Tag: Discontent

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Former Dolphins chaplain Leo Armbrust accused of sex harassment

Leo Armbrust

By Jane Musgrave

Leo Armbrust was never your typical Catholic priest.

Serving as chaplain to the Miami Dolphins, University of Miami Hurricanes and even briefly for the Dallas Cowboys, on weekends he was as likely to be seen pacing the sidelines shouting at trash-talking linemen as he was preaching the word of God to devout followers at Our Lady Queen of Apostles in Royal Palm Beach.

Known for his quick wit and a penchant for off-color jokes, Armbrust rubbed shoulders with famous athletes, business tycoons and community leaders. His well-placed connections helped him when he set off on a multi-million-dollar fund-raising odyssey to establish a Father Flanagan-style village for troubled and neglected teens.

However, 15 years after he founded Vita Nova, a less ambitious, but well-respected agency that provides housing and other assistance to hundreds of young adults no longer eligible for foster care, Armbrust is being accused of all manner of wrongdoing.

In a lawsuit filed this month in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, a former Vita Nova board member claims Armbrust, who left the priesthood in 2009, used agency accounts as his personal piggybank to fund a lavish lifestyle. In her lawsuit, Barbara McMillin accuses Armbrust, 63, of spending his days at the office trolling the Internet for sexual partners.

Further, she says, he harassed employees with crude behavior, obscene photos and anti-Semitic jokes. In at least one case, she says in her lawsuit, the agency was forced to pay a worker $200,000 to settle a sexual harassment complaint.

Her claims are salacious, provoking strong denials from agency officials and Armbrust supporters. However, the Wellington woman didn’t merely lay out her claims and leave it at that.

As part of her lawsuit, she attached confidential reports and internal memos that appear to shore up at least some of her allegations. They reveal Armbrust’s relationship with a hip-hop musician as well as statements from top staff that he was undermining Vita Nova’s work. Further, she said, she plans to send the information to law enforcement officials in hopes they will investigate.

‘Obviously, not happy’

Attorney Jack Scarola, who is being sued along with Armbrust, Vita Nova and several others, scoffed at McMillin’s attack. He said McMillin is simply trying to get back at him and Armbrust for filing a lawsuit against her and other board members for attempting to boot the former priest out of the agency he founded. While the other board members in February agreed to settle the lawsuit, award Armbrust an undisclosed amount in back pay and give him his job back, McMillin refused. So, he said, the litigation against her will continue.

“She obviously is not happy about that circumstance and has responded in what appears to be a very irrational fashion by suing everyone in sight,” Scarola said.

Attorney Gerald Richman, who filed a different lawsuit against McMillin and other board members on Armbrust’s behalf, voiced similar views. “Barbara McMillin has been extremely antagonistic toward Leo,” he said. “It’s almost like a vendetta.”

McMillin, a former CEO of Kids Sanctuary who has worked for children’s service agencies for decades, said the lawsuits Richman and Scarola filed prompted her to do some serious soul-searching about what she witnessed during her five years on Vita Nova’s board.

While she signed onto the settlement of the lawsuit Richman filed, she became suspicious when she said her own attorney wouldn’t reveal the full terms of the agreement that was hashed out with Armbrust to resolve the suit Scarola filed. She said she was appalled by the idea of giving Armbrust $100,000 to $200,000 in back pay and allowing him to return to his job as agency fund-raiser when he had proved so inept at raising much-needed cash.

“They can call me a mean old lady or whatever they want to do,” the 67-year-old said. “I just wouldn’t have felt I had done what was necessary for the kids if I hadn’t thrown this out there.”

And throw out she did.

As part of the lawsuit, she released an investigation the law firm Akerman Senterfitt did in 2012 in response to a grievance former employee Terry Sullivan filed against Armbrust.

In interviews with Akerman attorneys, Sullivan recounted the unprovoked tongue-lashings she received from Armbrust. He forced her to mend his clothes, wrap Christmas presents and go with him to pick out presents during the work day. On at least one occasion, she saw pornographic images on his computer, she told investigators.

