A Louisiana attorney whose work helped crack open the US Catholic church’s long-hidden clergy sexual abuse crisis died Thursday morning in suburban New Orleans.
Ray Mouton was 78.
Mouton’s path to becoming one of the earliest and most influential figures in exposing systemic abuse inside the church was deeply personal – and professionally paradoxical. In the 1980s, he was hired by the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, to defend Gilbert Gauthe, a priest charged with raping children.
Mouton successfully negotiated a plea deal for Gauthe to serve a 20-year prison sentence. The case effectively started the US’s reckoning with the worldwide Catholic clergy molestation scandal, though Gauthe was released from prison after just a decade.
In the course of that work, Mouton became privy to secret information that changed the direction of his life: the same diocese paying his legal fees was quietly protecting other abusive priests.
“That realization outraged him,” said investigative journalist Jason Berry, an occasional Guardian contributor who was the first reporter to expose the wider cover-up of pedophile priests. Berry said Mouton became one of his best sources and the driving force behind the journalist’s groundbreaking 1992 book Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
“Ray Mouton was by far the most mercurial, colorful, radically dramatic source I have ever had,” Berry said.
Berry’s reporting in the 1980s laid the groundwork for later investigations into the US church’s abuse crisis, including a Pulitzer prize-winning Boston Globe series in 2002; the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight that the series inspired; and the ongoing, Emmy-winning WWL Louisiana and Guardian series Losing Faith.
Berry said none of that would have been possible without Mouton.
After the Gauthe case, Mouton joined forces with Vatican canon lawyer Thomas Doyle – a former priest – and psychologist Michael Peterson, who had been treating abusive clergy, to write a 95-page internal warning to church leadership in 1985.
The document is a complicated relic. It warned that the church was facing billions of dollars in abuse claims – even back then – and offered strategies for meeting the crisis head-on while still protecting the hierarchy from the stench of individual priests’ crimes.
At the same time, it cautioned bishops that continued secrecy and denial would only deepen the crisis – and that it would expose the church to catastrophic moral and legal consequences.
“In this sophisticated society,” the report warned, “a media policy of silence implies either necessary secrecy or cover-up.”
But church leaders “failed to respond”, Mouton would later tell the CBS News program 60 Minutes II. He told the program that that left him with “a feeling of horror”.
Mouton also said the experience permanently changed him.
“I have no belief in the Catholic church – none,” he remarked. “It’s all gone. I went too many places. I saw too many things.”
For the last two decades of his life, Mouton lived with his wife, Melony, in a small mountain village in France near the Spanish border. There, he wrote the novel In God’s House, a fictionalized account drawn from his efforts to expose institutional abuse in the US Catholic church.
Despite living halfway around the world, Mouton closely followed continuing investigations into clergy abuse, a crisis that has since driven more than 40 Catholic organizations in the US into federal bankruptcy court, where they have collectively agreed to pay more than $2.6bn in settlements, according to information compiled by Pennsylvania State University’s law school.
Among those organizations is the archdiocese of New Orleans, about 135 miles (215km) east of Lafayette, which – along with its insurers – recently agreed to pay $305m to roughly 600 clergy abuse survivors.
Mouton provided quiet but vital support to a successful effort in Louisiana to eliminate filing deadlines for lawsuits seeking damages over childhood sexual abuse, which exponentially increased the size of the settlement that the New Orleans archdiocese ultimately offered survivors.
“I don’t think he wanted a lot of credit,” Mouton’s son, Todd, said. “If anything, he died upset that we still have these challenges 40 years later.”
Furthermore, his younger brother Henry would send messages from Ray reacting to WWL Louisiana’s and the Guardian’s Losing Faith series, which has captured abuse survivors’ renewed anger that many of the same patterns of concealment have persisted.
Todd Mouton said his father loved rock’n’roll and attending the running of the bulls at the annual San Fermin festival in Pamplona, Spain, just across the Pyrenees from where he lived. Ray Mouton returned to Louisiana for treatment after being diagnosed with cancer more than a year before his death.
He was at Ochsner medical center in the New Orleans suburb of Jefferson when he died.
Above all on Thursday, Todd Mouton wanted to celebrate his father’s legacy fighting for the voiceless victims.
“He was a crusader in a very unlikely effort,” Todd said. “It all unfolded in real time for him. He learned things he didn’t want to learn, but that can be any of us at any time where you have to stand up and do the right thing.”
