New Orleans Archdiocese Is Target of Child Sex Trafficking Investigation

 

The Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans is the target of an active child sex trafficking investigation, according to a sweeping and unprecedented search warrant Louisiana state police recently served on an organization that for decades has been submerged in the global church’s clergy molestation scandal.

The clerk at the state criminal courthouse where the warrant was signed released the 11-page document Tuesday. It makes clear that troopers involved in a pending rape prosecution against one priest came to suspect that that case was part of a broader pattern of “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.

In a stunning assertion made under oath, troopers said they had already recovered documents that “back” the notion that “previous archbishops, the highest-ranking official in the archdiocese, not only knew of the sexual abuse and failed to report all the claims to law enforcement, but spent archdiocese funding to support the accused”.

The warrant requests “ANY and ALL documents that pertain in any way to the sexual abuse of a minor by clergy members employed or otherwise associated with the Archdiocese of New Orleans”, concluding those “records are believed to constitute a violation of” the state’s law against trafficking of children for sexual purposes.

It also seeks “ANY and ALL communications between the Archbishop of New Orleans and ANY department within the Vatican pertaining to child sexual abuse”, among various other files.

The warrant refers to a 48-page memorandum first reported by the Guardian in summer 2023 which summarized secret internal archdiocesan records that the church was required to produce after seeking federal bankruptcy protection in 2020 in order to shield itself from a steadily growing wave of abuse-related litigation.

The memo described that New Orleans’ current archbishop, Gregory Aymond, repeatedly ignored his own advisers who suggested he discipline and publicly reveal the identities of multiple priests and deacons facing substantial, credible accusations of abuse.

Those decisions largely kept the public – and law enforcement – from learning of the accusations until they were reported by journalists years, if not decades, later. It also let clergymen facing abuse allegations to collect lucrative financial benefits that weren’t interrupted until a bankruptcy judge ordered them to cease, and then only partially, with health and medical assistance ultimately left intact.

Attorneys for victims of clerical sexual abuse gained access to the documents forming the basis of that key memo because their clients’ cases became part of the church’s bankruptcy proceedings. Those lawyers handed the memo to law enforcement in 2022, when federal investigators – assisted by state troopers – began investigating New Orleans clergy for possibly violating federal law by taking children across state lines for the purposes of sexual abuse.

The warrant released Tuesday recounted how investigators had gathered statements from “multiple victims … transported … outside of Louisiana where they were sexually abused”.

“Additionally, it was reported that in some instances, ‘gifts’ were given to abuse victims by the accused [molesters] with instructions to pass on or give the gift to certain priests at the next school or church,” the warrant contended. “It was said that the ‘gift’ was a form of signaling to another priest that the person was a target for sexual abuse.”

The warrant also described how victims reported being brought to a seminary that trains Catholic priests in New Orleans – adjacent to the city’s archdiocese – to swim nude in the pool and get “sexually assaulted or abused”.

“This was discovered to be a common occurrence, and it was reported that other members of the archdiocese were present at the pool at the time,” the troopers’ sworn statement maintained. “Although not all, many of the alleged sexual abuse cases or incidents occurred on archdiocese property.”

Such statements gave investigators reasonable suspicion “of previous widespread child sexual [and] determined that further investigation into the archdiocese of New Orleans was necessary”.

The state trooper who obtained the warrant released Tuesday was the same one who arrested 92-year-old retired priest Lawrence Hecker – an acknowledged serial child molester – on rape and kidnapping charges that a grand jury handed up against the clergyman in the fall.

Hecker has pleaded not guilty in connection with allegations that he strangled a teenaged boy unconscious and then sodomized him while they were at a church in 1975.

The warrant released Tuesday alludes to how the victim in that case reported his attack to his principal, Paul Calamari, “but no legal action was taken”.

Troopers’ sworn statement reveals that they questioned Calamari, who is described but not named in the document. During that interrogation, Calamari confessed to molesting a child in the 1970s, an act which eventually led to his being included alongside Hecker in an archdiocesan-released list of priests and deacons whom the New Orleans church considered to be credibly accused molesters.

Since almost immediately following that roster’s release, clergy abuse victims and their advocates have argued that the list omits countless names that should be on it. The church has been forced to add more than 20 names to that list since it was first published, in part because of investigations by WWL and its reporting partners that scrutinized clerics whose cases fit the criteria.

Aymond released the credibly accused roster as the archdiocese struggled to manage continued fallout from the worldwide church’s ongoing clerical sexual abuse crisis.

The search warrant is believed to mark the first-time authorities have sought the entire written history of the archdiocese’s management of clergy abuse cases under its watch. New Orleans judge Juana Lombard signed the warrant on 22 April, and state police served it at a meeting with archdiocese officials three days later.

But the court clerk was not able to get a copy of the warrant until 30 April as the police prevented the clerk from accessing the document and claimed the record was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. The court provided it to WWL and the Guardian in response to a public records request.

-Ramon Antonio Vargas & David Hammer, The Guardian

Commentary:

“The gospels tell followers of Jesus to be meek, humble, generous, forgiving, loving, merciful, nonjudgmental, noncritical, and repentant. Christians must turn the other cheek when slapped, share their property and give it to those who would take it; always go the extra mile and accommodate those who would borrow from them. They must love their enemies and pray for their persecutors (Matthew 5:38-45; Luke 6:27-30; Luke 6;36-38). Jesus also forbids his followers from being angry with their brethren, on pain of judgment and hellfire, and urges them to reconcile and come to agreement with their adversaries (Matthew 5:23-25). He admonishes them to treat others as they would have others treat them (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31), and he warns them against ‘taking up the sword’ (Matthew 26:52).

“But how many self-professed Christians actually behave according to gospel values? Such believers would never, for example, deny anyone food, shelter, or medical benefits, regardless of the needy party’s condition of birth, financial circumstances, race, immigration status, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation.  They would not look down on the poor and consider them unworthy of help. They would welcome immigrants, especially those seeking asylum, rather than imprisoning them. If their churches were wealthy, they would demand the sale of church assets to help fund care for the poor. They would not hoard weapons of war or attempt to overthrow honest elections. And they would laugh at the ‘Christian prosperity’ proponents, who according to the gospels have received their reward and will receive nothing more in Heaven.

“According to Jesus, people should view life on Earth as a trial venue, an audition for Heaven, in which their behavior will largely determine where they’ll spend the rest of eternity once they die.  Those who fill his stated criteria (and also happen to be gifted with God’s ‘grace’) will ascend to Heaven (John 12:25 and 12:28). Everyone else (i.e. most of humanity) will be tortured forever in Hell. Judging by widespread Christian behavior, this torture will include enduring the company of most of the self-professed Christians who ever lived” (Davis). 

And what do we make of the Catholic Church's history of ignoring priestly pedophilia and its cultural genocide and deaths of Indigenous children by Catholic clergy?  How can we reconcile with the Catholic Church's flagrant complicity and hypocrisy?  How can we forgive Christian ethnic cleansing and the divine Manifest Destiny? And what should we make of today's theocratic fascists, these white Christian Nationalistic misogynists and homophobes who are repressing women's rights and LTGBQ? And what about Christianity's archaic ideologies and indoctrination of a need for salvation perpetuated through irrational fear and guilt?

 -Glen Brown

Davis, Dan. “How to Be a Christian according to Jesus,” Free Inquiry, August/September 2023, Vol. 43 No. 5.