When he began a relationship with hip-hop artist and rapper Jeancarlos Correa, who uses the stage name Remynd, Armbrust told her to prepare packages at agency expense to promote the struggling musician’s career, she said in the report.

In one instance, he asked her to order T shirts to promote Remynd’s album, “Sex and Computers.” Featuring a blow up doll with the word “Censored” stamped between its legs, the album cover image was so offensive to the printer that the agency used that it refused the order. Sullivan also told lawyers Armbrust once called her into the office to look at a sexually laced music video of Remynd, featuring the musician trying to bed a Sarah Palin look-alike.

“Ms. Sullivan said that the video did not make her uncomfortable. She stated that she ‘is not a prude,’” Ackerman lawyers wrote in their report. “However, she felt the video should not be shared in the office.”

Top brass at the agency agreed. Vita Nova CEO Jeff DeMario told lawyers that when he learned Armbrust was circulating the image from “Sex and Computers” among staff and officials from other nonprofits, he told him to stop. He also told Armbrust to stop asking Sullivan to do sewing for him.

DeMario said there were other lapses as well. He said Armbrust sometimes dressed inappropriately, such as wearing a T shirt with a photo of one of the cops from the 1970s TV show “Chips”and the words “Spread ‘em” on it. He said he had heard Armbrust make “inappropriate” jokes about black and Jewish people.

The real problem, DeMario said, was that there was little he or Irvine Nugent, another former priest who was then president of Vita Nova, could do to rein in Armbrust. While both were technically his bosses, as the founder, he had the upper hand.

“If this was anyone else, they would have been terminated,” DeMario told the lawyers. “We have an agency that is predicated on virtues and we are not practicing them in house. What kind of agency are we?”

Scarola said he hadn’t read the report that McMillin attached to the lawsuit. He said he advised Armbrust not to comment for this story. But he said the depiction of Armbrust as a bigot or a sexist is simply wrong.

“There is not an anti-Semitic bone in Leo Armbrust’s body — not the slightest hint of prejudice about anything,” Scarola said. As to those who might have found Armbrust’s jokes offensive, he said: “That’s more a reflection of their over-sensitivity rather than any impropriety on the part of Leo Armbrust.”

Armbrust’s natural exuberance and occasionally flamboyant behavior are part of his charm and the reason he is a successful fund-raiser, Scarola said. “He has excellent community connections with high-profile people,” he said. “He has established these connections with the force of his personality.”

However, there are questions about Armbrust’s fund-raising ability. Before Vita Nova board members agreed to settle the lawsuit Richman filed on Armbrust’s behalf, their attorney described Armbrust’s fund-raising as “abysmal.”

“As the director of development for (Vita Nova Foundation), Armbrust has performed poorly and has failed to bring in sufficient donations that would cover his high salary, his benefits and his assistant,” attorney Roy Fitzgerald wrote. “Since at least 2006, Armbrust has failed to meet the fund-raising budget, although the fund-raising budget was significantly lower than what should be expected.”

According to Fitzgerald’s short-lived counterclaim to Richman’s lawsuit, Armbrust earned $150,000 annually, plus benefits. An assistant made $60,000-a-year. According to industry standards, he should have been bringing in three or four times the $210,000 the agency was spending on his office, roughly $630,000 to $840,000 annually. Records show its investment portfolio declined from $15.7 million in 2006 to $6.2 million in 2013. The agency also gets government grants.

“Armbrust sets his own schedule and does not invest the necessary time and energy into fund-raising or into the organization to understand the programs the organization offers,” Fitzgerald continued. “As such, Armbrust has failed at getting the necessary fund-raising and could do more.”

Since that lawsuit was settled, Vita Nova board members and executives have changed their tunes. They dispute the allegations McMillin is making in her recently filed suit.

“Much of what Ms. McMillin alleges in her complaint is substantially inaccurate,” DeMario said in a statement. “As an organization, we are saddened that Ms. McMillin has taken a path that may harm the very organization that she was once affiliated with and may impact the hundreds of young adults we serve.”

McMillin said that isn’t her intention. She said the organization is a good one and praised DeMario as doing good work against enormous odds.

