An elderly priest’s guilty plea exposes the church’s history of shielding predators in its midst for decades
Ramon Antonio Vargas in New Orleans
In the case of serial child molester and retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, the cover-up failed.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying by a coalition of high-ranking church officials and sympathetic judges, who prioritized the predator’s comfort above justice for his innumerable victims until the evidence against him was so overwhelming that – rather than stand the humiliation of a public trial – he pleaded guilty last Tuesday.
The 93-year-old’s decision not only saddled him with an automatic life sentence. It also exposed how Catholic bureaucrats in Hecker’s home town of New Orleans, one of the church’s strongholds in the US, repeated the same sins that produced an eerily similar scandal in Boston two decades earlier – events later immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.
This is the only conclusion to draw from years of reporting and studying the church files, court records, legal proceedings and and law enforcement documents outlining the campaign of terror to which Hecker subjected so many children raised in one of the most reliably Catholic regions remaining in the US.
Files held by New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese establish that Hecker was molesting children virtually immediately upon his ordination in 1958. Chronologically speaking, one of Hecker’s earliest victims was a preteen altar boy who described attending nude swimming parties with the priest – gatherings that would culminate in sexual assaults by the attacker.
Hecker eventually instructed that boy to bring a box containing a feather to a particular fellow priest at another nearby Catholic school and church. In short order, the second priest sexually attacked the boy – and the victim said he came to realize Hecker had used the feather to mark him as vulnerable to molestation.
Unsurprisingly, Hecker’s superiors became more than aware of his crimes. Accusations against him piled up at each of the major milestones in the US church’s reckoning with Catholic clergy sexual abuse, which began in the 1980s when Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in criminal court to molesting several boys.
Around that time, then New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan received a child molestation complaint against Hecker. Hannan’s response – carried out in private – was to fly Hecker to a sabbatical in New York City before letting him return to work once things back home cooled off.
More such claims against Hecker came in the 1990s, when another Louisiana priest – Robert Melancon – was convicted of raping an altar boy. The ensuing pressure prompted Hecker to confess in writing to church officials that he had sexually molested or otherwise harassed several children whom he had met through his ministry.
This time, Hannan’s successor as archbishop, Francis Schulte, was in charge of responding. Schulte sent Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric care facility that diagnosed him as an incurable pedophile who should not work with young people. Upon Hecker’s return, Schulte assigned him to work at a church with a grammar school attached to it.
Hecker retired under duress in 2002. As Spotlight famously chronicled, the Boston Globe had just exposed its local Catholic archdiocese for having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, and it ignited a scandal that saw the worldwide church promise reform, such as by no longer tolerating the likes of Hecker.
But, despite pledges of transparency, New Orleans’ archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, chose to hide from congregants the fact that Hecker had retired in hopes of keeping secret his career as a serial child molester.
Archdiocesan attorneys back then did send a confidential memorandum to police notifying them that there had been an accusation naming Hecker as an abuser. But the note mentioned only a single case while failing to mention Hecker’s 1999 confessions. And Hughes ignored his advisers’ recommendation to oust Hecker altogether from the priesthood instead of merely letting him retire, a break that allowed the clergyman to collect lucrative retirement benefits.
Such maneuvers were on brand for Hughes, who had worked as an administrator in Boston’s archdiocese in the 1990s and sought to “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse in that city, a report from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office ultimately found.
That scheming was effective in further suppressing the truth about Hecker – who would spend decades more free, even while Hughes’ successor as New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, continued dealing with the priest’s crimes after being appointed in 2009.
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