— Pope Francis spoke with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and their supporters for years before letting priests bless same-sex couples. But the move’s timing also owed something to its conservative opponents.
In March 2021, as stunned L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics grappled with a Vatican document approved by Pope Francis that ruled against blessing same-sex unions, one of his confidants, who is gay, says they spoke on the phone.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor who had befriended the pope over years of conversations, says that Francis, who had just returned from Iraq, gave him the sense that the Vatican “machine” had gotten ahead of him in the ruling; it stated that God “cannot bless sin.”
But he says Francis “acknowledged that the buck stops with him. I got the impression that he wanted to fix it.”
For Mr. Cruz, who visited Francis for his 87th birthday over the weekend, and for many L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, Francis did just that this week. He signed off on a major declaration by the same Vatican office on church doctrine that had issued the negative ruling two years before.
The new rule allows priests to bless same-sex couples as long as the blessing is not connected to the ceremony of a same-sex union, to avoid confusion with the sacrament of marriage. While the declaration does not change church teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” it is a concrete sign of acceptance for a portion of the faithful that the church has long castigated.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a sexual abuse survivor from Chile who befriended the pope.
Now, as liberals celebrate and same-sex couples begin receiving public blessings, some are wondering why the pope delivered the groundbreaking rule now, more than a decade after he started his pontificate with a resoundingly inclusive message on gay issues. “Who am I to judge?” he famously said in 2013, when asked about a priest rumored to be gay.
People who have talked to him over the years and Vatican analysts say Francis’ thinking evolved through frequent private conversations with L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and the priests and nuns who minister to them.
It was a long process, filled with fits and starts, but also the result of a gradual reorganization of the church by Francis, including the recent appointment to top jobs of like-minded churchmen who were amenable to the changes. The death last year of his conservative predecessor freed the pope’s hand, experts say, but they also believe that the overreach of Vatican antagonists — who sought to box Francis in — played a part, backfiring spectacularly.
“Like anyone, he learns from listening,” said Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, who has met frequently with Francis, a fellow Jesuit, and talked to him about the need to better recognize these members of the church.
Speaking this week, Father Martin would not divulge the content of those meetings over recent years, though he noted they had become “longer and longer.” During the most recent conversation in October, around the time of a major church assembly, he said that Francis “encouraged me, as he always does, to focus on the individual, to focus on the person, to focus on the pastoral needs.” The new document, he said, “is very much in line with that, that approach.”
Rev. James Martin, a prominent advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics, gave a blessing this week after the church ruling.
Francis DeBernardo, the executive director of New Ways Ministry, a Maryland-based advocacy group for gay Catholics, said he also met with the pope in October and sensed a similar opening to a change. Among the others at the meeting, he said, was Sister Jeannine Gramick, an American nun who has ministered to L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics for a half century and was censured by Francis’ predecessors. Mr. DeBernardo said they met with Francis for 50 minutes and talked about blessings.
“Out of the blue, he said, ‘You know, what gets me most upset are priests who chastise people in the confessional, who reprimand them,’” Mr. DeBernardo recalled. It is that instinct, to emphasize pastoral welcoming over “giving litmus tests for orthodoxy,” that he sees as key to the new document.
The Vatican and the office responsible for the declaration did not reply to requests for comment about specific meetings or the decision-making process behind the document.
In his decade as pope, Francis has filled L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with hope. He made a point to congratulate Sister Gramick and encourage her work. He met with and ministered to transgender Catholics himself and counseled gay couples on the upbringing of their children. He said homosexuality should not be criminalized and supported civil unions. And he recently made it clear that transgender people can be baptized, serve as godparents and be witnesses at church weddings.
But he also frequently confounded L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics with mixed messages, making it difficult to tell where Francis, for all his inclusive language, actually stood.
After the 2021 ruling against blessings, many of Francis’s liberal supporters note that he immediately sought to distance himself from it. They argue that it was rammed through without the pope’s understanding its full import or that he allowed it to go forward only under pressure from the doctrinal office, an explanation that top conservative cardinals mocked and that members of the office at the time said was simply not true.
Throughout, Francis kept talking to gay Catholics and their advocates, even as he had to weigh tensions on the left and the right that could affect the future of the church.
In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders, and bishops in Belgium have even published guidelines for blessings at same-sex ceremonies, something the new declaration prohibits. But in conservative African nations, where the church sees its future, opposition to gay rights and unions is fervent.
Already there have been some signs of revolt, with the conservative publication The Catholic Herald reporting that Archbishop Tomash Peta of Saint Mary in Astana, Kazakhstan, had sent a letter prohibiting his priests from performing blessings for same-sex couples, calling the declaration a “great deception.”
Same-sex couples participating in a public blessing ceremony in front of Cologne Cathedral in September. In Germany, where the church is liberal, priests have been blessing gay unions against Vatican orders.