“I truly hope and I pray that people will support the organization,” she said. “They are doing a fabulous job for kids who need their support. But it just isn’t right to allow Leo to go on and give that man money that should go to the kids.”

Scarola said McMillin may pay a heavy price for her actions. By releasing confidential information she may have put Vita Nova at risk. “Clearly, she had a fiduciary responsibility as an officer of the corporation to preserve the confidence of the corporation,” he said.

McMillin said she’s not worried. “Protecting Leo is not part of my fiduciary responsibility,” she said.

Further, she said, she’s not done. After Easter, she said she plans to ask the Palm Beach County state attorney, Florida attorney general and the IRS to look at the records she has collected. Not all of them are in the lawsuit, she said. She said she has credit card receipts that prove Armbrust was using agency money as his own.

“I’m not trying to destroy the foundation. I am trying to save the foundation,” she said. “He has been looting it for years.”

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Vatican’s mishandling of high-profile abuse cases extends its foremost crisis

Pope Francis leads the traditional Sunday Angelus prayer from his window overlooking Saint Peter’s Square on Sunday.

By Chico Harlan and Amanda Coletta

Three years ago, Pope Francis said the Catholic Church was committed to eradicating the “evil” of abuse. The pope and other church leaders drew up new guidelines to handle accusations. They pledged transparency. They said victims’ needs would come first.

“A change of mentality,” Francis called it.

But two recent major cases suggest that the church, for all its vows to improve, is still falling into familiar traps and extending its foremost crisis.

While the cases are markedly different — one involves a Canadian cardinal accused of inappropriately touching an intern; the other involves a Nobel-winning bishop from East Timor accused of abusing impoverished children — anti-abuse advocates say both instances reflect a pattern of secrecy and defensiveness. They say the church is still closing ranks to protect the reputations of powerful prelates.

In the case of the cardinal, Marc Ouellet, the Vatican did look into the accusations — but it delegated the investigation to a priest who knows him well, a fellow member of a small religious association. The priest determined there were no grounds to move forward — a conclusion the lawyer for the accuser says is dubious, given the possible conflict of interests.< Justin Wee, the lawyer, said Father Jacques Servais did interview his client in a 40-minute Zoom call, but rather than ascertaining the details of the allegations, appeared more interested in probing her motives and asking if she still believed in God.

“If the Vatican is handling cases like that, it means that if you’re powerful, nothing will happen,” Wee said. “No one should be above the rules.”

In the case of the bishop, Carlos Ximenes Belo, the Vatican disciplined him in 2020, one year after Holy See officials said they had became aware of accusations. But those restrictions — which included barring Belo from contact with minors — were kept secret by the church until a recently published Dutch news investigation that described abuse of multiple boys dating back to the 1980s.

Belo had attained stardom in the church by winning the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in seeking a peaceful resolution in East Timor’s long struggle for independence. But six years later, the Vatican announced he was stepping down — two decades before the usual retirement age — citing a canon law that refers to health or other “grave” reasons. The Vatican did not respond to a question about whether officials knew about abuse allegations at the time of Belo’s early retirement. He eventually wound up as an assistant parish priest in Mozambique. He said in a 2005 interview that his duties there included teaching children and leading youth retreats.

“Both cases are further indications that the whole accountability initiative is sputtering, is proving to be superficial and ineffective,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an abuse clearinghouse. “It makes you wonder: What has changed?”

The Vatican launched a drive to regain credibility against abuse after a wave of accusations not just against parish priests, but against bishops and cardinals — the power brokers of the church. Francis in 2018 called bishops to Rome for an unprecedented summit on abuse, which took place months later. And afterward, the church set out new rules and guidelines for how to handle cases, including instances when bishops are accused of coverup or abuse.

The church has shown progress on several counts. Dioceses around the world have set up reporting offices, giving alleged victims an easier way to alert the church of potential crimes. And in one instance, the church submitted itself to an act of unprecedented transparency, releasing a 449-page report into the abuse of defrocked American cardinal Theodore McCarrick, with revelations that bruised the reputation of Pope John Paul II.

But since then, the Vatican has not been transparent about any discipline against other prelates. And it has regularly ignored its own procedures, which provide specific instructions about who should be tasked to investigate bishops.

