NEW ORLEANS (LA)
Times-Picayune [New Orleans LA]
July 21, 2024
By Stephanie Riegel
The photograph hangs near the main staircase in the entrance hall of the private residence of the archbishop of New Orleans.
Inside the thin gold frame, standing shoulder to shoulder with a smiling Archbishop Gregory Aymond, are his predecessors: archbishops Philip Hannan, Francis Schulte and Alfred Hughes. Revered in the local church, the legacies of the former archbishops are also now defined by the heinous sexual abuse of children committed by clergy under their watch, and their unwillingness to fully account for it.
“I don’t think any of those men on the wall intentionally tried to hurt people,” said Aymond on a recent afternoon, shortly after passing by the picture.
They did, however. They also handed Aymond the profound challenge of trying to move the diocese past its decades-long abuse scandal and atone for its failures.
In 2018, Aymond took what he believed was the crucial step in that reckoning, releasing for the first time a list of nearly 60 priests and clergy members credibly accused of sexually abusing children. He saw it as part of the healing process. But instead of reconciliation, a controversy erupted over whether it was a complete list and a flood of new abuse claims led the church to file for bankruptcy protection less than two years later.
Now, as the bitter bankruptcy fight enters its fifth year and, what some believe is its final, critical stage, the urgency of Aymond’s monumental task has better come into focus. Though his aim remains to heal the church, his job now is also to save it from ruin — at a cost of more than $100 million, the closure of more parishes and the loss, potentially, of his own reputation.
“I know my legacy will be ‘he dealt with sexual abuse,’ but I did more than that,” Aymond said. “I have taken seriously the role of bishop, being a pastor and being a shepherd.”
Keeping the church afloat
In a wide-ranging discussion over three days at his residence on Walmsley Avenue, Aymond laid out his views on the bankruptcy, its effect on the local church, the abuse crisis and the role of his predecessors, whom he said “certainly, certainly,” share the blame for the horrors. For the first time, he vowed that any settlement would include a full public release of the church’s files related to sexual abuse. He also said more parish closures are coming and addressed the criminal case against the archdiocese that has been opened by the Louisiana State Police.
At 74, Aymond, a lifelong New Orleanian who has presided over the nation’s second-oldest diocese for more than a decade, will reach the mandatory retirement age later this year for diocesan leaders. But he intends to remain in his position until the bankruptcy is resolved.
“It is a commitment I have made,” he said.
The gravity of that commitment has aged him. Aymond’s face is drawn, his demeanor weary and guarded. He keeps long hours, rising early to say Mass in his small private chapel and presiding at local parishes most nights. He relies heavily on a small cadre of close friends and advisers.
The financial toll of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy is far more severe than initially forecast by those advisers. In a letter Aymond wrote to the Vatican in April 2020 to inform them he was filing for bankruptcy, he estimated the church’s share of abuse claims at about $7 million.
Four years later, legal fees alone stand at nearly $40 million and more than 500 abuse survivors have filed credible claims against more than 300 clergy members. Aymond’s handling of priests under his own watch has come under scrutiny. And coming up with a settlement that claimants and their attorneys are willing to accept — and one the church can afford — is far from assured.
“I don’t know what happens,” if the case doesn’t settle, Aymond said. “We take this week by week. I pray a lot.”
Aymond still says the bankruptcy “needed to happen,” but called the slow progress and mounting legal bills “an injustice.” He denies that he filed the case to keep ugly church secrets hidden behind court protective orders. He said it was done to come up with an equitable settlement.
“If we had not filed, we would have spent a lot on a few people. This way, we can spend what we have on a number of people,” he said. “I call that justice.”
How much the church should pay is an open question. Aymond said the church has made an initial settlement offer, but declined to say how much. Filings in the bankruptcy list roughly $500 million in assets and vast real estate holdings, which have an insured replacement value of $2 billion. Aymond and his advisers say there isn’t as much as there appears. More than half the parishes operate in the red, they say, and old empty churches and school buildings won’t fetch a fraction of $2 billion if sold off all at once.
