The clergy abuse survivor who successfully pursued a child rape charge against retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker in New Orleans says the local archbishop “should have been sitting right there next to” the serial molester clergyman at his criminal sentencing hearing on Wednesday.
A statement issued by the survivor after the 93-year-old Hecker received a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment Wednesday alluded to how New Orleans archbishop Gregory Aymond has repeatedly expressed a desire in the media to “walk with” the victims of the worldwide Catholic church’s decades-old clergy molestation scandal.
But the survivor, who requested that his name be withheld, took note of how Aymond did not appear at Wednesday’s sentencing, which capped off a legal saga that exposed how the church took steps to hide the truth about Hecker’s abusive past from the public for as long as possible.
“[Aymond] and the archdiocese had the perfect chance” to walk with survivors at a proceeding where two other victims also spoke about the lifelong trauma Hecker’s abuse of them inflicted, the statement said. “But neither [Aymond] nor anyone from the archdiocese showed up to support the survivors.
“Aymond’s words are hollow and false. Aymond should have been sitting right there next to Hecker.”
The archbishop later responded in a statement saying that he as well as the archdiocese hoped and prayed “that the survivors of abuse perpetrated by Lawrence Hecker have some sense of peace in his sentencing”.
“We offer our sincere and heartfelt apologies to the survivors for the pain Hecker has caused them to endure for decades,” Aymond’s statement said in part. He also commended the “bravery” of the Hecker abuse survivors who spoke out against him. And he renewed a promise to meet with clergy molestation victims who wanted once the archdiocese resolves a pending bankruptcy protection case that it filed in 2020 while attempting to manage the fallout of the church’s clerical abuse scandal.
The verbal exchange between the survivor who proved to be Hecker’s downfall and Aymond unfolded after the victim went into gut-wrenching detail about how his life was ruined in 1975 by his abuser and those who then shielded the clergyman from accountability.
In his first time speaking publicly about his ordeal, the survivor testified on Wednesday that he was a teenaged student at New Orleans’ St John Vianney high school – which primarily catered to boys interested in joining the Catholic priesthood – when Hecker befriended him. He was an aspiring athlete at the time and would work out in a weight room fashioned out of a space in the bell tower of an adjacent church colloquially known as Little Flower, which – like St John Vianney – has since closed.
Hecker showed up unannounced in the weight room one day and made small talk with the boy about sports. He suddenly put the child in a wrestling-style headlock until he was unconscious and raped him, according to court filings.
The survivor later told his mother and school officials about the rape. But he said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police. Instead, Calamari threatened the survivor with expulsion unless he underwent psychological treatment for what the school official dismissed as “anger issues and fantasy stories”.
Hecker initially denied those accusations. But in 1999, he did admit in writing to his church superiors that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met through his ministry.
The church then allowed Hecker to return to work before retiring a few years later. The archdiocese then waited until 2018 – nine years into Aymond’s leadership – to finally notify the public that Hecker, Calamari and dozens of their fellow clergymen had been faced with substantial child sexual abuse allegations that eventually drove the organization into bankruptcy.
After Hecker’s unmasking as a child predator, the former St John Vianney student worked with a civil attorney, Richard Trahant, to file a formal complaint with law enforcement about his assault. The case made slow progress until the Guardian and WWL Louisiana began publishing a series of reports on Hecker’s 1999 confession – as well as actions that the church took to hide that disclosure. The outlets managed to publish those reports despite the fact that the bankruptcy thrust most archdiocesan matters under a court-mandated seal of confidentiality.
Ultimately in September 2023, Louisiana state police and the office of New Orleans district attorney Jason Williams obtained a grand jury indictment charging Hecker with child rape and other crimes in connection with the 1975 attack at St John Vianney.
He pleaded guilty on the morning his trial was supposed to start on 3 December. That not only produced one of only a handful of Catholic clergy molestation convictions in recent memory in Louisiana, which is home to about a million of the church’s followers. It also set the stage for Hecker to get his life sentence Wednesday.
Two other victims of Hecker who were prepared to testify in support of the former St John Vianney student had the trial gone forward addressed him Wednesday. One, who has publicly identified himself as Aaron Hebert, dismissed Hecker as “Satan in priest clothing”. The second of those survivors called Hecker “an animal” – while the self-acknowledged child rapist occasionally wept, wiped at his eyes and audibly groaned but declined to apologize.
The former St John Vianney student then testified that his being raped by Hecker negatively affected his personal relationships for the rest of his life – including with his wife and children. “I have zero friends,” he said. “I pushed everyone away.”
And in his opinion, “the archdiocese should be sitting there” in the courtroom with Hecker – “because they are complicit in this as well”.
Supporting that notion was a number of clergy abuse survivor advocates who attended Wednesday’s sentencing and urged authorities to remain committed to a broader investigation spurred by the case against Hecker.
Law enforcement statements sworn under oath as part of the wider investigation explicitly outline suspicions that the archdiocese allegedly ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported” to authorities. But no one other than Hecker had been charged at the time of his sentencing – something advocates would like to see changed.
Richard Windmann of the Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse (SCSA) said being satisfied with Hecker would be “a day late and a dollar short”. “They need to cast that net wider,” Windmann remarked.
“There still are others” deserving of justice, said Jillian Coburn, another SCSA member. “So many others.”
Brian Manix – a survivor of abuse by the late George Brignac, a deacon who was arrested four separate times on child molestation charges and never convicted before dying while awaiting trial in 2020 – said: “It’s a start, but we got a long ways to go. I mean, there’s a lot of hiding – we all know now.”
For her part, Dana LaCombe, the research director of the clergy sex abuse survivor group TentMakers of Louisiana, urged the state police investigator and FBI agent who together pursued Hecker and then widened their work beyond him to “continue the fight no matter the road blocks they come across”.
“Children,” she said, “are worth fighting for.”