“It’s very frustrating, to be honest,” said one individual who has consulted with the Vatican on its handling of abuse, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly. “When big names come out — the Vatican and the curia — the shield comes down. It’s incredible.”

Belo could not be reached for comment. The investigation by Dutch publication De Groene Amsterdammer included interviews with two adults who described abuse by Belo when they were teenagers, after which, they said, the bishop had given them money. The publication said the allegations against Belo had been known to aid workers and officials in the church. The Salesians of Don Bosco, a religious order to which Belo belonged, said in a statement it had learned about the accusations with “deep sadness and perplexity.”

The statement did not offer any timeline and referred further questions to those with “competence and knowledge.”

Ouellet, 78, has denied the accusations of inappropriate touching. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures within the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy, as head of the department that oversees and vets bishops. Francis has allowed him to stay in the role well beyond the normal five-year term. He has a reputation as a moderate — a rarity in the ideologically divided church — and has served under several popes, including Francis, with whom he has near-weekly meetings.

The accusations against him surfaced publicly as part of a recent class-action lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Quebec, in which more than 100 people allege sexual misconduct against dozens of members of the Catholic clergy, lay and religious pastoral staff or volunteers. Many victims say they were minors at the time of alleged assaults.

The accusations date back to Ouellet’s time as archbishop of Quebec. A woman identified in the legal documents only as “F.” says that in the fall of 2008, when she was a 23-year-old intern, working as a pastoral agent at a diocese in Quebec, he forcefully massaged her shoulders at a dinner. When she turned around, the lawsuit alleges, she saw that it was Ouellet, who smiled and caressed her back before leaving.

In 2010, at the ordination of a colleague, F. alleges that Ouellet told her that he might as well hug her because there’s no harm “in treating oneself a bit.” He hugged her and slid his hand down her back to above her buttocks, according to the lawsuit. She says that she felt “chased” and that when she spoke to other people about her experiences, she was told that she wasn’t the only one to have that “problem” with him.

F. ended up trying to bring the case to light through official church channels, first to an independent advisory committee designed to receive church cases, and then — at the committee’s advice — in a letter to Francis himself. A month after her January 2021 letter to the pope, she was informed that Father Jacques Servais would investigate. She alleges that he appeared to have “little information and training” about sexual assault.

The Vatican did not respond to a question about why a close associate of Ouellet, who had known the cardinal since at least 1991, would have been tasked to conduct a preliminary probe. The church guidelines warn against a conflict of interests.

Wee, the alleged victim’s lawyer, said there was no follow-up from Servais or anyone else at the Vatican after the Zoom call in March 2021.

Servais did not respond to a request for comment.

Wee, who declined to make F. available for an interview, said she learned that the Vatican had determined there wasn’t enough evidence for a canonical investigation based on a Vatican news release after the allegations against Ouellet became public in August. He said she was not told privately beforehand.

Jean-Guy Nadeau, an emeritus professor of religious studies at the University of Montreal, lamented the lack of transparency in the case. He said Servais should have recused himself given the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“I don’t understand how that choice was made,” Nadeau said of Francis’s decision to appoint Servais to conduct the investigation. “I really don’t understand how such a choice could ever happen.”

Analysts said the case highlights the need for external investigators to probe misconduct allegations. David Deane, an associate professor of theology at the Atlantic School of Theology in Nova Scotia, said members of the clergy often close ranks and cannot be trusted to investigate one another.

“Having clergy handle the investigation is a real problem. It’s a real issue,” he said. “As long as that happens, it’s going to be very difficult to have both accountability and public confidence in the process.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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These Catholics are trying to work within the church to change how sexual abuse is addressed

Executive Director Sara Larson

By Sophie Carson

When a group of local Catholics decided to expand their advocacy work outside a Whitefish Bay living room, they had to come up with a name for their new organization.

They settled on “Awake Milwaukee.”

As Catholics who wanted to push for change on the issue of sexual abuse from within the church, the name represented their own views as well as what they hoped to do for others.

