In the case of serial child molester and retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, the cover-up failed.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying by a coalition of high-ranking church officials and sympathetic judges, who prioritized the predator’s comfort above justice for his innumerable victims until the evidence against him was so overwhelming that – rather than stand the humiliation of a public trial – he pleaded guilty last Tuesday.
The 93-year-old’s decision not only saddled him with an automatic life sentence. It also exposed how Catholic bureaucrats in Hecker’s home town of New Orleans, one of the church’s strongholds in the US, repeated the same sins that produced an eerily similar scandal in Boston two decades earlier – events later immortalized in the Oscar-winning film Spotlight.
This is the only conclusion to draw from years of reporting and studying the church files, court records, legal proceedings and and law enforcement documents outlining the campaign of terror to which Hecker subjected so many children raised in one of the most reliably Catholic regions remaining in the US.
Files held by New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese establish that Hecker was molesting children virtually immediately upon his ordination in 1958. Chronologically speaking, one of Hecker’s earliest victims was a preteen altar boy who described attending nude swimming parties with the priest – gatherings that would culminate in sexual assaults by the attacker.
Hecker eventually instructed that boy to bring a box containing a feather to a particular fellow priest at another nearby Catholic school and church. In short order, the second priest sexually attacked the boy – and the victim said he came to realize Hecker had used the feather to mark him as vulnerable to molestation.
Unsurprisingly, Hecker’s superiors became more than aware of his crimes. Accusations against him piled up at each of the major milestones in the US church’s reckoning with Catholic clergy sexual abuse, which began in the 1980s when Louisiana priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in criminal court to molesting several boys.
Around that time, then New Orleans archbishop Philip Hannan received a child molestation complaint against Hecker. Hannan’s response – carried out in private – was to fly Hecker to a sabbatical in New York City before letting him return to work once things back home cooled off.
Hellbound and Down 