LOUISIANA
The Advertiser
Claire Taylor August 1, 2014
Ten years after admitting the Diocese of Lafayette and its insurers paid more than $26 million to the families of children molested by priests, Bishop Michael Jarrell this week refused to release the names of those priests.
“Bishop Jarrell sees no purpose in such action,” Monsignor Richard Greene, media liaison, wrote in response to The Daily Advertiser’s request for the priests’ names.
The Advertiser made the request after sworn statements from the 1990s came to light recently, including allegations by a young man that a priest still ministering in Lafayette sexually abused him. The priest and Diocese denied the allegations.
“The obvious purpose is that failing to reveal these names may pose a serious threat or danger to even more innocent children in this diocese than these men have already injured,” Ray Mouton wrote in an email to The Advertiser.
Mouton is the attorney who represented Gilbert Gauthe in the first widely known case of pedophilia by a Catholic priest in the Diocese of Lafayette. Now living in France, Mouton campaigns for the rights of survivors of abuse, co-authored a 1985 report hailed by the media as the most significant document issued in the priest sex abuse scandal, and wrote “In God’s House,” a novel drawn from his extensive experience dealing with this issue.
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