“We felt like we were finally awake. We were finally paying attention to something that had been there all along,” said executive director Sara Larson. “It’s also what we’re aiming to do for our broader community: to help people wake up to this reality.”

The group’s ethos is that while the Archdiocese of Milwaukee has come a long way in addressing clergy abuse, more can be done to support survivors and increase transparency. The group has also recently released a list of recommended changes.

Awake is unique among most anti-clergy sexual abuse groups because its leaders are practicing Catholics who want to remain in the church and see it improve.

“Real change and structural change can only come from within, when the laity really is speaking and saying we’re not comfortable with where this is at,” said Patty Ingrilli, a member of Awake’s board of directors.

An archdiocese spokeswoman said the church has put stringent policies in place to prevent abuse, worked with survivors and given anti-child abuse training to 100,000 people.

“No organization in the U.S. has done more than the Catholic Church when it comes to addressing sexual abuse, and incorporating prevention measures throughout the organization,” said communication director Sandra Peterson.

‘It’s about listening first’

A lifelong Catholic with a theology degree, Larson was working at a local parish in 2018 when two pieces of news hit her like a “punch in the gut” and caused her to pay attention to the abuse crisis. The cardinal Theodore McCarrick was removed from ministry over allegations of child sex abuse, and the sprawling Pennsylvania grand jury report was released, detailing widespread abuse and cover-ups.

Previously, Larson believed a narrative she thinks is common among Catholics: Sexual abuse in the church “happened a long time ago, and when we found out about it, we fixed it, and now it’s time for us to move on.”

Within a year, Larson had dived into research on the crisis, hosted other local Catholics in her home for discussions on the issue and launched Awake Milwaukee.

The group’s first action was an open letter to survivors, apologizing for the abuse they experienced and for the “many ways your abuse was ignored, minimized, and covered up.” Dozens of local Catholics, including priests and deacons, signed on.

Most of the group’s founders weren’t survivors of abuse or close family or friends of survivors. But they were people of faith who cared.

“We were people who maybe had been part of the problem by not caring enough about this, and not learning and not taking action earlier,” Larson said.

Ingrilli, a Brookfield Catholic who’d served as chair of her parish council, got involved because it was important to raise her three sons in the church, she said.

“I needed the Catholic Church to be a safer place than what I felt it was,” she said.

Awake has four areas of focus: education, prayer, advocacy and survivor support.

Educating “Catholics in the pews” about “the full reality of sexual abuse” in the church is key, Larson said. Awake runs a blog and hosts regular panel discussions with survivors and experts.

It’s been painful that some Catholics don’t support Awake’s mission, she said.

“We really think that a lack of understanding is a huge part of the problem,” she said.

Awake also runs support groups for survivors of clergy abuse. The virtual groups have drawn survivors from across the U.S. and Canada, Larson said. Not all experienced abuse within the Milwaukee archdiocese.

Most of the survivors have remained in the church and were looking for a place to be honest about the crisis while remaining “rooted in faith and hope,” Larson said.

“People want to be heard, and they want to be believed. That is the foundation of everything we do,” Larson said. “It’s about listening first.”

Group compiled list of recommendations

Awake recently released a list of recommended policy changes for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.

Among the recommendations: publish an online list of all priests credibly accused of abuse in the archdiocese, including visiting priests and those from religious orders – the current list only includes diocesan priests; publish twice-annual reports detailing the work of two oversight boards; and acknowledge the sexual abuse of adults, not only children, in Archdiocesan documents.

Each recommendation includes reasoning for why Awake leaders believe it should be implemented, as well as examples of dioceses that have implemented it.

“We really wanted to focus on things that, from what we understand, are very possible,” Larson said.

While some changes may seem minor, they can have a big impact on survivors, Larson said. Take the suggestion to list all credibly accused priests online.

She says that an average parishioner likely would make little distinction between a diocesan priest and, for example, a priest who was ordained in the Archdiocese of Chicago but was working at a church in Milwaukee.

A survivor “could go looking and say, ‘my abuser is not on this list,’” Larson said.

And while so-called extern and religious-order priests aren’t directly accountable to the Milwaukee archbishop, “it’s just a really good way to increase transparency about the full scope of abuse that happened in our archdiocese,” Larson said.

