NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The Advocate
April 12, 2019
By Ramon Antonio Vargas
For the second time in a week, a man has come forward with new claims that he was molested decades ago by a New Orleans-area Catholic priest who was only publicly identified as a suspected child abuser last year.
A lawsuit filed Thursday by an unnamed plaintiff in Orleans Parish Civil District Court accused Lawrence Hecker, 87, of fondling a group of boys who were attending St. Joseph School in Gretna in 1968, 10 years after his ordination.
The suit against Hecker joins a string of other civil court cases – mostly ongoing – that have been filed against Catholic Church officials in New Orleans following Archbishop Gregory Aymond’s disclosure on Nov. 2 of a list of clerics who had been faced with credible allegations of sexually abusing children.
Hecker appeared on that list and joins other still-living, defrocked clerics on that roster to be confronted by accusers who had not come forward before the release.
According to the new 19-page suit, the plaintiff was in middle school at St. Joseph when Hecker took him and other boys at the school behind the altar at the church. The lawsuit accused Hecker of lining the boys up shoulder-to-shoulder, ordering them to drop their pants and showing them “what it was like to get a hernia exam” by groping the children’s genitals.
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