The Rev. Stanley Begnaud’s more than two-decade career as an ordained priest in the Diocese of Lafayette is proving problematic for those he left behind.

Begnaud, born in Lafayette in 1921, ordained in 1958, retired in 1982 and deceased three years later, is a key though largely missing figure in a continuing lawsuit against the Diocese of Lafayette filed by a plaintiff, known in court only as “Sam Doe,” who says the priest sexually abused him more than 60 years ago. The plaintiff would be in his late 70s now.

Sam Doe charges that he was a parishioner at St. Stephen Catholic Church in Berwick, near Morgan City, in the early 1960s when Begnaud, then a parish priest who was giving the 16-year-old a ride home from a social event, attempted to molest him — first in the moving vehicle and then by the side of the road. St. Stephen’s was…