But as Francis has aged, and ailed, he seems to be in more of a hurry to finish remaking his church.
In January last year, he fired the doctrine office’s No. 2 official, Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, who was widely considered responsible for the 2021 document, sending him to a small Italian town. (Archbishop Morandi did not return a request for comment.) In July, the pope then reorganized the office, appointing a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, as its chief.
“Finally after 10 years of pontificate, Francis was able to appoint a cardinal that responds to his vision of the church,” said Mr. Politi.
Sandro Magister, another longtime Vatican expert who thinks that Francis’ unilateral decisions are undercutting his professed belief in a church governed by consensus, agreed that Cardinal Fernández was key, as was the death of the pope’s predecessor, Benedict XVI.
“After Benedict died, Francis has started to dare,” he said. Had Benedict remained alive, he added, Francis would never have made Cardinal Fernández watchdog of the church’s doctrine, a position Benedict held for more than 20 years.
Early in his tenure, Cardinal Fernández, loathed by conservatives, indicated that the question of gay blessings was likely to be examined again. It didn’t take long for conservatives to test him, and Francis.
Francis appointed a close adviser and fellow Argentine, Víctor Manuel Fernández, to lead the church’s doctrine office.
Over the summer, Cardinal Raymond Burke — an American and the de facto leader of the opposition to the pope — and other conservatives sent a letter to Francis asking for a definitive answer on the blessings. The 2021 document seemed to give them a precedent, and an advantage.
Then they made their demand for clarification public just before a major October assembly of bishops and laypeople that was expected to tackle such sensitive topics. It seemed like a clear warning shot to Francis and his doctrine office.
Cardinal Fernández responded by publishing Francis’ private response. While the pope clearly upheld the church position that marriage could exist only between a man and a woman, he said that priests should exercise “pastoral charity” when it came to requests for blessings, a seeming reversal of the “cannot bless sin” ruling.
Francis seemed to have opened the door a crack. Then, this week, Cardinal Fernández burst through it.
In his introduction to the new rule, he cited the pope’s response to Cardinal Burke as a critical factor in the ruling. It provided, he wrote, “important clarifications for this reflection and represents a decisive element.”
In other words, the conservatives kept pushing for an answer, and they got one.
“Let us remain vigilant,” Pope Francis said Thursday in his traditional Christmas greetings to members of the Curia, the bureaucracy that runs the Vatican, “against rigid ideological positions that often, under the guise of good intentions, separate us from reality and prevent us from moving forward.”
As a Jesuit priest for more than two decades, the Rev. James Martin has bestowed thousands of blessings — on rosary beads, on babies, on homes, boats, and meals, on statues of saints, on the sick, on brides and on grooms.
On Tuesday morning, Damian Steidl Jack, 44, and his husband, Jason Steidl Jack, 38, stood before Father Martin in a living room on Manhattan’s West Side. The couple, running a bit late because of subway delays, dressed casually. Damian, a floral designer, complimented Father Martin on the pine smell of the Christmas tree.
In keeping with the Vatican’s admonition that such a blessing should not be performed with “any clothing, gestures, or words that are proper to a wedding,” Father Martin wore no robes, and read from no text. There is no blessing for same-sex couples in the thick book of blessings published by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. Instead he selected a favorite of his own from the Old Testament.
“May the Lord bless and keep you,” Father Martin began, touching the two men’s shoulders. They bowed their heads slightly, and held hands.
“May the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his countenance to you and give you joy and peace.
“And may almighty God bless you,” he said, making the sign of the cross, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.”
And then, with emotion evident on their faces, the three men hugged.
Damian Steidl Jack, left, and his husband, Jason Steidl Jack, on their wedding day at Judson Memorial Church in the West Village in 2022.
Father Martin is arguably the highest-profile advocate for L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics in America. He has met frequently with Pope Francis about making the Roman Catholic Church more inclusive, and in the fall he participated in a global gathering on the church’s future at the pope’s invitation.
On Tuesday morning, he was far from the halls of power. He was at home, making history. Father Martin had waited years for the privilege of saying such a prayer, however simple, out in the open.
“It was really nice,” Father Martin said on Tuesday, “to be able to do that publicly.”
The pope’s decision was greeted as a landmark victory by advocates for gay Catholics, who describe it as a significant gesture of openness and pastoral care, and a reminder that an institution whose age is measured in millenniums can change.
The decision does not overturn the church’s doctrine that marriage is between a man and a woman. It does not allow priests to perform same-sex marriages. It takes pains to differentiate between the sacrament of marriage — which must take place in a church — and a blessing, which is a more informal, even spontaneous, gesture. And, a priest’s blessing of a same-sex couple should not take place in connection with a civil marriage ceremony, it says.
News of the pope’s decision spread quickly among gay Catholics, many of whom began preparations for blessings of their own after the busy Christmas season.