Plus, the church isn’t shutting down. It plans to keep serving parishioners.
“We can only afford what we can afford,” he said. “The court is expecting us to be sustainable when this is over, and we only have so much money. If they don’t accept this, then we have a serious problem.”
To make the settlement plan work, insurance companies will have to put up money. So will local parishes affiliated with the archdiocese but not in bankruptcy themselves.
“Our goal is to ask parishes, to require them, to contribute something they can afford but that is not so large that it will curtail their ministry,” Aymond said. “What that is, we don’t know yet.”
At the same time, Aymond will close or consolidate more parishes later this year because the archdiocese, despite its half a million Catholics, is shrinking. While there are thriving parishes in prosperous areas, others are in poor, aging neighborhoods and struggle to fill pews on Sunday.
The costs of maintaining old churches are rising. And the church remains a vital provider of services through its affiliated charities like Second Harvest Food Bank and Catholic Charities.
“It’s not because of the bankruptcy,” said Aymond, who declined to say how many or which of the 110 parishes are slated for closure. “We would have had to do this anyway.”
‘He could resign’
In the community, Aymond’s actions are viewed in starkly different ways. To friends and admirers, he is a compassionate, spiritual man, pained and overwhelmed by the task at hand but committed to seeing it through.
“He is very introverted, very sensitive,” said Brother Lochland Sofield, a longtime friend who co-wrote a book with Aymond in 2007 on forgiveness. “But he is not going to give this up.”
To his harshest critics, Aymond is just another in a long list of clerics who will do whatever it takes to shield a church from the consequences of decades of sexual abuse and a large and coordinated cover-up.
“Archbishop Aymond is the primary reason that the bankruptcy is in its fifth year, expenses will soon reach $50 million, and survivors of childhood sexual abuse continue to see no end in sight,” said attorney Soren Gisleson, who, with his partners Johnny Denenea and Richard Trahant, represents dozens of abuse survivors. “Aymond is absent.”
Others who still fault Aymond and the church have a more circumspect view. Henri Andre Fourreaux III, a claimant who said he was groomed for abuse on an altar boys retreat in the 1970s by a priest who later molested another boy, said Aymond was placed in an impossible circumstance by his predecessors. But he still shoulders the blame.
“He has done the best he can, but this is not just about him personally. He represents the office and has inherited the sins of others who have gone before him,” said Fourreaux. “He could resign.”
Aymond has no intention of resigning and sees himself as fundamentally misunderstood.
“I am called a liar and it is simply not true. I am a man of integrity and I do not lie,” he said. “But I am the one sitting in the chair now and I get blamed for whatever happened previously. I haven’t gotten used to it. I don’t think it’s possible to get used to it.”
A different approach?
Aymond believes the media has overlooked what he calls a “watershed moment” in 2002, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops pledged reforms intended to prevent clergy abuse and report it when it happens. He said he helped implement those reforms as bishop in Austin, Texas, in the early 2000s and enforced them when he came to New Orleans.
He said there has only been one instance of clergy abuse that occurred on his watch. In 2020, the Rev. Pat Wattigny was arrested and charged with molesting a 15-year-old boy on the northshore in 2013. Wattigny later pleaded guilty.
“For 25 years now, there has been a different approach,” Aymond said. “Not that that makes up for the sins of the past, but it does say we have repented, and we really want to do what is right.”
But several other recent incidents and issues outrage Aymond’s critics. There is the case of Lawrence Hecker, who was indicted last fall, accused of committing child kidnapping and rape as a priest in the early 1970s. Though the abuse happened before Aymond was even a priest, Aymond, as archbishop, continued to pay Hecker’s retirement benefits and fought efforts in federal court to get those benefits taken away.
Aymond defended his actions, saying church law “tells us no matter what a priest does, he must be given sustenance. He cannot be put on the street.”
He declined further comment because of pending litigation.
