‘Maybe I lived a naive life’: New Orleans archbishop denies knowledge of widespread child sex abuse in 1970s

The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans has said the allegations at the heart of a child-sex trafficking investigation being conducted by state police against his archdiocese are a “sin”, “evil” and a crime – but he has insisted he was oblivious to them when they unfolded during a bygone era earlier in his career.

Gregory Aymond’s comments, in an interview published on Sunday by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper, were his first about an investigation which erupted into public view in April as Louisiana state troopers served the archdiocese’s headquarters with a search warrant that accused the institution of potentially having run a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades”.

A sworn statement attached to the warrant added that the institution – which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 when faced with dozens of lawsuits stemming from the decades-old clerical molestation crisis engulfing the global church – also purportedly covered up the abuse and failed to report it to law enforcement.

The inquiry which Aymond addressed in Sunday’s interview started in part after attorneys representing clergy abuse claimants seeking damages from the archdiocese provided a 48-page memorandum asserting that there was evidence of many of the allegations cited in April’s warrant within internal documents that the church was compelled to produce during the bankruptcy.

That memo recounted how Aymond “worked, socialized and/or lived with at least 48” clergymen accused in bankruptcy claims alleging child sexual abuse, starting in 1973 – when he became a teacher at a New Orleans high school primarily catering to boys interested in the priesthood – through 2000, which was his 14th and final year as the rector-president of the city’s Notre Dame seminary.

The state police warrant alleged that investigators had spoken with victims who reported being brought to swim nude in the pool at the seminary – which trains priests – and get “sexually assaulted or abused … [while] members of the archdiocese were present”.

Yet Aymond told the Times-Picayune that he “never experienced any of those things”.

“Maybe I lived a naive life,” Aymond said to the newspaper. “I don’t think so. But they say these things happened and I would love to know where, when and by whom?”

Aymond made clear that he viewed the fallout of the clergy molestation scandal as a mess that he inherited from the three preceding New Orleans archbishops: Philip Hannan and Francis Schulte, who have died; and Alfred Hughes. He said the abuse that spurred the scandal “should have been reported”, and it was “wrong” for it to not be.

“But it was a sign of the times” when pedophilia was less understood, Aymond remarked to the Times-Picayune.

Aymond served various roles under Hannan and Schulte, including as a high-ranking aide known as a vicar general whose responsibilities would have included administering misconduct complaints against archdiocesan clergymen. He became the bishop of Austin, Texas, in 2000 and returned to New Orleans to succeed Hughes as archbishop in 2009.

Reportedly, while in his home gazing at a photograph of him, Hannan, Schulte and Hughes all standing together, Aymond told the Times-Picayune: “I don’t think any of those men … intentionally tried to hurt people.

“Did they knowingly or unknowingly make terrible mistakes? Yes, knowingly or unknowingly they made terrible mistakes that have cost the church reputation and financially.

“But I cannot judge their hearts.”

Despite Aymond conceding that his predecessors’ management of the clergy molestation scandal hurt people, his administration has left Hannan’s name on an archdiocesan-run high school. And Schulte’s name still graces an imposing building at Notre Dame seminary.

‘I know my legacy’

In other parts of the wide-ranging interview, which the Times-Picayune reported conducting over three days, Aymond for the first time pledged to make archdiocesan files detailing the local church’s clergy abuse scandal publicly accessible after resolving the bankruptcy. He also indicated his willingness to meet privately with small groups of abuse survivors to hear their stories.

And he said he’s frustrated that the focus on the child molestation scandal enveloping his archdiocese has overshadowed some of the good things he described the church having accomplished. He mentioned increased mass attendance, how 200 adults had recently been baptized and confirmed within the archdiocese, and growing youth ministries, among other things.

“I know my legacy will be ‘he dealt with sexual abuse,’ but I did more than that,” said Aymond, 74. “I have taken seriously the role of bishop, being a pastor and being a shepherd.”

As the Times-Picayune noted, Aymond’s interview with the outlet came more than five years after he released a November 2018 list disclosing the names of about 50 clergymen faced with substantial child molestation allegations while working locally. He meant the move to be a conciliatory gesture over the ongoing clergy abuse scandal.