On the morning of the pope’s announcement, Michael McCabe’s husband, Eric Sherman, ran into his home office in their apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, bursting with news: Their 46-year partnership could at last be blessed.
“You wait so long for the church to come around, you kind of give up hope,” said Mr. McCabe, 73, who attends Mass every Sunday at the Church of St. Francis Xavier in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.
Michael McCabe, left, and Eric Sherman at their home in Queens, New York. The two have been together for 46 years, and are looking forward to being blessed by a priest in the new year.
The couple married in 2010 in Connecticut, before same-sex marriages became legal in their home state of New York. They had long been resigned to the church’s stance, even if they had not fully made peace with it, Mr. McCabe said.
“I know that myself and my relationship with my husband are good things,” said Mr. McCabe, who taught catechism to first graders at the church.
Although the pope’s decision stops short of recognizing Mr. McCabe’s marriage, he said he could only find the joy in the news. After rejoicing with his husband on Monday, he emailed his priest. They plan to receive a blessing early in the new year.
It wasn’t immediately clear how different priests across the country would respond to the pope’s invitation to bless gay couples. The announcement gives individual priests latitude and encouragement to offer the blessings, but does not require them to do so. Gay couples living in more liberal dioceses may be more likely to find a willing priest than those living in conservative dioceses. In Chicago, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, a close ally of Pope Francis, issued a statement saying that in his archdiocese, “we welcome this declaration, which will help many more in our community feel the closeness and compassion of God.” Many other bishops have remained mum so far. Conservative critics have said the pope’s move essentially encourages priests to bless sin.
“I’m sure many old bishops are open to this, and many young priests will have to be convinced,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Villanova University, noting that young Catholic priests in the United States are overwhelmingly conservative.
In New York City, where a handful of progressive Catholic churches have been on the forefront of welcoming L.G.B.T.Q. parishioners, but have stopped short of marrying them and sanctifying their unions, the news from the Vatican was just as exciting for some priests as it was for their parishioners.
“I say it is about darn time,” said the Rev. Joseph Juracek, pastor of the Church of St. Francis of Assisi in Midtown, who believes the church is finally aligning with Jesus’ teachings: “This is what he is all about: That God is for all people.”
While many Catholics celebrated the pope’s decision, others felt it was too little, too late. Some L.G.B.T.Q. people who left the church years ago, feeling unwelcome, said it was a half-measure that would not tempt them to return.
Thomas Molina-Duarte, 37, a social worker in Detroit, was an active member of his local Catholic parish for many years. But when he and his husband married, they had to do so in an Episcopal church, and they eventually joined a “home church,” where they gather with a small group to do close readings of texts from the Bible.
“I welcome the news, but it’s not going to make me come back to the church,” Mr. Molina-Duarte said of the pope’s decision. “We’ve found a community of other people that we felt we could bring our full selves to.”
In New York City, Damian and Jason Steidl Jack, who were married last year, had previously discussed the possibility of a blessing with Father Martin, a longtime friend of Jason’s. When Father Martin texted on Monday afternoon and asked if they wanted a blessing, they leaped at the offer.
“God’s grace is at work in our lives, whether the Vatican issues an announcement or not,” said Jason, an assistant teaching professor of religious studies at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn and an advocate for gay Catholics. “But we are eager for the support of our communities and of our pastors who look after us.”
Walking back to the subway from Father Martin’s Jesuit community residence, Jason and Damian said the blessing he had given them felt both ordinary and profound.
“It’s one grace of many,” Jason said. They were a part of history, and they were also on their way to meet Damian’s mother at Walmart to shop for Christmas groceries.
“It’s like you said,” Jason told his husband, “It’s like we’re claiming our space.”
As he reached the end of his 41-year life, Kevin Portier had endured child rape at the hands of a southern Louisiana Catholic priest for whom he had served as an altar boy; a highly publicized trial that sent the clergyman to prison for the rest of his days; and the trauma associated with those experiences.
But one of Portier’s harshest ordeals came within his final two years alive. Representatives of the church that he had been raised to believe in approached him at his home, at his job and at a relative’s funeral to ask him to lend his support to efforts to secure an early release for his rapist, Robert Melancon.
“I don’t know what the real deal is,” Portier wrote in a fall 2017 email seeking answers from leaders of his local diocese, who didn’t realize until later that the people lobbying for Melancon’s release were actually church officials about 60 miles away in New Orleans. “And [it] doesn’t matter. All that matters now is I will not be lied to by the Catholic church.”
It’s unclear whether Portier, before his death in the spring of 2019, ever learned exactly who was trying to engineer an early release from prison for Melancon. But records that the Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans has fought to keep hidden show the city’s archbishop Gregory Aymond – while not even being in charge of him – furtively sanctioned legal maneuvers that, if successful, would have prematurely freed Melancon from what Portier considered to be a just punishment.
