LAFAYETTE (LA)
Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse (SCSA) [Middletown DE]
November 25, 2025
By Richard Windmann, Ph.D
Lafayette, LA – In the flat, humid parishes of south Louisiana, in the heart of the Diocese of Lafayette, the name Father Gilbert Gauthe once meant trust. He was the smiling young priest in photographs and parish bulletins, the man who baptized babies, posed for First Communion pictures, and bowed his head in prayer beside hospital beds. Parents were proud when he chose their sons to serve at his altar. To many families, he was a sign that God was close.
Behind that image, he was something very different. Over the span of years, while wearing the collar and carrying the authority of the Church, Gauthe repeatedly abused children entrusted to his care. What he did, and what the Diocese of Lafayette did and failed to do, would become one of the first major Catholic abuse scandals in the United States. That scandal would pull in a young defense lawyer named Ray Mouton, a Dominican priest and canon lawyer named Thomas Doyle, and an eleven year old boy named Scott Anthony Gastal, whose courage would change history and mark him for the rest of his life.
This is that story, told in a way that respects the reality of the harm without dwelling on its most graphic details.
A Priest Given Power, and a Diocese That Protected Him
Thomas Doyle
Photo Credit: nola.com
The Diocese of Lafayette in the 1970s was deeply Catholic. Church calendars set the rhythm of the year. Parish picnics, festivals, and rosary groups filled evenings and weekends. Priests were welcomed into family homes as honored guests. Their word carried enormous weight.
When Gilbert Gauthe was ordained and assigned to parishes in this diocese, he stepped into that world of automatic trust. He organized youth activities. He became a Boy Scout chaplain. He offered rides, trips, and overnight events for altar boys and other children. Parents saw him as a dedicated priest who took an interest in their sons’ spiritual lives.
Soon, troubling signs began to appear. Some boys became anxious and withdrawn. Some refused to serve at Mass or to be alone with the priest. Nightmares and sudden behavior changes showed up in Catholic homes that had never imagined a priest could be the source of danger. A few parents raised concerns with local pastors and with diocesan officials.
Inside the chancery, the offices where the Diocese of Lafayette handled its business, those concerns were taken seriously enough to prompt action, but not the kind of action that would have protected children. Gauthe was sent for evaluation and “treatment”, but after that he was returned to active ministry. He was reassigned from one parish to another, one cluster of families to the next. Each new assignment was presented as a routine pastoral move. Each new assignment gave him access to more children.
In doing so, the Diocese of Lafayette made a series of decisions that would later be exposed as catastrophic. It chose to manage the situation quietly instead of calling law enforcement. It chose to trust reassurances that he could be handled, rather than confronting him publicly and warning parents. It chose to believe, or pretend to believe, that internal measures were enough, even as reports continued to surface.
The Pattern of Abuse
What happened behind closed doors, on trips, and in places where children should have been safe can be described simply: Gauthe used his role as a priest to gain the trust of children and then violated that trust in deeply harmful ways. The details differ for each survivor, but the pattern is consistent.
First came friendliness, attention, and special favors. Children were told they were important, that spending extra time with the priest was an honor, that they were helping the Church by being close to him. Then, slowly or suddenly, that closeness became abuse. Children who had been taught that a priest represented God were confronted with behavior that no child should ever experience from an adult, especially one in a sacred role.
Many survivors later described feeling trapped. They were confused, ashamed, and terrified that no one would believe them if they spoke. Some were told directly that talking would hurt their families or their standing in the Church. Others felt too overwhelmed even to put what had happened into words. Their silence, and the Diocese’s unwillingness to be fully honest, allowed the abuse to continue far longer than it should have.
The Diocese of Lafayette Forced into the Open
Ray Mouton
Image Credit: USA Today
By the early 1980s, the situation could no longer be contained inside chancery walls. Families began to file lawsuits. Allegations and documents started moving into the public record. Reporters asked hard questions. The Diocese of Lafayette, which had spent years trying to manage things quietly, now found itself at the center of a storm.
To defend Gauthe in the criminal case, the diocese turned to a young lawyer, Ray Mouton. At first, this was simply a difficult assignment: represent a priest accused of serious crimes. But as Mouton met with victims and parents, and reviewed what had been done and what had been ignored, his perspective changed. He saw that this was not just the story of a single troubled priest. It was the story of a system that had received warnings, moved the priest, and left children unprotected.
At the same time, in Washington, a Dominican priest and canon lawyer named Father Thomas Doyle was watching the case unfold. Doyle worked at the apostolic nunciature, the Vatican’s diplomatic mission to the United States. He had access to internal Church discussions and documents. To him, it was clear that what was happening in Lafayette was not an isolated problem. It was a preview of a much larger crisis.
