BATON ROUGE (LA)
The Advocate [Baton Rouge LA]
June 9, 2025
By Matt Bruce
School leaders at Catholic High in Baton Rouge noticed a disturbing pattern with a diocesan priest on the teaching staff in early 1993. It was a red flag that prompted a meeting between school officials and a high-ranking clergyman from the Baton Rouge diocese, according to documents recently unsealed in court.
Even after being warned twice that “he was socializing too much with students” at the all-boys school, the Rev. Daniel Lemoine continued to spend time alone with them, said a report sent to the bishop of the Baton Rouge diocese following the meeting.
One student’s parents complained to Catholic High leaders in December 1992 that Lemoine took their son to Our Lady of the Mercy Church, where the priest lived at the time, and made the boy wait in the rectory alone while he showered and changed his clothes. When school administrators confronted Lemoine about his tendency to fraternize with ninth and 10th graders, he acknowledged how it could raise suspicions and cause “false impressions,” the report said. But the priest denied any sexual misconduct with students.
Still, school officials terminated Lemoine’s contract, said the report, part of an ongoing lawsuit against Lemoine and the diocese.
While the newly unsealed records include no sexual misconduct accusations against Lemoine at Catholic High, they do reveal he has faced at least seven allegations of abuse elsewhere — some uncovered by his own admission — dating back to the 1970s. It’s unclear from the records whether some of those allegations covered the same incidents. He has not been charged criminally.
Lemoine was among the 45 clergy members deemed credibly accused of sexual abuse on a 2019 list released by the diocese. The list noted “several” allegations against Lemoine, but no exact number.
Almost five years passed between his first admission of molesting a teen and a decree from the diocese that he cease being a priest.
In late 1994, not quite two years after losing his teaching job, Lemoine confessed to a church official to having had sex with three boys, two of them under 16 years old, the records show. He was suspended and ordered by church officials into therapy before being allowed to resume limited duties about a year later, largely in a hospital ministry. Ultimately, after being suspended again amid more allegations of past abuse, he was stripped of all duties as a priest in 1999, the records show.
The documents, which detail the accusations against Lemoine and the church’s response, were made public after a judge unsealed confidential diocese records as part of the lawsuit.
The plaintiff is a Denham Springs man who sued last year under the state’s “Lookback Window” law, which gave people sexually abused as minors a three-year window in 2021 to file lawsuits that otherwise would’ve been time-barred in court. The man alleges Lemoine sexually abused him from 1984 to 1986 when he was an altar boy at Immaculate Conception Church in Baton Rouge. The diocese also is a defendant in the lawsuit, which alleges church leaders should’ve known Lemoine was a risk and breached their duty of care.
A diocese spokesperson declined to comment on the newly released documents, citing the ongoing litigation. Lemoine has denied the allegations made in the lawsuit.
Catholic High officials said in a statement that they are not aware of any allegations of abuse against Lemoine related to his time as a teacher there, where he worked part-time over two school years.
“We hold all those affected by abuse in our prayers and remain committed to supporting their journey toward solace, peace, and justice,” they said.
The diocese had filed much of its information related to the case under seal, citing the sensitive nature of the allegations and the anonymity of the plaintiff. State District Judge Ronald Johnson ordered the filings to be unsealed, with the plaintiff’s full name blacked out in the publicly available court documents, after a hearing behind closed doors on May 19.
“We believe it was important to unseal the records filed by the Diocese of Baton Rouge to support the public purpose of the revival window in educating the public about the prevalence and harm of child sexual abuse to prevent future abuse,” the plaintiff’s lead attorney, Julien Lamothe, said in a statement last week. “Unsealing the records supports that public purpose.”
‘Danger signals’
Lemoine served over 25 years in the ministry in Baton Rouge, Port Allen, White Castle, Denham Springs and Pierre Part. He spent two of those years teaching religion courses at Catholic High.
The Rev. John Carville, administrator of the Baton Rouge diocese, wrote a report in April 1993 to then-Bishop Alfred Hughes about Lemoine, who had by then already been removed from the school.
“I am concerned because this has been a pattern throughout his 13 years of priesthood,” Carville reported. “Despite warnings from pastors and myself … he has shown no willingness to examine his behavior. As he grows older, this behavior becomes more suspect.”