Meanwhile, one of the attorneys who played a key role in the campaign to free Melancon, VM Wheeler III, would himself later be convicted of molesting a child – an act of abuse that occurred years before, but that was not reported to authorities until after he joined New Orleans’s Catholic clergy as a deacon.
An obituary photo of Kevin Portier.
The records in question make clear that the effort to free Melancon involved overtures by affiliates of the archdiocese of New Orleans to the highest levels of government: to the warden of the prison where the convicted rapist was incarcerated, to the director of Louisiana’s department of corrections, and to the state’s governor himself.
It brought tension between New Orleans’ archdiocese and its smaller counterpart in Louisiana’s Houma-Thibodaux region, which administered the church where Portier served and met Melancon. After learning an early release for Melancon was a possibility, the bishop of the Houma-Thibodaux diocese told his New Orleans colleagues that he did not support it, regardless of arguments that the convicted rapist deserved it because he was enfeebled at the time.
Ultimately, Melancon died in prison in November 2018 at age 82, as Portier had wanted, before his own life ended about 18 months later.
Nonetheless, the saga of Portier’s pain vividly demonstrates how actions undertaken by the archdiocese of New Orleans in private often do not match its public pledges of empathy for survivors of its decades-old clerical abuse crisis.
The US’s second-oldest Catholic archdiocese, under Aymond’s leadership, declared bankruptcy in 2020, saying it was the most fair way for the organization to make whole hundreds of people abused by its clerics while allowing the church to continue carrying out its intended mission of sharing the gospel.
“The healing of victims and survivors is most important to me and to the church,” Aymond wrote in a letter to the approximately half-million Catholics in the New Orleans area shortly after the bankruptcy filing.
The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy after paying $11.7m in out-of-court, abuse-related settlements during a 10-year period beginning in 2020. The proceeding has now cost the archdiocese nearly $34m in legal and other professional fees; remains unresolved; and therefore has not yet resulted in any compensation for those with pending abuse claims.
Records that lay out the efforts to free Melancon are not publicly accessible because of a secrecy order from a judge that took effect shortly after the archdiocese declared bankruptcy. The Guardian obtained them through a law enforcement source.
Other confidential records obtained and reported on by the Guardian have established that the archdiocese over the last several decades has gone to extremes to shield abusive clergymen as long as possible – including the handful of ones convicted of or charged with crimes by authorities armed with subpoena powers that can pierce the church’s protection.
New Orleans church officials in a prepared statement maintained: “Archbishop Aymond had no role in requesting or advocating the department of corrections for the temporary release of Robert Melancon for medical reasons in accord with the department’s health care policy. Archbishop Aymond initially considered allowing Melancon to be housed at [an archdiocesan-run nursing home named] Wynhoven under certain conditions but ultimately decided against allowing Melancon to live in an archdiocesan facility.”
The records surrounding the effort to free Melancon – temporarily, if not permanently – stopped short of describing him as terminally ill at the time. Yet the church’s statement also sought to characterize a letter that Aymond sent to Melancon expressing support for an early release as “a corporal work of mercy” consistent with the archbishop’s “pastoral ministry to a dying prisoner”.
Portier’s father, Wilson Portier, said in a brief interview that he was generally aware there had once been efforts to free his son’s rapist from his life sentence. Yet he said he was stunned to learn those had been carried out in part by another convicted abuser – as well as endorsed by Aymond, who wasn’t even technically Melancon’s boss.
“Everybody’s got a right to a lawyer,” Wilson Portier said of those who had backed an early release for Melancon. “But they’ve got to live with their conscience that they knew – they already knew – he had abused somebody.”
‘Leaving it in God’s hands’
Portier pursued rape charges against Melancon at a time when most of the public could not grasp that clergymen were capable of sexual abuse.
It was late June 1995 when police arrested Melancon on accusations that he had raped Portier for several years beginning when he was eight, in about 1985. Several more years would pass after Melancon’s arrest before the 2002 Catholic clergy abuse scandal in Boston’s archdiocese opened the world’s eyes to priests and deacons who were child rapists – and their supervisors who enabled them.
Portier said Melancon began raping him almost immediately after he became an altar boy at Annunziata church in Houma, Louisiana. Melancon was the pastor there. Portier was 18 and Melancon nearly 60 when police made an arrest in the case.
An anonymous donor posted a $500,000 bond for Melancon to be out of police custody while awaiting his trial. The trial occurred about a year later, which is a relatively fast turnaround in Louisiana’s often sluggish criminal justice system.
Local media coverage captured the climate that greeted Portier. Supporters of Melancon insinuated that he had been unfairly targeted for political and religious persecution because the local top prosecutor’s father was Jewish.
By that time, the Houma-Thibodaux diocese had paid Portier $800,000 to settle litigation stemming from his abuse. It was not the church’s practice to pay that kind of sum if it believed someone was lying. Yet Portier faced accusations from defense attorneys that his only motivation to come forward against Melancon was greed.