The archdiocese says it does not list extern and religious-order priests because it has no way of knowing key details about abuse allegations against such priests and how they were investigated. “There is also no certainty that the Archdiocese would be informed of allegations against every priest who worked at some point in the Archdiocese,” the statement said.

Another of Awake’s recommendations is to be more public about the work of two lay-led oversight boards, which provide advice to the archdiocese on its clergy abuse policies and whether people are fit to serve in ministry.

In response to a reporter’s question about the recommendation, the archdiocese spokeswoman said the Community Advisory Board includes survivors of abuse, victim advocates, professional psychologists and therapists, and members of law enforcement.

The board meets regularly and “serves as an instrument of education and vigilance and as a pathway of archdiocesan accountability to the larger community,” Peterson said.

Especially important to Larson is the recommendation to expand protections for child victims to adults. It’s not just children who are vulnerable to power differentials, she said: women in religious orders, adult seminarians and lay leaders also suffer sexual abuse.

“I’ve come to believe that the abuse of adults in the church is that it’s happening on a really broad scale today and still being tremendously mishandled by the church,” Larson said.

Awake Milwaukee has not received a response after sharing the recommendations with archdiocese officials.

“My hope is at least that they can see that the recommendations have merit and that even if they don’t directly respond to us, that it just makes them think,” Ingrilli said.

Ingrilli led a campaign last year to ask the archdiocese to ban liturgical music from David Haas, a widely known contemporary composer who was accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women. Officials didn’t reply. The decision whether to play Haas’ songs falls to individual parishes.

In response to a reporter’s questions about the lack of response to Awake’s leaders, Jerry Topczewski, chief of staff for the archdiocese, issued a statement:

“We are always open to input from professionals regarding the Church’s considerable and ongoing efforts assisting those who were victims of clergy sexual abuse of minors, while also remaining vigilant in our abuse prevention and safe environment efforts.”

Catholicism ‘part of the fabric of my life’

Even as they find little traction with archdiocesan officials, Awake’s leaders remain committed to their cause as well as their faith.

It hasn’t been easy.

“I had no idea, when I said yes to this, how much it would break my heart,” Larson said. “The depth of the pain and the depth of the wounds that are still present in the church is just not something that I understood.”

For Ingrilli, the group’s work has been personal. She found her great-uncle’s name on the Green Bay Diocese’s list of credibly accused priests. Her priest working at her hometown parish in Kiel, a Salvatorian from the Buffalo diocese, was also accused of abuse but wasn’t removed from ministry until decades later.

The discoveries galvanized her to make a difference within the church. She didn’t consider leaving it.

“That is part of the fabric of my life. That is very much who I am. I can’t imagine not having it,” Ingrilli said.

Ultimately, Ingrilli hopes Awake’s work prompts enough change that people who have left the church feel comfortable enough to return.

It’s her way of evangelizing, she said.

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New Orleans lawyer fined for alerting school to priest’s past sexual misconduct

Richard Trahant was fined $400,000 for violating confidentiality rules around a bankruptcy filing by the local archdiocese

Richard Trahant told the principal a priest formerly employed there had admitted to fondling and kissing a teen girl.

By

A New Orleans attorney who represents victims of clerical sexual abuse faces a $400,000 fine after alerting a local Catholic high school that a priest who worked there once admitted to fondling and kissing a teen girl he met at another church institution.

The lawyer, Richard Trahant, said he would appeal against the hefty sanction handed to him on Tuesday, which stemmed from a federal judge’s ruling that his alert violated confidentiality rules governing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by the local archdiocese.

A spokesman for the archdiocese – the second-oldest in the US, serving about 400,000 parishioners – declined comment other than to say: “The wisdom of the judge’s ruling speaks for itself.”

At the center of the dispute is a priest named Paul Hart, who officials found kissed, groped and at least once engaged in what the church described as “dry sex” – simulated intercourse while clothed – with a girl who was a senior in high school and participated in a youth group at a church where he was assigned in the early 1990s.

Hart was then in his late 30s. The girl was 17. By 2012, she had learned that after other assignments, Hart was returning to the church where they met and which ran a school her children then attended.