Mouton and Doyle, joined by a psychiatrist, Dr Michael Peterson, collaborated on a confidential report for the American bishops. Using the Gauthe case and the Diocese of Lafayette as a central example, the report warned that abuse by clergy was more common than many church leaders wanted to admit, that the harm to victims was profound and lifelong, and that the Church faced enormous moral and legal consequencesif it continued to conceal these crimes.
The report called for transparency, accountability, and real safeguards for children. Many bishops heard the warning. Too many filed it away and carried on with old habits. Years later, when scandals erupted elsewhere, people would look back at that report and realize how early the alarm had been sounded.
The Boy Who Took the Stand: Scott Anthony Gastal
Scott Anthony Gastal
Photo Credit: William Widmer
Amid all the files, memos, and high level discussions, one figure stands at the center of this story: a boy from the Diocese of Lafayette named Scott Anthony Gastal.
Scott’s family were ordinary Catholic parishioners. They believed that helping their son grow close to the parish priest was good for his soul. They encouraged his involvement, proud to see him serving at Mass and spending time at the rectory. When Scott finally told them what had happened to him, their world collapsed. The man they had welcomed into their home, the man they had allowed to guide their child, had abused their trust in the worst way.
The Diocese of Lafayette, facing multiple legal claims, offered settlements to some families, including the Gastals. Many agreements came with expectations of confidentiality. Scott’s parents made a different choice. They refused to keep quiet. They decided to take their case all the way to a public civil trial.
That decision brought Scott, at eleven years old, into a courtroom filled with adults. Under oath, he described how the priest had treated him. He talked about what it was like to be singled out, then harmed, and how his life had changed afterward. To protect his dignity and privacy, not every detail was aired in open court, but there was no mistaking the core truth. A child had been exploited by a priest, and the Diocese of Lafayette had not stopped it when it could have.
Reporters sat in the gallery. Readers across the country encountered a story that many had considered unthinkable. Scott’s testimony cracked the facade of untouchable respectability around the clergy. People could see, in the face and voice of an eleven year old boy, what it meant to be on the receiving end of institutional failure.
The jury believed him. His family won a substantial verdict. More importantly, the case exposed how long diocesan officials had known there was a problem and how little they had done to prevent further harm.
For Scott, that day did not bring a clean sense of victory. It marked him, permanently, as someone whose deepest trauma had been turned into public record. He had done something extraordinarily brave, but he still had to grow up and live with the weight of what had happened.
Criminal Charges, Prison, and an Incomplete Justice
While civil lawsuits moved through the courts, the State of Louisiana filed criminal charges against Gauthe. The charges reflected the seriousness of his actions, especially given that they were committed against children.
In the mid 1980s, he pleaded guilty as part of a deal rather than go through a long trial on every count. He received a twenty year prison sentence. For many survivors and their families, the sentence was both a relief and a disappointment. It meant public acknowledgment, in a criminal court, that serious crimes had been committed. It also felt too small compared to the lifelong impact on those who had been abused.
Under the rules in place at the time, he did not serve the full twenty years. He was released after about a decade. The Diocese of Lafayette, meanwhile, continued to settle civil cases, paying millions of dollars in connection with his abuse. The financial cost was high. The human cost was immeasurable.
After his release, Gauthe’s name continued to surface in new allegations and legal issues. The sense that he remained a danger, even after prison, was deeply painful for those whose lives he had already damaged.
The Long Shadow Over Survivors
The abuse that began in sacristies, rectories, and on trips organized by a parish priest did not end when the last case was settled or when the cell door closed behind him. Survivors carried the effects into every part of their lives.
Many struggled with anxiety, depression, and difficulty trusting others. Places that once symbolized comfort and holiness became sources of fear. Some left the Church entirely. Others stayed, but with a far more complicated relationship to their faith and to authority.
For those in the Diocese of Lafayette, there was an added layer. Their suffering had not just come from an individual priest. It had been magnified by an institution that knew enough to move him, but not enough to stop him. Bishop’s offices, chancery files, and internal discussions were all part of the chain of decisions that kept children at risk.
For Scott, life after the trial meant living as both a survivor and a symbol. He had been one of the first children in America to testify publicly about abuse by a Catholic priest. That testimony helped countless others, but it also meant that his story was never entirely private again.
A Violent End and a Legacy That Endures
Decades passed. The case of Gilbert Gauthe became a reference point in documentaries, books, and reports on clergy abuse. The names of Ray Mouton and Thomas Doyle appeared again and again as men who had tried to warn the Church early. The Diocese of Lafayette issued statements of regret and sorrow, even as survivors continued to live with the consequences of its past decisions.
In March 2025, news broke that Scott Anthony Gastal, now fifty years old and living in Lake Charles, Louisiana, had died after a violent assault in a motel parking lot. He spent days in the hospital before succumbing to his injuries. A suspect was arrested and charged with murder.