In taking the witness stand against Melancon, Portier testified that he had gone ahead with the criminal trial despite having received his settlement because he didn’t want his abuser to rape again.
“I feel I would have the peace of mind – the peace of mind that he won’t do this to anyone else,” Portier said.
Portier’s testimony received a significant boost from another witness who testified that Melancon had recruited him to be an altar boy and molested him for several years. For that torment, the witness said he got a $30,000 payment from Melancon’s superiors.
Newspaper image of convicted rapist and priest Robert Melancon in 1996.
The jury hearing the case against Melancon deliberated fewer than two hours before finding him guilty of aggravated rape. As a result, Melancon was handed a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment.
Though the jurors’ brief deliberations suggested they strongly believed Portier, Melancon vehemently maintained his innocence. He told the judge presiding over his sentencing: “Your honor, I am innocent of these trumped-up charges that have been brought against me.”
He later wrote in gratitude to a college journalist who had penned a column expressing skepticism of Portier, highlighting some inconsistencies between his testimony during the criminal trial and the civil litigation. Melancon thanked Michael Heinroth, saying: “My faith in the justice system as well as my faith in my church has almost disappeared.”
Melancon also wrote that Heinroth’s favorable take on his defense salvaged at least some of his flagging faith in the news media.
“I still have a difficult time believing all this is really happening,” Melancon wrote to Heinroth, who acknowledges learning a lot more about the nature of the Catholic clergy abuse crisis since writing his student newspaper opinion piece challenging Portier’s credibility. “A young man of questionable character … tells an outrageous allegation [about] me … and not only the jury, but many others believe it!”
Portier was much more reserved in his response to the verdict against Melancon. He declined to discuss his case in public, and his only remark to the Louisiana newspaper the Advocate was: “I’m leaving it in God’s hands.”
‘No threat to public safety’
Melancon had been imprisoned for more than two decades when the New Orleans attorney VM Wheeler III sent a letter, on 19 July 2016, to the warden of the Homer, Louisiana, correctional center where Portier’s convicted rapist was housed.
About two years later, the archdiocese of New Orleans ordained Wheeler as a deacon. Months before his death in April, Wheeler pleaded guilty to indecent behavior with a juvenile after being accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy two decades earlier.
A mugshot of VM Wheeler III after he was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy.
All of that was still ahead for Wheeler when he reached out on behalf of Melancon. At that moment, he argued in favor of an early release for the priest because of a new state prison policy meant to benefit certain infirm incarcerated people.
On the letterhead of the influential New Orleans law firm where he worked at the time, Chaffe McCall, Wheeler listed Melancon’s various maladies, including hypertension, type II diabetes, an enlarged prostate and coronary artery disease.
“We believe that, given his medical condition, Melancon poses a low risk of danger to himself or society and no threat to public safety,” Wheeler wrote to the warden.
Adding that the imprisoned clergyman was “permanently and irreversibly wheelchair and bed bound”, Wheeler said the plan was to place Melancon in an archdiocesan-run assisted living facility in the New Orleans suburb of Marrero if he were granted a medical release.
Wheeler wrote that Melancon would not be anywhere near any “sites of congregation for juveniles”, though a Catholic elementary school would have been about a half-mile away.
A week later, the pastor of the Metairie, Louisiana, church where Wheeler would later be assigned as a deacon wrote a letter to Aymond.
Andrew Taormina’s missive mentioned the new state prison policy, which could have led to an early, medical-related release for Melancon. It mentioned that the warden of the prison where Melancon – Taormina’s former classmate – was being kept had already given encouraging news.
The warden, Jerry Goodwin, “has expressed his opinion that Bobby will qualify for this temporary (and perhaps permanent) release to a nursing facility”, Taormina wrote to Aymond. To give him the best shot possible, Taormina added, Aymond would need to approve the plan to move Melancon into the Marrero nursing home, colloquially known as Wynhoven.
Gregory Aymond, the 14th archbishop of New Orleans, after his installation mass held in the St Louis Cathedral in New Orleans on 20 August 2009.
“We are told that things could go very quickly for Bobby if he qualifies for ‘furlough’ release,” Taormina wrote.
A stamp on Taormina’s letter shows Aymond’s office received it. Handwritten notes on the document read: “Will it be announced? … Will victims be notified? … Cost who will absorb?”
At the beginning of 2017, Taormina sent another pair of letters: one to Louisiana’s piously Catholic governor, John Bel Edwards, and one to his secretary of corrections.
Taormina’s letter to both argued that Melancon’s various health problems made him eligible for at least a temporary medical furlough that he could spend at Wynhoven. The transfer would both prevent Melancon’s health from continuing to deteriorate in prison and save the state some money as it grappled with a strained budget, Taormina wrote.
“We have met with Archbishop Gregory Aymond, and he is open to Father Melancon ultimately being housed at Wynhoven,” Taormina asserted in his letter to Edwards.
