A suspended Indianapolis priest has avoided prison after pleading guilty to a lesser charge in a case alleging that he sexually abused a teenage boy.
A Hamilton County judge sentenced David Marcotte, 35, on Wednesday to one year on home detention followed by 18 months of probation, and suspended his 2 1/2-year prison sentence.
The judge accepted Marcotte’s plea agreement even though the boy’s parents begged him to reject the plea deal, under which the Catholic priest avoids prison and does not have to register as a sex offender, WRTV-TV reported.
Marcotte pleaded guilty last month to one count of dissemination of matter harmful to minors and admitted that he shared lewd images with the boy when he was 14 or 15 about six years ago. Prosecutors agreed to dismiss child solicitation and vicarious sexual gratification charges under his plea agreement.
The victim, now 20, lives in another state and is attending college. In a letter to the court, the young man called Marcotte “the bald-headed pedophile creep in the defendant’s chair.”
Marcotte worked at St. Malachy Church and School in Brownsburg when he allegedly sent the victim inappropriate images and engaged in sexual conduct via social media and video chat apps.
Marcotte was suspended by the Archdiocese of Indianapolis in February 2019, days after the archdiocese said it learned of the allegations. He remains suspended from the ministry, an archdiocese spokesman said Wednesday.
Audit found that priest, who has also been accused of rape, may have misappropriated nearly $400,000.
The Rev. John Asare-Dankwah at St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in New Orleans Sunday, Nov. 10, 2019.
By STEPHANIE RIEGEL
An FBI probe involving the Archdiocese of New Orleans is investigating allegations that the former pastor of St. Peter Claver Catholic Church in Treme who was removed from his post last year after being accused of raping a child years earlier may have misappropriated nearly $400,000 in parish funds.
The archdiocese on Tuesday confirmed that in September 2021, it turned over an audit to federal investigators that identified some $368,682 in questionable payments allegedly made by the Rev. John Asare-Dankwah to himself or on his behalf while he was pastor of the church.
“In the months that followed Fr. Asare’s removal as pastor from St. Peter Claver, financial discrepancies at the parish came to light,” archdiocesan spokesperson Sarah McDonald. After the audit was completed, “the archdiocese turned over the findings in that audit to federal authorities for investigation and continue to assist with this ongoing criminal investigation.”
Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that the FBI was looking into sexual abuse allegations in the archdiocese stretching back decades. The AP said the FBI was focused on whether clergy had taken children to other states to molest them, potentially in violation of the federal anti-sex trafficking law known as the Mann Act.
The archdiocese told the AP that it wasn’t aware “of any federal investigation into clergy abuse.”
A spokesperson for the FBI field office in New Orleans did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The allegations concerning Asare-Dankwah only came to light Friday when a federal judge overseeing the priest’s case — which is related to but separate from the archdiocese’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings — made the audit report public.
Eight former French bishops have been accused of sexual abuse and 3 more of non-denunciation of abuse, the French bishops’ conference said Monday, signaling that some high-level Catholic Church officials not only turned a blind eye for decades but may have been perpetrators themselves.
Among those under investigation was Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, a former head of the French bishops’ conference, who has admitted to abusing a 14-year-old girl when he was a priest 35 years ago.
“I behaved in a reprehensible way,” Ricard, 78, wrote in a confession letter read during a news conference by Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, the current president of the bishops’ conference.
Ricard retired in 2019 after nearly two decades as archbishop of Bordeaux, but he has maintained the title of cardinal. He was appointed this year to temporarily supervise the Roman Catholic Foyers de Charité organization, which was making changes after being rocked by sexual abuse scandals.
Monday’s revelations — which came as church officials met for an annual conference — are “shocking, but not surprising,” said Zach Hiner, executive director of SNAP, a network of church abuse victims.
Some of the accusations were already known, and wherever independent commissions or church officials have looked for evidence of sexual abuse over past decades, they have tended to find cases on a stunning scale.
Last year, a report from an independent French commission found that French Catholic clerics had abused more than 200,000 minors over the past 70 years. The report estimated the number of perpetrators to be at least 3,000.
“One doesn’t get to those kinds of levels without there being significant problems at the very top,” said Hiner, who said abuse accusations against “people at the highest levels of the Catholic Church” have proliferated.
Last year’s independent commission report in France gathered more than 6,000 testimonies, including from victims and witnesses, and several cases were forwarded to law enforcement officials.
Moulins-Beaufort said Monday that at least some of the accused bishops will be or have been investigated by state authorities, along with parallel church investigations. But in cases where the window of prosecution has closed, internal probes are the only options.
Among victims organizations, those internal procedures have prompted calls for greater transparency.
“It can be rather opaque,” said Hiner, criticizing cases in which bishops were punished by the church “but without much information given to parishioners and the public as to why.”
ll of the accused will face either prosecution or church disciplinary procedures
France’s Catholic church on Monday revealed that 11 former or serving French bishops have been accused of sexual violence or failing to report abuse cases, including a cardinal who confessed to assaulting a girl decades ago.
