US archbishop secretly backed bid to free priest convicted of raping child
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023...lic-church
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023...lic-church
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