In his report to the bishop, Carville noted that Brother Francis David, the school’s principal, said there had been no sexual allegations against Lemoine when they dismissed him as a teacher. But Carville added that Lemoine’s “compulsion to socialize with adolescents was a danger signal.”
David recommended Lemoine undergo therapy for his behavior. Both he and vice principal Greg Brandao “felt that Lemoine’s purpose in teaching was to satisfy his own social needs rather than to truly benefit the students,” Carville stated.
After his dismissal as a teacher, Lemoine remained a chaplain at Baton Rouge Regional Medical Center and was transferred to live at the St. Aloysius Parish rectory in Baton Rouge. He was evaluated for psychotherapeutic treatment and began seeing a psychologist, according to Lemoine’s “delicts reservata,” the comprehensive report done years later by the Catholic church that outlined his infractions.
Then, in October 1994, Lemoine confessed to a diocesan official that he began grooming a 12-year-old boy in 1976 and had a “sexual relationship” with the child until age 15, a case summary included in that report says. Lemoine further admitted to molesting a 13-year-old boy at St. Joseph the Worker Church in Pierre Part, where he had been a pastor from 1985 to 1990, the report said.
He also said he had sex with a teen while a seminarian in Labadieville, the report said, though it’s not clear in the records whether the youth was 16 or 17. Lemoine claimed that the teen was the “aggressor,” the report states.
It was not clear if church leaders at the time reported Lemoine’s confessions to law enforcement, but the correspondence between diocese officials indicated the statute of limitations for prosecution in each incident had expired. When one of the teens’ parents threatened to sue, the church settled with the family for an undisclosed amount in November 1995, according to the report.
In January 1995, Hughes placed Lemoine on administrative leave and sent him to St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland for inpatient treatment for ephebophilia — a sexual attraction to people in their mid- to late teens.
After completing the program, Lemoine returned to Baton Rouge and was reinstated as a priest in 1996 on a restricted status, assigned to hospital ministries, church records show. He was allowed to be a chaplain “with the strict understanding that there could be no further social or recreational contact on his part with adolescent boys,” states one of the unsealed church reports.
Lemoine ministered to the sick, led World Day prayers at Our Lady of the Lake and was licensed to officiate a wedding in late 1998, church records show.
More claims of abuse
Then, two new allegations surfaced in the spring of 1999.
One of the victims alleged “improprieties” by Lemoine in 1982, when he was 16 or 17. The other victim claimed Lemoine committed sex acts with him while they took trips together to New Orleans and Florida in 1991 and 1992. The boy was 14 or 15 or at the time, church reports state.
Also in 1999, a lawsuit — later settled by the diocese — was filed against Lemoine alleging sexual abuse, though neither he nor the victim were ever publicly named.
That same year, Hughes removed Lemoine from all priestly duties, kicked him out of the Our Lady of Mercy rectory and directed him to “embrace a lay lifestyle in every way possible,” church records show.
Two more reports were made, in 2007 and 2019. Lamothe, the attorney, said those two reports were made by the same man.
In April 2007, a 41-year-old man told his pastor that Lemoine tried to molest him at St. Joseph Parish in Pierre Part around 1978, when he was 13, records show.
That man reported to his pastor that when in eighth grade, he was molested by Lemoine. The victim said it happened during a retreat at St. Joseph the Worker Church shortly after Lemoine was ordained as a priest in 1979. He said the priest fondled him as he was sitting alone reflecting.
The man said he tried to report it to a catechism teacher immediately afterward and days later told his godfather, but both “reacted negatively” to him and he suppressed the memory, his pastor reported to diocese officials. When his daughter asked to become an altar server in 2006, it re-triggered the experience and gave the man months of anxiety and depression, the pastor reported.
In a letter to the diocese, the man’s pastor told church leaders the experience caused the victim “anger and rage over the years, not just for what happened, but because he told what happened twice and nobody believed him.”
Last year’s lawsuit listed Lemoine as a Tangipahoa Parish resident. Neither he nor his attorney could be reached for comment.
This story was edited to change the job titles of Brother Francis David and Greg Brandao, which were given incorrectly in the records filed in court.
Email Matt Bruce at matt.bruce@theadvocate.com