NEW ORLEANS (LA)
The Guardian [London, England]
August 10, 2023
By Ramon Antonio Vargas
Victims’ advocates detailed church’s neglect in following oversight recommendations when transferring accused clergy
After the US’s second-oldest Roman Catholic archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020, attorneys for people claiming sexual abuse at the hands of the organization’s clergymen reviewed thousands of records outlining how the church managed the careers of priests and deacons faced with substantial allegations.
Glaringly missing from those documents is any plan by which the archdiocese of New Orleans could reliably protect children from contact with clerics who had been suspended from public ministry following molestation allegations – but who for years stayed in close proximity to and were financially supported by the church.
The archdiocese’s failure to implement a meaningful oversight plan for suspected, still-living predator priests and deacons – as was repeatedly recommended to the organization – is outlined in a 48-page memorandum secretly prepared by a team of attorneys representing some people pursuing clerical abuse claims through the bankruptcy proceeding.
The accusers’ lawyers have turned it over to law enforcement in what was meant to be a summary of crimes that they believed could still be prosecuted. The brief has not led to any substantial action from authorities. And as broad confidentiality rules apply to the bankruptcy, parties on all sides of the case have sought to keep its contents from becoming public.
Nonetheless, the Guardian obtained a copy of the memo, which vividly demonstrates the limits of measures that church leaders in a region with about a half-million Catholics have taken to ostensibly help put distance between accused clerics and children as well as adults who are described as vulnerable.
At least 17 clergymen were still living either at the time they were included on the list of credibly accused clerics that the New Orleans archdiocese first released in 2018 – or when they were added to that roster during several subsequent revisions.
According to the memo’s authors, one of the most egregious examples to emerge from that group was Gerard Howell.
Howell was permanently removed from active ministry about 30 years earlier over credible accusations that he had molested children in Louisiana’s deaf community in the 1960s and 1970s.
Months after becoming New Orleans’s archbishop in the summer of 2009, Gregory Aymond sent Howell to be evaluated during a 29-day inpatient stay at the St John Vianney center, the memo recounts.
The center has been known nationally for providing behavioral health treatment to clergy. And the archdiocese, at the time, was reviewing its policies for handling priests and deacons accused of abuse.
St John Vianney center staff diagnosed Howell with having pedophilia and narcissistic personality disorder, among other conditions. The treatment team recommended “extensive monitoring” by a person who would act similar to a parole officer, conducting lie-detector tests and in-person visits at random while requiring Howell to keep a daily log of travels.
The memo also said that Aymond directly received a report from a psychologist who described Howell as someone who “will always be high risk”. Howell was accused of at least 24 cases of molestation, with many victims being deaf children, according to the memo.
“With a pedophile, one cannot count on the ageing process to naturally diminish deviant arousal or extinguish sexually abusive behavior,” the psychologist told Aymond about Howell, who is now in his mid-80s. “The best strategy to manage risk is to eliminate opportunities for access to young children.”
The archdiocese ultimately sent Howell to an abbey in South Dakota which would be counted on to take “steps to ensure he would not come into contact with children” and which “was also supposed to send monthly reports” about him to New Orleans church superiors, the memo said.
The memo’s authors could only find three letters about Howell to the archdiocese from the abbey which was supposed to be monitoring him.
Similarly, after a priest named Lawrence Hecker admitted to his superiors in 1999 that he sexually molested or otherwise harassed multiple teenage boys whom he met through work, he was recommended to be put “under some supervision and [to] be made accountable to a designated ministry monitor”, the memo recounts.
A board advising Aymond’s predecessor, Alfred Hughes, made that recommendation in 2004.
If there has been anyone designated to monitor him, that would be news to Hecker. When he sat for a deposition in December 2020 as part of a lawsuit which accused him of abuse and is part of the church’s pending bankruptcy, Hecker indicated that he “knew of no monitoring”, the memo said.