There were also the cases of former deacon George Brignac and the Rev. Paul Hart. Brignac was removed from official church duties in the 2000s after allegations surfaced that he molested several children decades earlier, but he was allowed to read at local churches and was in proximity to children as recently as 2017. Brignac was later arrested and charged with rape. He died in 2020.
Hart was assigned by Aymond in 2017 to serve as chaplain at Brother Martin High School, even though the archdiocese four years earlier had deemed as credible accusations that he sexually abused a 17-year-old girl in the 1990s.
In the case of Brignac, Aymond said he didn’t know low- level parish officials let Brignac volunteer and placed him on the credibly accused list. With Hart, the archdiocese said at the time that the girl was not a minor under Church Canon Law, which defined the age of consent in the 1990s as 16.
Critics also note that Aymond’s list of credibly accused clergy members, released in 2018, was incomplete. It has now grown to more than 80 names.
There are also specific allegations of past abuse that happened at a time while Aymond was an administrator in the archdiocese, though before he was a bishop. A sworn statement attached to a search warrant that State Police investigators served on the archdiocese earlier this spring alleges that child sex abuse and naked pool parties took place at the Notre Dame Seminary. Aymond taught there in the 1970s and ran the institution from 1981-2000.
“I never experienced any of those things,” Aymond said. “Maybe I lived a naive life. I don’t think so. But they say these things happened and I would love to know where, when and by whom?”
In hindsight, he calls the systemic cover-up of sexual abuse of children a “sin” and “evil,” and acknowledges it was a crime. Still, he said it occurred in a different era, when less was known and understood about pedophilia. Some families and schools engaged in covering it up, too, he said.
It should have been reported,” he said. “Never should the institution be protected more than the child. Any time that was done, it was wrong. But it was a sign of the times.”
Kevin Bourgeois is an abuse survivor and former leader of the abuse survivors group SNAP, who has known Aymond for decades and briefly worked for him, trying to bridge the gap between the church and survivors. He has heard this reasoning before and said it speaks to Aymond’s defining blind spot.
“Show us where the child was ever more important than the institution,” Bourgeois said. “He can’t because there is no evidence. I think he truly believes in his own mind that it’s true, but he’s that enmeshed in the hierarchy. He can’t see it.”
Rebuilding trust
Aymond believes the focus on the clergy abuse crisis and bankruptcy case has overshadowed the good the church is doing. He points to a 5% increase in Mass attendance last year; the recent baptism and confirmation into the church of 200 adults; a turnout of more than 700 men for a Lenten day of prayer; and the growth of youth ministries and young adult programs in prosperous parishes, where Sunday Mass draws standing-room-only crowds.
“He is at his desk every day,” said Sharon Rodi, a longtime friend, who has served on the boards of several Catholic nonprofit organizations. “He tries to reach out in every possible way that he can.”
In a sign of the persistence of the faithful in the city, on a steamy Sunday morning in early June, hundreds of the faithful gathered for a special Mass at St. Louis Cathedral followed by a Eucharistic procession around Jackson Square, during which Aymond walked slowly and held a heavy gold monstrance. After, he individually greeted more than 150 of the worshippers, who waited nearly half an hour to shake his hand, seek his blessing on their rosary or prayer cards or ask for his prayers.
“I think there is a positive long-term future,” Aymond said. “That is one of the things the bankruptcy is designed to do — to give us sustainability so we can do the mission of Christ.”
Aymond believes he can work to rebuild the trust that sustaining the church requires. But when it comes to the past, he is only willing to go so far in saying what many abuse survivors want to hear — that the three men pictured on the wall with Aymond, and maybe he, too, deserves the blame for that lost faith.
“Did they knowingly or unknowingly make terrible mistakes? Yes, knowingly or unknowingly they made terrible mistakes that have cost the church reputation and financially,” he said. “But I cannot judge their hearts.”
Email Stephanie Riegel at stephanie.riegel@theadvocate.com.