In his separate letter to the corrections secretary, James Le Blanc, Taormina said he hoped to obtain letters of support from the sheriffs and district attorneys of the parishes – Louisiana’s term for counties – where Portier had been abused and where Wynhoven was located.
In August of that same year, Melancon – whose priesthood had not been stripped from him – sent a pair of handwritten notes directly to Aymond.
One was to complain that the bishop to whom he reported, Houma-Thibodaux’s Shelton Fabre, had instructed him to stop celebrating mass in prison as a priest because he was prohibited from doing so given his conviction.
Melancon – who at the time was purportedly bed-bound, if his supporters were to be believed – did not appreciate being called out for his masses in prison. “This man rebukes me for answering God’s call,” Melancon wrote to Aymond. “All I did [was] feed God’s people with the bread of life. No one will take that joy from me – not even a bishop.”
In the other note to Aymond, which was dated a few days earlier, Melancon said he understood that Taormina was scheduled to have a meeting in Baton Rouge – Louisiana’s capital – about his appeal for an early release from prison.
“I asked Our Lady to guide them to make a positive decision,” Melancon wrote, referring to the Virgin Mary. He added that he had heard “nothing” from Fabre’s diocese and complained that he felt as if he had been “tossed aside like a used candy wrapper”.
Aymond sent one reply to Melancon in between the dates of his notes.
“Dear Bobby,” Aymond’s note said in greeting. “I join you in the prayer to Our Lady to guide those regarding your appeal to make a positive decision. We leave such things in the hands of the Lord and pray for His compassion and for justice.
“I am sorry that you feel tossed aside by some in the church. Be assured of my deep respect for you, appreciation for your many years of ministry and for your life of faith that you continue to live now.”
‘I’m going to let it rest’
While few Louisianans knew of the clandestine efforts by some in the church to help Melancon win an early release from prison, Portier learned of them by September 2017 because some of the disgraced clergyman’s supporters had personally approached him. Portier reported as much in emails to the Houma-Thibodaux diocese.
The emails collectively described a private investigator showing up at Portier’s home near Houma – in the area where he had been abused and where he still lived – “with an old priest … from … New Orleans”. He also said the church had somehow found time “to send attorneys” to intercept him at his home, at his job while he was on the clock, and as he attended his uncle’s funeral.
The visitors were “trying to get the priest that raped me out of jail”, Portier wrote.
“I know the old priest also went to the district attorney’s office and asked them to file a petition for end of life release” for Melancon, Portier added.
Portier warned his local diocese: “Please … inform all of [your] legal representation that the next time they show up at my home or family event I will press charges for harassment.”
An emailed reply from the Houma-Thibodaux diocese to Portier established that he soon spoke with the local liaison for clergy abuse victims, who previously had worked in Aymond’s administration. The email from the liaison – Carmelita Centanni – to Portier made clear “that the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux is not involved in any way in any effort to get Robert Melancon released from prison”.
A burst of other written communication around that time shows that the Houma-Thibodaux bishop Fabre spoke with Aymond and wrote to Taormina, who turned 87 in July.
In a letter to Taormina, Fabre stopped short of accusing him of being the “old priest” from New Orleans whom Portier described. Fabre also described being informed by a local journalist that both “an unnamed priest [and] unnamed bishop” had recently gone to the local district attorney “to speak about the possibility of getting Robert Melancon released from prison”.
But Fabre – who has since become the archbishop of Louisville, Kentucky – also didn’t accuse Taormina of being the priest who visited the DA. He only wrote: “If you are not the priest referenced and you know who [he] is, then I would appreciate knowing his name so that I can contact him and share my very serious concerns about the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux being perceived as participating in this effort in any manner.”
The campaign for Melancon to be freed from prison fizzled out there, by all indications.
Melancon has been accused of additional sexual violence as recently as August, when a woman filed a claim in the New Orleans archdiocese’s bankruptcy case accusing him of abusing her when she was 13.
The woman, who is seeking damages, said Melancon fondled her genitals and forced oral sex with her on multiple occasions in his car while it was parked outside churches and down the street from a fair, among other settings.
Her complaint said her abuse began in the late 1960s, when Melancon reported to the New Orleans archdiocese because the Houma-Thibodaux diocese had not yet been founded. The claim was filed past a key bankruptcy deadline, but the woman said she hadn’t learned about the date until recently. So she requested special permission to pursue her claim, which remains unsettled.
Melancon died in prison of natural causes on 5 November 2018. Coincidentally, that was three days after Aymond published the first version of a list of priests and deacons who had ministered in New Orleans and were considered credibly accused of child molestation – a roster meant as a gesture of transparency and solidarity for abuse victims.
That list did not name Melancon, though a similar one released later by the Houma-Thibodaux diocese did.
