NEW MEXICO
Renegade Catholic
Jay Nelson
Just when you think it’s really and truly finally over, the past reaches out and grabs at you like a zombie hand from a grave. Once again the scandal of clergy sexual abuse hangs over the Land of Enchantment as new lawsuits are filed.
The story below for some reason does not name the accused priest, and the details provided don’t help that much, for there were at least two child-molesting priests who were sent to the Servants of the Paraclete from Connecticut and later became fugitives: Fr. Laurence Brett and Msgr. Arthur J. Perrault. But Brett was ultimately found, laicized and died, and there’s no mention of any of that here, so it would have to be Perrault, who has never been seen again.
Perrault was a big apple here – popular (winning a local “People’s Choice for Favorite Clergy” award), a close friend of later-disgraced Archbishop Robert Sanchez, a top liturgist who wrote columns for the archdiocesan newsletter, did the TV Mass regularly, and served as the coordinator of worship for bishops in the West. He’d been a colonel in the Air Force reserve Chaplains Corps, and served in the four biggest and richest parishes in the state.
And Fr. Perrault was also a major perp. Screwed male and female over a wide range of ages, and he nearly got me once, too. For he taught ethics, of all things, at St. Pius X High School here in Albuquerque back then. I went there back when it was located where the ABQ Uptown shopping mall is now. Thank God, I was only there for my freshman and sophomore years. But on one occasion, I had to see him in his office after school – I had found out about a gang fight that was scheduled for after school that I thought needed to be stopped.
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