For many people who remembered the early days of the scandal, Scott’s death felt like another cruel turn in a life defined in part by what had been done to him as a child and by what he had done to confront it. He became, once again, a headline, this time as a homicide victim rather than as a child witness in a Church case.
What Remains
The story of Father Gilbert Gauthe and the Diocese of Lafayette is not just about the downfall of one priest. It is about a system that failed to protect children, about a Church warned from within by people like Thomas Doyle and Ray Mouton, and about a young boy, Scott Anthony Gastal, whose decision to tell the truth helped change the way the world sees abuse in religious institutions.
No retelling can undo the harm. What it can do is keep the record honest. A priest used his role to abuse children. A diocese moved him instead of stopping him. A lawyer and a canon lawyer tried to wake the Church up to the magnitude of the crisis. A child walked into a courtroom and told the truth when doing so was almost unthinkable.
That is the legacy. Not the photographs of parish life from the 1970s, not the polite statements from chancery offices, but the lives of survivors who still carry what happened and the voices that forced a powerful institution to begin facing what it had allowed on its watch.
Beyond Lafayette: A Warning to the World
The impact of this story did not stop at the boundaries of the Diocese of Lafayette. What happened there became a template, and a warning. When journalists in other cities launched their own investigations, they frequently looked back to Lafayette as one of the first places where the full pattern of abuse, concealment, and institutional self protection had been pushed into public view.
The confidential report crafted by Thomas Doyle, Ray Mouton, and Dr Michael Peterson traveled quietly through Church channels. It was cited in legal filings. It was studied by victims’ advocates and canon lawyers. Years later, when dioceses in other states and other countries faced their own scandals, they discovered that the warnings had already been written in careful, sober language, using the Gauthe case as a key example.
It was not only Church leaders who learned from Lafayette. Survivors’ groups found in Scott’s story a kind of roadmap. They saw that civil suits, public testimony, and coordinated advocacy could force dioceses to open their files and acknowledge their failures. Lawyers and therapists began to specialize in helping people who had been harmed by religious authority. Legislators in some states revisited statutes of limitation, recognizing that survivors often need decades before they can speak.
In this way, the Diocese of Lafayette became both a cautionary tale and a grim turning point. It showed that the strategy of quiet transfers and confidential payouts could not hold forever. The truth would eventually surface, and when it did, it would carry with it not only moral outrage, but financial and legal consequences that would reshape the Church.
The Cost of Telling the Truth
For all the institutional lessons, there is still the personal cost. People like Scott Anthony Gastal lived those lessons in their own bodies and memories. Telling the truth was not a one time act for him. It was something he had to carry every time he saw a Church building, a priest in a collar, or a news story about clergy abuse.
Telling the truth also cost Thomas Doyle and Ray Mouton. Doyle’s advocacy for victims marked him as a critic inside his own Church. He paid a price in his career for insisting that the rights of children and families outweighed the desire to avoid scandal. Mouton, who entered the story as a criminal defense lawyer, became one of the earliest insider voices demanding reform. Both men had to live with the knowledge that their warnings, grounded partly in what they saw in Lafayette, were not fully heeded when they were first delivered.
The Diocese of Lafayette, for its part, had to stand before its own people and acknowledge failure. Parishes that had once taken pride in their priests had to face the fact that a priest had been allowed to harm children in their midst. The diocese issued apologies. It created policies and review boards that did not exist in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet for many survivors, those measures, while necessary, came too late to protect them.
A Story Still Unfinished
Although many of the central actors in this story are gone from public view, the story itself is not finished. Its consequences live on in the faith journeys of survivors, in the finances and policies of the Diocese of Lafayette, and in the ongoing work of advocates and Church reformers who still point back to the Gauthe case when they argue that transparency and accountability are non negotiable.
What happened in Lafayette is now part of the global memory of the Catholic Church. It stands as proof that harm can flourish in the shadows of a revered institution, and that it takes courageous witnesses, determined advocates, and honest record keepers to bring that harm to light.
When we remember Gilbert Gauthe, the Diocese of Lafayette, Thomas Doyle, Ray Mouton, and Scott Anthony Gastal, we are not only revisiting a painful past. We are also reminding ourselves of what is at stake whenever an institution is tempted to hide the truth. The children in the pews, the families in the parish hall, the quiet trust people place in a collar or a title, all of that is fragile.
The story from Lafayette shows what happens when that trust is betrayed, and what it takes, however imperfectly, to begin to rebuild a world where children are believed, survivors are heard, and power is no longer allowed to operate without scrutiny behind closed doors.
About
About the author: Dr. Windmann has been an activist and advocate for chilldhood sex abuse victims and survivors for over a decade. He is one of the co-founders of Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse, and is currently the president of the organization. He is also a prolific speaker and writer on the subject of childhood sex abuse, and appeared in the Netflix documentary “Scouts Honor: The Secret Files Of The Boy Scouts Of America.” You can contact him at richard.windmann@scsaorg.org.
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