The memo provides an opportunity to glean some of the first details about that deposition, which has otherwise been kept under seal and out of public view. And according to the document, during the deposition, Hecker admitted to viewing images depicting child sexual abuse if it “appeared” on his computer whenever he occasionally went searching for pornography online.
The archdiocese’s failure to follow through on such recommendations is more than simply embarrassing, the memo’s authors contend. It enabled one of the organization’s most notorious suspected abusers ever – beside Hecker – to come into close, publicly documented quarters with schoolchildren just months before he appeared on the credibly accused clergymen list released by Aymond in 2018.
In that instance, deacon George Brignac had been allowed to take and pass an archdiocesan “safe environment” course which essentially grants those who complete it certification to be around children at church-organized events.
The course – which the archdiocese has said is also meant as a safeguard for vulnerable adults – was created amid a reform movement stemming from the worldwide Catholic church’s decades-old clerical abuse scandal.
Brignac had already been arrested three times on child sexual abuse allegations and was barred from publicly working as a clergyman.
Yet his safe environment certification let him give a lecture – without restrictions – to a group of students at a local Catholic elementary school about the Feast of Fatima. It even let him pick out costumes for the children to wear for a celebration of that feast organized at the school. Brignac at the time was associated with a local chapter of the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic community service organization.
Media reports would later reveal that Brignac was reading scripture at local services, setting off a scandal which led to him being arrested a fourth time on child molestation charges. He died in June 2020 without going to trial.
Hecker and Howell were among a number of priests who were receiving pension payments and allowances to cover living costs until the judge overseeing the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case ordered the church to stop providing such benefits to credibly accused abusers.
Upon that order, Howell wrote a letter saying it would be “draconian” for the judge, Meredith Grabill, to cut off his support from the church. Grabill was unswayed and ordered a halt to the benefits for Howell and several other clerics who were considered credibly accused of molestation.
Hecker declined to comment when contacted on Wednesday.
He’s been under investigation by the New Orleans district attorney’s office, which obtained records on the clergyman in June. The archdiocese turned over its files on Hecker to the DA’s office after its prosecutors issued the church a subpoena demanding records on him, according to new court documents unsealed Tuesday.
Howell was unable to be reached.
For years, the archdiocese maintained that its recent protective measures had all but eliminated contemporaneous clergy abuse. But in mid-July, the former chaplain of a New Orleans-area Catholic high school – Patrick Wattigny – pleaded guilty to molesting two minors whom he met through his work after his ordination in 1994.
Wattigny was given a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to charges of molesting one boy whom he met in 2013 and another to whom he was introduced in 1996.
He is one of 17 clergymen who were alive when they were added to the archdiocese-curated list of credibly accused abusers. And he is the only one of those 17 who has since been convicted of a crime – so far.
That group also includes Hecker and Howell.
VM Wheeler III – once a deacon – is not among that group despite pleading guilty to charges that he sexually abused a preteen boy between 2000 and 2002, prior to his ordination to the clergy. Wheeler had started serving a five-year stint on probation when he died in April.
Just one year and four months before the 2018 list’s initial release, five priests from that group of 17 – including Hecker and Wattigny – underwent background checks. They did so along with 125 other archdiocesan priests, according to documents obtained separately by the Guardian.
Since none of them had any local or federal criminal record or appeared on any sex offender registry at the time, the check cleared the backgrounds of 124 of the priests who were reviewed, the documents show.
The only priest flagged for having a record was one who was charged with driving while intoxicated in 2012. He was acquitted of that count in 2014, according to information from the courthouse which handled the case.
The archdiocese did not respond to questions from the Guardian.
But Aymond did issue a statement in which he pledged to “continue to look for ways to strengthen our safe environment programs and are meeting with survivors to review and enhance our current protocols for responding to allegations of abuse”.
“We will continue to learn from the past,” Aymond’s statement said. “But I am more focused on the present and future.”
- In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International