Melancon’s death brought no closure to Portier, who never received an apology from his rapist.
“When a child is hurt like that, it never, ever goes away,” Portier told The Times of Houma/Thibodaux after Melancon’s death. “It is always there.
“I don’t know how a man of God would not try to close that, to go to his death without forgiveness.”
Furthermore, those campaigning for Melancon’s release had triggered Portier’s anxiety over his rape in a major way, his father said.
“He was on edge all the time that [Melancon] was going to get out and come back and get him,” Wilson Portier said. “His mental state was always locking the windows and making sure the door was locked. He called in the middle of the night [worried] somebody was trying to get into his house and stuff like that.”
Portier said his son had tried to treat his trauma by working with therapists. Kevin Portier was still in the middle of that fight when his father said he died of a heart attack on 23 March 2019, leaving behind his parents, his brother, his sister-in-law, a niece and a nephew to grieve.
Wilson Portier listened silently to some of the supportive words Aymond, Taormina and Wheeler wrote on behalf of his son’s rapist. Asked if there was any response he wanted to put on the record, he replied: “Well, I got a lot to say about it but I’m not going to say anything.”
Referring to his late son and the man who raped him, Wilson Portier said: “I’m going to let it rest – because they’re both dead, right?”
From left to right, Barbara Hart of Grant & Eisenhofer, Rob Jenner of Jenner Law, and David Lorenz, director of the Maryland chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, are seen at a news conference about efforts seeking the release of a sealed report on abusive clergy in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
Attorneys for several men who say members of the clergy in the Archdiocese of Washington sexually abused them in Maryland decades ago defended on Friday the new law that allowed them to sue the Catholic Church: The Child Victims Act.
The filings from plaintiffs’ lawyers respond to a legal challenge from the Washington diocese last month, with the church’s attorneys arguing Maryland’s child victims law is unconstitutional, and that the men’s lawsuits, filed in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, should be dismissed as a result.
Archdiocese attorneys contend the legislature granted defendants immunity from child sex abuse lawsuits after the victim turns 38, when it expanded the statute of limitations to that age in 2017. They argue their legal protection stems from a rare provision in the law known as a statute of repose, which created “vested rights” that lawmakers cannot simply change.
Lawyers for the victims in the lawsuits disagree.
In their filing Friday, attorneys for a man who sued the Washington diocese in Montgomery County said the diocese’s lawyers’ interpretation of the law runs afoul of “well-settled principles set forth by the Maryland Supreme Court.”
“Applied here, those principles demonstrate that the law at issue here is a statute of limitations, which the General Assembly is free to modify under Maryland’s constitution,” wrote attorneys Robert K. Jenner, Philip C. Federico and Steven J. Kelly, all of whom are representing the man suing in Montgomery Circuit Court.
The Friday filings spelled out the differences between statutes of limitations and statutes of repose.
The only other known statute of repose in Maryland is in the construction industry, according to experts. In that context, it protects the likes of builders and architects from liability related to injuries sustained in their structures after a certain amount of time passes following completion.
Under the statute of repose, the clock for claims starts ticking when the building is deemed operational. It doesn’t matter when someone is injured.
With a statute of limitations, the law starts counting the period a person has to file a lawsuit from the time they sustain an injury.
That distinction, plaintiffs lawyers argued Friday, supports the position that the 2017 law was a statute of limitations.
“Very simply, the timeline does not begin to run until a child is sexually abused,” wrote the legal team behind the Prince George’s County lawsuit, a half dozen attorneys from the Baltimore law firms Schochor, Staton, Goldberg and Cardea, P.A. and Janet, Janet & Suggs, LLC.
The back-and-forth filings cut to the heart of a legal battle that likely won’t be resolved until the state Supreme Court determines whether the child victims law is constitutional.
Anticipating an immediate challenge in court, legislators last spring included a provision in the law, which took effect Oct. 1, allowing for a mid-lawsuit appeal. The appeal comes at a common stage of civil litigation where defendants ask the court to throw out a lawsuit on legal grounds.
Typically, when a trial court denies a motion to dismiss a lawsuit, the case proceeds toward trial. While plaintiffs almost always can appeal if a judge decides to throw out a lawsuit, the Child Victims Act specifically allows the defendant to appeal if a judge rules it’s constitutional and that the case should go to trial.
The impact of the legal proceedings in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties is being felt around the state: Judges, facing the prospect of going ahead with lengthy litigation based on a law with questions looming over its constitutionality, are likely to freeze those cases until the state’s high court decides on the Child Victims Act.
A class action complaint, the lawsuit in Prince George’s County alleges three men were sexually abused as children at the Catholic schools or churches they attended in the suburbs of Washington. The men “have suffered serious and permanent physical, emotional, and financial injuries,” because of the abuse. They say the Archdiocese either knew, or should have known, about its priests’ predatory ways.
