NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The New Orleans Advocate
February 8, 2019
By Andrea Gallo and Ramon Antonio Vargas
It was 1959 when priest John Franklin was stripped of his ability to minister to Catholics in the New Orleans area because he had been credibly accused of sexually abusing a minor.
Yet within a few years, Franklin was working as a priest in central Louisiana, holding invocations at prep sports awards banquets, presiding over funerals — and by 1966, allegedly abusing another child.
He was still a priest 20 years later, when he fatally shot himself in the head shortly before he could be tried on charges that he sexually abused a preteen altar boy in Florida
His suicide note said he preferred to be “a dead memory than a living … disgrace.”
Franklin’s story, buried in the balkanized record keeping of the U.S. Catholic Church, has slowly resurfaced following his appearance on last year’s list of credibly accused clergy abusers from the Archdiocese of New Orleans and a listing this week on the release from the Diocese of Alexandria.
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