Pastor backs off questioning criminal nature of priests’ conduct

By Kaitlin Bain
Beaumont Enterprise
February 03, 2019

https://bit.ly/2GmOL1m

Congregants attend Saturday evening mass at St. Anne's Catholic Church in Beaumont. Area churches, clergy and parishioners continue to grapple with last week's naming of priests within the diocese who were accused of sexual misconduct. Photo by Kim Brent

A pastor at St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Beaumont walked back public comments he made during Mass Saturday questioning the criminal nature of abuse allegedly committed by members of the clergy.

“I probably shouldn’t even have gone into it at all,” Monsignor William Manger told the Enterprise on Sunday. “I don’t know what the offenses were.”

Referencing the fact that only one priest from the Diocese of Beaumont clergy members faced prosecution as a result of sexual assault allegations, he told congregants at the 5 p.m. Saturday service that, “What that tells me is that what they did was not to an intense criminal standard.”

Manger said Sunday he was simply trying to quote facts from Bishop Curtis Guillory’s letter, released two days earlier, that accompanied a list of names of 13 priests believed to have molested minors. It was part of a coordinated public naming by 14 Texas dioceses of nearly 300 “credibly accused” members of the clergy statewide of acts committed over the past several decades.

Manger initially tried to explain his comments. He said, for example, that someone suspected of rape will go straight to jail, but in lesser forms of “inappropriate touching,” a prosecutor may not go forward with charges.

Eventually, Manger said he should not have brought any of that up.

Michael Norris, director of the Houston office of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said comments like Manger’s show at least some members of the Catholic Church still don’t understand the scope of the problem.

Norris said the reason these cases are so hard to prosecute is not that they don’t constitute criminal acts but that it often comes down to a child’s word against a member of the clergy.

“These guys are God-like figures,” he said. “Who was above God? I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t think they would believe me.”

In response to the release of names last week, a local survivor recounted for the Enerprise his experience of being molested by two St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church priests on the list, once when he was 8 and then again 10 years later.

He said he received threats to drop the case. And when one of his abusers died seven years ago, the man said, some members of the Nederland parish accused him of killing the former priest “with his defamatory lies.”

Norris said in many cases, it takes more than one accusation against a member of the clergy for it to move forward.

The church could prove it understands this challenge and is trying to rectify the situation by reprimanding any members of the clergy who make comments like Manger’s.

Guillory said in an interview that he had not yet reviewed Manger’s statements and as a result wouldn’t comment on them or any possible reprimand that could come.

“I can say I stand by what I said in my letter,” he said.

Guillory’s letter, copies of which were distributed at Mass Sunday morning, included a broad apology “for the severe damage” victims suffered due to “sinful and criminal abuse.”

During Saturday’s St. Anne’s service, Manger said he “knew almost all of those priests and their work was good, they just made bad decisions.”

He called it a “shame that young people have been abused by members of the clergy who have broken the trust of the church.”

He asked parishioners to pray for the church and victims as well as those prosecuted for sexual abuse find “repentance and healing.”