In a shock revelation, the president of the Bishops’ Conference of France, Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, told reporters that some of the high-ranking church officials faced criminal prosecution, or a church tribunal, or both.
Among them is Jean-Pierre Ricard, a long-standing bishop of Bordeaux who was made a cardinal by Pope Francis in 2016, and who had admitted to a “reprehensible” act on a 14-year-old, de Moulins-Beaufort said.
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a priest, I behaved in a reprehensible way towards a girl of 14,” Ricard wrote in a message to the Conference read out by de Moulins-Beaufort.
“There is no doubt that my behaviour caused serious and long-lasting consequences for that person,” the cardinal said, adding that he had since asked the woman for forgiveness.
French bishops are meeting in Lourdes in southwestern France for their autumn conference to discuss ways to improve their communication and transparency regarding historical sex crime allegations against the clergy.
The public confession by Ricard, 78, was received “like a shock” by the bishops, de Moulins-Beaufort said.
Ricard, 78, was bishop in Coutances, Montpellier and finally Bordeaux between 2001 and 2019.
All of the accused will face either prosecution or church disciplinary procedures, said de Moulins-Beaufort, who is the archbishop of the northeastern city of Reims.
He said six former bishops had already been accused of sexual abuse “by the judiciary of our country, or by the judiciary of the church”, one of whom had since died.
‘Serious shortcomings’
Ricard would now be added to that list, as would Michel Santier, who was sanctioned by the Vatican for “spiritual abuse having led to voyeurism involving two adult men”.
Commenting on Santier’s case, Moulins-Beaufort admitted that there had been “serious shortcomings and dysfunctioning at every level”.
Two retired bishops were being investigated by the French judiciary, and were also the target of a church procedure.
The name of one other bishop had been flagged to the authorities, but prosecutors had not yet responded, while the Vatican had curtailed his duties.
One bishop, Andre Fort, was sentenced in 2018 to a suspended prison sentence of eight months.
Olivier Savignac, at the Parler et Revivre association which supports victims of sexual violence, told AFP he was “shaken” by Monday’s revelations concerning a “dizzying” number of bishops.
“So many things are hidden. How many more will emerge?” he asked.
Savignac added: “The church only ever reacts when its back is to the wall.”
Another association, Agir Pour Notre Eglise, who advocates church reform in the face of the accusations, urged the the bishops to come up “clear announcements” by the close of their meeting on Tuesday.
“It is with great sadness that we learn of all this,” Alix Huon, a member of the association.
The church was rocked last year by the findings of an inquiry that confirmed widespread abuse of minors by priests, deacons and lay members of the Church dating from the 1950s.
It found that 216,000 minors had been abused by clergy over the past seven decades, a number that climbed to 330,000 when claims against lay members of the Church are included, such as teachers at Catholic schools.
The commission that produced the report denounced the “systemic character” of efforts to shield clergy from prosecution, and urged the Church to pay compensation to victims.
Ricard retired as bishop of Bordeaux in 2019 but he remains a cardinal, a position usually held for life.
Archbishop of Bordeaux, France, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Bernard Ricard blesses his titular church – Sant’ Agostino – during a ceremony to officially take possession of his church, in Rome, Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006. Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard said on Monday Nov.7, 2022 that he had abused a 14-year-old girl thirty-five years ago and is withdrawing from his functions. The move comes after a report issued last year revealed a large number of child sex abuse cases within the country’s Catholic Church.
Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, one of France’s highest-ranking prelates of the Catholic Church, said Monday that he had abused a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago and is withdrawing from his religious duties.
“Thirty-five years ago, when I was a priest, I behaved in a reprehensible way with a young girl aged 14,” Ricard said in a written statement.
“My behavior has inevitably caused serious and lasting consequences for this person,” he said.
Ricard, 78, used to be the archbishop of Bordeaux, in southwestern France, until he retired from that position in 2019 to serve in his home diocese of Dignes-les-Bains, in the south of the country. In the 1980s, he was a priest in the archdiocese of Marseille.
The announcement was made Monday at a news conference by the president of the French bishops’ conference, Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort.
Moulins-Beaufort said a total of 11 bishops and former bishops, including Ricard, have been targeted by accusations in relation with sex abuse in diverse cases investigated by French justice or church authorities.
Ricard said he had talked to the victim and asked her for forgiveness, without specifying when. He said he was also asking for forgiveness “to all those I hurt” through his statement. He did not elaborate on that.
At times when the French Catholic Church has just started to pay financial compensation to victims of child sexual abuse, Ricard said he decided “not to stay silent anymore about (his) situation” and that he was available for the country’s justice and for church authorities.
The broad study released last year by an independent commission estimated that some 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by priests or other church-related figures in France.
The tally included an estimated 216,000 people abused by priests and other clerics, and the rest by church figures such as scout leaders and camp counselors. The estimates were based on broader research by France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research into sexual abuse of children.
The report described a “systemic” coverup by church officials and urged the French Catholic Church to respect the rule of law in France.
