BATON ROUGE (LA)
The Advocate
February 1, 2019
By Andrea Gallo
Before Clarence Biggers came to the Diocese of Baton Rouge in 1964, multiple girls told their parents that the Marist priest had kissed them, fondled them and exposed himself to them at St. Joseph Catholic School in Marietta, Georgia.
One of their mothers typed up a letter to Marist officials about his abuse. But instead of removing him from ministry, the Marist order transferred the priest to the Diocese of Baton Rouge, where he worked at St. Joseph Church in the tiny town of Paulina in St. James Parish on the east bank of the Mississippi River.
The Diocese of Baton Rouge named 37 clergymen this week who were credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor, and Biggers was among them. While some of those on the list had previously been targeted by lawsuits and featured in media accounts, 19 of them had never had their misconduct exposed.
Biggers was one of those.
The Diocese reported that Biggers continued to abuse children after he got to Paulina, saying that they received multiple reports in 2000 of abuse that occurred between 1964 and 1967. Dan Borne, a spokesman for the Baton Rouge Diocese, said Friday that they had no records indicating that Biggers sexually abused a minor before he came to Baton Rouge. The Marist order transferred Biggers back to Atlanta in 1967, where he worked at another church parish before he joined a monastery and died in 2009.
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