NEW ORLEANS (LA)
Times Picayune
February 23, 2019
By Tim Morris
The failures, missed opportunities, mistakes and criminal neglect that allowed a culture of child sexual abuse to take root and grow in the Catholic Church are all found in the story of the disgraced Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe.
The first Catholic clergyman in the United States to be indicted for repeatedly sexually abusing children, Gauthe’s 1984 case not only revealed his own repulsive crimes but evidence of other pedophile priests and a church hierarchy complicit in a systemic cover-up.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the church refused to heed the warnings that could have stemmed decades more of abuse. It also could have opened the way to reconciliation and healing for the sins that have left one of the world’s most influential institutions crippled by the scandals 35 years later.
The Times-Picayune reporter Kim Chatelain is not the first to tell Gauthe’s sordid story, but his “Catholic Church ignored 1985 report warning of child sex abuse crisis” should evoke a great weight of remorse as church leaders gather in Rome to make yet another attempt to address the problem.
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