The woman filed a complaint with the archdiocese, accusing Hart of grooming her before pursuing sexual contact she now realized was inappropriate. In a church investigation, Hart denied initiating what happened but admitted contact, which he could not say did not cause him to ejaculate.

Worldwide, the Catholic church has since 2002 instructed leaders to consider anyone younger than 18 underage. However, though the investigation found Hart broke longstanding church laws mandating that priests practice celibacy, it did not find he sexually abused a minor. Under church law in effect at the time, the age of majority was 16.

Church officials have never publicly discussed Hart’s case. In 2017, he became chaplain of Brother Martin high school, in New Orleans. Details of the investigation into Hart were contained in files the archdiocese turned over after it filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2020, faced with dozens of unresolved lawsuits related to the worldwide church’s decades-old clerical abuse crisis.

Trahant, the lawyer, represents plaintiffs in some such lawsuits. As the bankruptcy case positioned the local archdiocese to reorganize its books, Trahant and some colleagues and clients were put on a committee representing the interests of clergy abuse claimants. In that role, Trahant learned about the 2012 complaint against Hart.

Though Brother Martin only admits boys, girls participate in activities including cheerleading and competitive dancing. In January this year, Trahant, a cousin of the principal, notified Brother Martin about the Hart investigation. Within days, Hart retired. He and the archdiocese – which has spent nearly $19m in legal and professional fees since filing for bankruptcy – said it was because of a battle with brain cancer.

Trahant also sent an email to this reporter, then working for the local newspaper, the Times-Picayune, advising him to “keep” Hart on his “radar”, without saying why.

The Times-Picayune reported that Hart’s departure came as the misconduct investigation resurfaced. The judge overseeing the archdiocese’s bankruptcy petition, Meredith Grabill, ordered a leak investigation because Hart’s file was among documents the church had classified as confidential.

When answering questions during that leak investigation, this reporter declined to discuss any sources cited in the Times-Picayune article but did say Trahant did not provide any information in the piece. Nothing indicates that investigators concluded Trahant had provided any of the information in the Times-Picayune report or was one of the unnamed sources cited.

Judge Grabill nonetheless ruled in June that Trahant’s alert to Brother Martin and his email telling this reporter to keep the priest on his radar – which the judge said “planted the seed” leading to the article – violated the confidentiality rules of the bankruptcy case.

Grabill immediately removed from the clergy abuse claimants committee Trahant, two attorneys with whom he frequently collaborates and a number of clients. On Tuesday, she added the $400,000 fine against Trahant, saying the amount was derived from the cost of the leak investigation.

The judge also wrote that the leak investigation was only necessary because Trahant didn’t immediately come clean. But at one point Trahant said in court that he had written to the judge asking to meet with her in February, and he hoped to discuss the chain of events involving Hart; yet he had no success, according to a publicly available transcript.

Grabill on Tuesday wrote that the fine would “serve the desired purpose of deterring Trahant and others from engaging in similar misconduct”. Trahant was given 30 days to pay an amount that is far higher than any sanction typically given to lawyers.

Trahant would not comment on Grabill’s reasoning. But in a deposition during the leak investigation, a transcript of which is in the public record, Trahant said he believed he acted as any officer of a court of law should.

“I don’t believe I violated the [confidentiality] order” by alerting a school about a cleric who had previously engaged in misconduct with a teen, the attorney said.

“I’m going to do something about it 10 out of 10 times.”

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Clergy abuse has scarred minority Catholic communities

— Black people in the US have suffered from clergy sex abuse, but ‘it’s an invisible trauma’


An online forum titled “Neglected Voices in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis” discussed the clergy sexual abuse and trauma faced by the victims in the United States Oct. 5.

by Mark Pattison

The image of a white victim does not tell the complete story of clergy sexual abuse in the United States, according to a number of panelists during an Oct. 5 online forum titled “Neglected Voices in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis.”

