NEW ORLEANS (LA)
WWLTV [New Orleans, LA]
June 29, 2026
By Ramon Antonio Vargas / The Guardian, David Hammer / WWL Louisiana Investigator
Bernard Knoth resigned from New Orleans’ Jesuit university in 2003 amid sexual abuse allegations at an Indianapolis high school, which he maintained were ‘untrue’.
Bernard Knoth, who was forced to resign as president of Loyola University New Orleans in 2003 after allegations of child sexual abuse and eventually left the Roman Catholic priesthood, has died.
Knoth died June 18 at his home in Sarasota, Fla., after a short, unspecified illness, according to a newspaper obituary published on Friday. He was 77.
Knoth was ordained a priest in 1977 and belonged to the Jesuit religious order. He became president of the Jesuits’ Loyola University New Orleans in 1995. But eight years later, amid the fallout of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Catholic clergy abuse scandal by the Boston Globe’s investigative team Spotlight, Knoth resigned the Loyola presidency.
He was accused at the time of having molested a student at Brebeuf Jesuit Prep in Indianapolis in 1986. He had to step down because Loyola’s bylaws required its president to be a Jesuit member in good standing, according to a contemporaneous New York Times report.
”While I deny any inappropriate conduct, the (order) has judged the complaint credible,” he said in a statement released by Loyola at the time.
The Jesuits then assigned Knoth to a community run by them in Chicago, the Illinois attorney general’s office there would later say in a report on credibly accused clergy abusers.
He ultimately left the Catholic priesthood – a process known as laicization – in 2009. A LinkedIn page under his name said he subsequently worked as a senior management consultant based in Sarasota.
Nine years after his laicization, as the worldwide Catholic church found itself still trying to navigate legal and financial consequences from its decades-old clerical abuse scandal, Knoth landed on lists of clergymen faced with credible molestation allegations that were released – in addition to the state of Illinois – by the archdioceses of Indianapolis and New Orleans as well as by the Jesuit order.
He nonetheless continued maintaining that the allegation preceding his Loyola resignation was “untrue,” including in a 2018 interview with The New Orleans Advocate newspaper.
Later approached for comment by southwestern Florida’s News-Press in a 2019 report about credibly accused Catholic clergymen who had moved to that state, Knoth’s only remark reportedly was, “I have a new life and a new dog.”
Knoth’s obituary said his survivors included a sister and his husband of 10 years. The obituary cited Knoth’s passion for cooking, sailing, reading and teaching – and recalled a career in education that also saw him serve as an assistant dean at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.