In the Montgomery County lawsuit, a man says he suffered “horrific” sexual abuse while attending a church in Gaithersburg as a child at the hands of two priests, including one with a well-document history of abuse.
Because of the abuse, the man “experienced significant anguish, culminating in a mental breakdown,” the Montgomery County lawsuit said. “In addition to extreme emotional distress, he has experienced physical sickness and dramatic weight loss.”
The Baltimore Sun does not name victims of sexual abuse.
The Archdiocese of Washington denied allegations raised in both complaints in the legal filings where they argued the child victims law was unconstitutional.
In their filings Friday, the plaintiffs’ lawyers cited a report from Maryland’s Attorney General documenting decades of abuse and torture of children by clergy in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Laying out the findings of a four-year investigation, the report released in April detailed evidence of 156 clergy and other church officials abusing at least 600 children dating to the 1940s.
The General Assembly passed the Child Victims Act shortly after the report became public.
Maryland’s legislature “acted well within its power to remedy a societal ill of enormous proportions,” the legal team behind the Prince George’s County lawsuit wrote.
“The legislature established, as the public policy of Maryland, that sexual predators, their accomplices, and their facilitators must be called to account in civil court for their actions,” the lawyers wrote. “Moreover, by eliminating the statute of limitations, the General Assembly recognized the psychological injury and other obstacles that have long prevented victims from coming forward.”
Plaintiffs lawyers said Friday that Maryland courts have determined that policy considerations can be helpful in determining whether a law is a statute of limitations or a statute of repose.
“Quite simply, the legislature could not have intended to provide a special and exceedingly rare legislative privilege — a statute of repose — in favor of every person and organization charged with protecting a child from sexual abuse but who failed to do so,” the lawyers behind the Prince George’s lawsuit wrote.
Even if the 2017 law granted the church and other entities immunity from civil actions stemming from decades old child sex abuse, those legal protections would not extend to the archdiocese’s “longstanding and extensive cover-up.” The lawsuits in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties allege the archdiocese’s actions amounted to “fraudulent concealment,” meaning the lawsuits might be able to proceed even if 2017 provided some immunity.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in Aotearoa New Zealand has received several reports of clerical sexual abuse and church-based abuse from victims and survivors in the Catholic Diocese of Palmerston North.
SNAP invited the new Catholic Bishop of Palmerston North, John Adams, to get to know the survivors’ network. However, Bishop Adams responded: “I had a look at your Facebook page. I was shocked to be honest at the level of vitriol I found there, indeed an almost complete lack of charity.”
Bishop Adams then emphasised protecting his clergy instead of supporting the victims: “Surely Catholic clergy have a right to both the just scrutiny, and the protection of the law.”
SNAP is disappointed that Bishop Adams judged the survivors’ network by Facebook comments rather than by the official SNAP website or personal conversations with network members.
SNAP reports that Bishop Adams also asked for “assurances” from the network before he would offer support. It is not clear what the Bishop meant by “assurances,” however when asked to clarify, he did not respond.
SNAP reports that one of the biggest concerns when dealing with clerical sexual abuse is that those who bear the ultimate responsibility, who are obliged to support the victims, often blame the victims rather than the abusers.
SNAP canvassed some of its members for responses to Bishop Adams’ comments. The Bishop’s claim that the victims “lack charity” was especially upsetting. “What an unfair reaction, accusing survivors of lacking charity and using that to not support us,” one survivor said. Other responses SNAP received from its members are:
“The Bishop expects people who are carrying life-shattering trauma memories to speak in soft delicate tones.”
“If anyone dares to say how upset and angry they are about being sexually assaulted by a priest, then he calls that vitriol?”
SNAP reports that if Bishop Adams is judging the survivors’ network by comments people leave on the network’s Facebook page, then he also needs to look at Catholic Facebook pages around the world. He will then see that there are some “nasty and vindictive things” said on them too.
SNAP is aware that the Catholic Church in New Zealand has safeguarding standards which include listening to the abused. Bishop Adams’ reaction to an invitation to get to know a survivors’ network and support the abused, appears to be a violation of those safeguarding standards.
National leader for SNAP in Aotearoa New Zealand, Dr Christopher Longhurst stated in response to Bishop Adam’s comments:
“I think it is appalling that any church leader would criticise any victim of clerical child sexual assault or any church-related abuse, accusing them of a lack of charity, or asking for assurances before supporting them. This betrays an utter ignorance around trauma-informed response. Victims and survivors have suffered enough. They deserve unconditional support from all members of the church. Their anger is perfectly justified. It is the lack of charity from church leaders such as this bishop that is shocking.”
National leader for SNAP in Australia, Mr Donald McLeish, also responded to Bishop Adam’s comments:
“They do not realise the pain they have caused and continue to cause. I have no answer but to not expect support when it is not there. The bishop is saying, providing we stop the criticism he will cooperate. We cannot do that while the criticism is warranted.”
