NEW ORLEANS (LA)
Times-Picayune
February 20, 2019
By Kim Chatelain
Ray Mouton and Gilbert Gauthe could not have been more polar opposites.
Mouton was a flamboyant, well-heeled defense lawyer whose Louisiana ancestors included a governor, a United States Senator and the founder of the community that eventually became the city of Lafayette. He drove flashy cars, captured media attention, raked in big bucks and lived on a 15-acre estate with his wife and three children near the Acadiana fields where he had quarterbacked his school football team to a state championship.
Gauthe was the son of a struggling farmer, an introvert and a poor student. He was the oldest of eight children raised modestly along Bayou Lafourche in Napoleonville, a village with a total area of 0.15 square miles. Uncertain about his direction in life, the unassuming Assumption High School graduate entered Immaculata Seminary in Lafayette and became a priest. Using his Catholic collar as a shield, he molested dozens of young boys and for years intimidated them into silence.
The antipodal lives of the two Cajuns merged in 1984 when Mouton, a cradle Catholic, was hired by the Diocese of Lafayette to represent Gauthe, whose iniquitous deeds had caught up to him in a criminal indictment charging that he molested 34 children. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Mouton and Gauthe would become key figures in the origins of a 35-year scandal about clergy sexual abuse and cover up that has become the church’s biggest challenge since Reformation in the 16th century – setting the stage for a historic religious summit at the Vatican that begins Thursday (Feb. 21).
With one of the world’s oldest and most powerful institutions now groaning under the weight of a heightening clergy abuse scandal, Pope Francis is attempting to get his arms around the crisis by summoning bishops from around the globe to Rome, 5,500 miles and a cultural world apart from the tiny Acadiana community where Gauthe became “patient zero” in Roman Catholicism’s plague of abuse.
For much of the past three-and-a-half decades since Gauthe’s crimes were exposed, the Catholic hierarchy has bobbed and weaved its way through a barrage of sex abuse complaints highlighted by blockbuster revelations in Boston in 2002 and in Pennsylvania last year. Those reports of abuse finally prompted church leaders to take tangible steps to address the deep-seated sins that some believe span much of the church’s long history.
But Mouton and a few others within the church recognized Gauthe not as an anomaly, but as the first of what they feared would be a wave of abuse cases. They wrote so in an internal report in the mid-1980s, warning church hierarchy that the crisis likely involved hundreds of pedophile priests and could cost the church $1 billion in judgments.
Church leaders ignored the warning.
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