BEAUMONT (TX)
Beaumont Enterprise
February 3, 2019
By Kaitlin Bain
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.
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