Blacks have suffered from clergy sex abuse, but “it’s an invisible trauma. It’s an unknown trauma because there are Black victims, survivors, of the sexual abuse crisis,” said Father Bryan Massingale, author of “Racial Justice in the Catholic Church.” “Yet in the Catholic imagination, we usually see a white face — a white male face, overwhelmingly.”

“We as Alaska Native people, American Indian people,” panelist Elsie Boudreau, a Yup’ik Eskimo from Alaska, said, “are statistically number one in all of these different areas of suicide, alcoholism, homelessness, incarceration, childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence, and I know historically and through, you know, with our ancestors, that those are not part of who we are. Those are not our culture.”

“I believe that clergy sexual abuse has played a role in that,” said Boudreau, who herself is a survivor of clergy sexual abuse.

She and others were part of the forum sponsored by Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life.

Dr. Deborah Rodriguez, who herself was abused by a priest and now assists other survivors, said Hispanics are “a people of many histories and cultures. Now we are also people of many vulnerabilities. And think it’s these vulnerabilities that clergy abuse has impacted so directly.”

“Whereas sometimes we Latinos or Hispanics guard family secrets and sins, I believe abusing clerics took advantage of that vulnerability by forcing us to continue in silence to incorporate their sins upon us,” she added.

Maka Black Elk, now the executive director for truth and healing at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, said boarding schools “took children from their families and placed them in these institutions run by federal governments, the Catholic Church and other denominations, (and) really gave predatory priests almost unfettered access to Indigenous children.”

Red Cloud is a former boarding school known as Holy Rosary Indian Mission school until 1969.

A process of truth and healing “starts with the truth,” Black Elk added. “We are not as an institution healing anyone. And, in fact, we are not capable of really doing that. The only thing that we are capable of doing is providing the things that individuals need in order to journey to their own healing.”

He said, “There’s no such thing as sort of collective healing in our work that we have seen so far. We can’t make whole groups of people heal. But what we can do and what we are responsible for and accountable to is providing that truth.”

“It’s going to take every one of us to work on this,” said Deacon Bernie Nojadera, executive director of the Secretariat for Child and Youth Protection at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

There is, he added, an “opportunity to again bring back humility, being able to listen, and to listen attentively, actively, to our brothers and sisters who have been crying and yearning and wanting to have their voice heard.”

Father Massingale, who teaches theological and social ethics at Jesuit-run Fordham University, pointed to realities that he said further marginalize Black abuse victims.

“Many of those in diocesan offices who are charged with ministering to the victim survivor community have not been culturally competent to work with Black people,” he said, also citing “the abandonment of the church in many ways, the closure of parishes in many urban areas.

Further, “Black people are seen as sexually irresponsible — more promiscuous and therefore, their stories are less likely to be believed, because, the understanding is that therefore, you must have contributed in some way” to the abuse, Father Massingale said.

And if “you can’t speak proper English, that is seen as a way of demonstrating your lack of credibility,” he added. “And so the inability to speak standard English already casts your testimony into some kind of doubt.”

Rodriguez said that not only is she a survivor of abuse by a priest in the Catholic elementary school her parents had scrimped and saved to afford, but “I am a survivor of reporting that very abuse as an adult to proper church authorities, which I consider a singular traumatic event as an adult.”

Hispanic victims of abuse can be traumatized when “we can’t speak the language, we don’t understand the legal system or, maybe perhaps our own legal status is at risk and that’s been used against us. But there’s also evil (in) taking advantage of those vulnerabilities.”

Boudreau said during the forum that she was 10 “when the abuse began.”

“And I came forward when my daughter turned 10 and I looked at her and I was like, ‘How is it that someone could take advantage of such innocence?'” she said. “And I couldn’t shield the truth from my consciousness anymore at that point.”

She added, “There are so many other survivors who have not spoken their truth.”

“We have to say this was an injustice, this was wrong, this was a crime,” Rodriguez said. “Admit it. Apologize for it. Be sorry and name it. What Pope Francis started in Canada was only the beginning: that every clergy, every religious leader needs to do: ‘I am sorry.'”

“If anything, with Pope Francis’ encouragement that we indeed be a field hospital and that we indeed smell like the sheep, it’s going to require much work,” Deacon Nojadera said. “This is just the beginning.”

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