So the next year, Gauthe was assigned extra duties. He became chaplain of the diocesan Boy Scouts. Any pedophile would have whooped, and Gauthe took full advantage.
The Scouts, as their just-released "perversion files" prove, shared the Catholic Church's determination to shield criminals, sacrificing the innocence of young charges in a doomed attempt to maintain a wholesome public image.
Louisiana always figured prominently in the scandals that engulfed both institutions nationwide. Gauthe was the first to be unmasked in the endless succession of predatory priests who enjoyed years of episcopal protection.
After Gauthe pleaded guilty in 1985, and was sentenced to 20 years in the state pen, Rev. Kenneth Doyle, spokesman for the U.S. Catholic Conference in Washington, said: "We don't want to give the impression that it's a rampant problem for the church, because it's not."
Then, New Orleans journalist Jason Berry, who covered the case, wrote a book predicting years of turmoil and multimillion-dollar court judgments against the church. You know who got that one right. The buggers were rampant for sure.
We can't say whether Bishop Frey at the time doubted the wisdom of consigning Boy Scouts to the care of a known pedophile, but news reports did offer plenty of clues.
In 1976, four adult Scout leaders were arrested in New Orleans for running a troop where underprivileged boys were recruited for sexual exploitation. It was the movement's first high-profile sex scandal in America.
The
Scout leaders -- Raymond Woodall, Richard Stanley Halvorsen, Harry
Cramer and Lewis Sialle -- were all sentenced to prison in 1977. At the
same time parents of Gauthe's victims found out what he was up to, and
filed complaints with diocesan officials.
Frey, in what we were soon to
discover was the standard response of the church throughout the country,
merely moved Gauthe to another parish, where he continued his unholy
ministry until he was suspended in 1983 after aggrieved parents filed a
lawsuit.
"Louisiana always figured prominently in the scandals that engulfed both institutions nationwide."
Louisiana can thus fairly claim to have been the bellwether in the tribulations that beset the church and the Scouts in the past few decades. It is no coincidence that Gauthe evidently felt at home in both.
He had no known connection, however, with New Orleans Troop 137, which hit the national headlines while he was preying on the youth of Lafayette.
What was known at the time as the "Boy Scout sex case," netted 17 arrests, and Troop 137 was identified at the trial of its leaders as "the nucleus of a nationwide sex and pornography ring, with boys recruited into the troop sent to other states for the pleasure of men there."
Troop leaders would recruit underprivileged boys and ply them with gifts so they could be prepared for sleepovers and naked pool parties.
The "perversion files" reveal that Scout authorities have been reluctant to report abuse to the police, or to the parents of victims, and the parallel with the Catholic church is obvious. But these are not the only institutions inclined to cast a veil over their own sins.
It has happened at other churches, at schools and, famously, at Penn State too. Right now the BBC is being savaged in the press over there for hushing up evidence that one of its stars, a DJ and TV host called Jimmy Savile, was as much of a weirdo as his peroxided hair and suits of many colors suggested.
Savile died before it came out that he spent decades taking advantage of young girls in the care of charities for which he raised millions, copping a knighthood.
So it is not only in Louisiana or America that the instinct was to dummy up.
The Scouts and the church have both professed contrition, so, with any luck, there will never be another Gauthe.