But Aymond has drawn criticism as the list has since grown to about 80 names. And the number of priests, deacons, nuns, religious brothers and lay staffers named in abuse claims filed as part of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy is more than 300, the bulk of whom the church has not labeled as credibly accused.

At the time his archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, Aymond indicated his administration believed it could resolve the proceeding at a cost of about $7m, including compensation for abuse victims. Yet the unsettled bankruptcy had cost the church about $40m just in fees for legal and other professional services while abuse claimants still had not gotten a cent as of Sunday.

The archdiocese’s bankruptcy attorneys at one point were prepared to argue that most of the abuse claims were worth relatively little because they had been brought past filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation. But that strategy absorbed a blow when the Louisiana state supreme court in June upheld the constitutionality of laws temporarily allowing child molestation victims to pursue civil damages no matter how long ago their abuse was.

Furthermore, the archdiocese anticipated the documents spelling out its history of clergy abuse would remain under a court seal while the bankruptcy was unresolved. But they have repeatedly leaked into news media reports, showing how the church had gone to unusual lengths to suppress the truth about the abusive conduct of some of its priests and deacons – and to generously provide for them financially, including under Aymond.

Another source of unflattering headlines for the archdiocese: the pending prosecution of retired priest Lawrence Hecker, 92, who was criminally charged in September with raping a child in 1975 or 1976 at a church attached to the New Orleans high school dedicated to educating prospective priests.

Aymond was either in his third or fourth year on the school’s faculty at the time the purported rape occurred. And in 1976, the year after his ordination into the priesthood, Aymond assumed the title of “business manager” at the school, according to his archdiocesan personnel file.

That same year, as he has acknowledged, Aymond confiscated sexually suggestive, handwritten letters which another priest – Robert Cooper – sent to two of the school’s students. The letters have since purportedly disappeared yet led to Cooper’s dismissal from the school.

Meanwhile, Hecker’s alleged victim maintained he reported his rape to the principal of the school, Paul Calamari, who – along with Cooper – was later named in Aymond’s 2018 list as a credibly accused clergy predator.

Hecker appeared on the 2018 list, too. He had confessed in writing to his superiors in 1999 that he had molested several other children whom he had met through work – but the archdiocese let him minister for three more years before allowing him to quietly retire with lucrative benefits, some of which he still gets.

Aymond was carbon-copied on an archdiocesan letter welcoming Hecker back to work after his acknowledgment to abusing minors repeatedly. He was a high-ranking aide to the New Orleans archbishop at the time, Schulte.

The credibly accused list which Aymond released nine years into his tenure as Hughes’ successor was the archdiocese’s first public acknowledgment that Hecker retired in the wake of his admitted serial child molestation, according to investigative reporting conducted by the Guardian as well as the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana.

The former student pressing the criminal case against Hecker has told authorities that his school paid for him to receive mental therapy after the abuse – yet campus administrators never notified police about the crime. He finally took matters into his own hands and denounced Hecker to law enforcement in the summer of 2022.

‘Blind, incompetent or a liar’

The ensuing investigation not only resulted in criminal charges being filed against Hecker. It also spurred the child sex-trafficking investigation that Aymond commented on in his interview Sunday with the Times-Picayune.

Mere days before the interview’s publication, a priest ordained in Nigeria who Aymond invited to work in Texas and near New Orleans was charged in Florida with possessing child abuse imagery and sexually assaulting two women for whom he served as a spiritual adviser.

Related: US priest’s sexual assault accusers felt they ‘could not say no’, police say

Church officials in Austin first suspended Anthony Odiong from ministering in that region in 2019. Their counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same. That second suspension came two years after one of the women to speak out against Odiong had filed a clergy abuse claim in 2021 in Aymond’s archdiocese’s bankruptcy case.

Aymond on Sunday did not address Odiong’s arrest.

Lawyers who have the largest contingent of clergy abuse claimants in that bankruptcy issued a statement Sunday saying it beggared belief for Aymond to portray himself as having been unaware of the predatory and abusive behavior around him during his rise in the church.

“He is either deaf and blind, incompetent or a liar – and we know which one he is,” said the statement from Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and Johnny Denenea.

Aymond told the Times-Picayune that “it is simply not true” to call him a liar.

“I am a man of integrity,” he reportedly said, “and I do not lie.”