about Archbishop Flynn was a lie. Excerpts:
Another Catholic attorney who had represented victims, Anthony Fontana, was frustrated in his efforts to get the bishop’s attention. “There’s another problem you need to know about,” he told Flynn. A Lafayette priest named Gilbert Dutel had been accused of coercing young adult men into having sex.
Flynn offered a calm reply. He explained that Dutel was cured and that, regardless, he needed to keep him in ministry because of the priest shortage.
Fontana said that in a sworn affidavit that was part of the 1990s lawsuit. More:
The files do not support the claim that Flynn healed the diocese. They also contain no suggestion that Flynn called police about priests accused of sexually assaulting children. Hundreds of documents reveal that Flynn’s diocese used many of the same aggressive legal tactics that he would later employ in the Twin Cities.
Attorneys hired by the diocese argued that victims waited too long to come forward and that the public didn’t need to know the names of accused priests. The diocese fought efforts by victims to seek compensation from the church and focused on keeping the scandal as private as possible, which meant that fewer victims came forward to sue.
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