LOUISIANA
The Times-Picayune
By Kim Chatelain, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
An international non-profit organization for victims of clergy sexual abuse has taken issue with Archbishop of New Orleans Gregory Aymond’s plan for a special ritual seeking forgiveness from people hurt by the Roman Catholic Church. The group says tangible steps are needed more than “words, gestures and apologies.”
Aymond has set “a ritual of forgiveness and resurrection” as part of the annual Divine Mercy Sunday Mass that he will celebrate April 3 at St. Joseph Church in New Orleans. The rite “seeks forgiveness and reconciliation with those who have been hurt or alienated by the church either through institutional or individual offenses,” the archdiocese said.
In announcing what it called a historic and important Mass in the life of the local church, the archdiocese did not mention the series of lawsuits, criminal prosecutions and scandals since the mid-1980s over sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the United States. It says only that “we as individuals, as members of the archdiocese and society as a whole have let people down.”
David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said Friday (April 1) that such apology services often sound good but are largely self-serving public relations events. “They don’t protect a single child, expose a single predator, punish a single concealer or deter a single cover-up,” Clohessy said. “The archdiocese should take tangible steps so that the church no longer will need to give apologies. The goal should be no more victims.”
He said Aymond should warn parents, parishioners, police, prosecutors and the public about two abusive priests who at some point in their careers were in the New Orleans area and have been convicted of sex crimes elsewhere:
* Mark Broussard, a former Lake Charles priest who on March 11 was sentenced to two life terms in prison, plus 50 years, for sexually abusing altar boys in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
* Robert Poandl, who lived in New Orleans in the early 1970s and was sentenced to prison after taking a Cincinnati boy to West Virginia and assaulting him in 1991. In 2010, Aymond heeded the advocacy group’s call to alert New Orleans area Catholics to allegations made against Poandl.
Clohessy also called attention to the Rev. Maurice Nutt, director of the Institute for Black Catholics Studies at Xavier University. In 2003, two St. Louis police officers reached a confidential settlement in their lawsuits alleging that Nutt, while a member of the St. Louis Police Board, sexually harassed them. Nutt has publicly denied any wrongdoing in the case and has never been charged with a crime.
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