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The New Orleans Roman Catholic archbishop, Gregory Aymond, has apologized to a group of survivors who have claimed they were abused by clergymen as children.
“I know you have been through a lot of pain,” he said on Thursday in a federal courtroom while looking directly at survivors Tim Trahan and Richard Coon.
Aymond was in court as part of a five-year-old bankruptcy protection case for his church.
“It’s embarrassing to me that someone would take advantage of children sexually. Please accept my personal invitation to meet with you personally,” he said.
Trahan, who has been pushing to add one of the two priests he alleges abused him to the church’s credibly accused list, said he accepted Aymond’s apology.
“I hope the apology was sincere. I believe it was sincere,” Trahan said. “It looked almost like he was walking on a plank and had to say something, but I appreciate it. I wanted to hear that and it takes guts to apologize, so that was a step in the right direction.”
Aymond took the stand and testified under oath to support the church’s $230m settlement with about 625 survivors who claim they were abused as children by priests, deacons or other church employees.
Bankruptcy court judge Meredith Grabill now must decide whether to approve the plan as both fair to survivors and other creditors and also something that will allow the church to continue operating.
“This is a real opportunity to rebuild trust,” she said from the bench.
“It’s going to be difficult to continue our mission; it will be a challenge,” Aymond said. “It’s what we can afford to pay the survivors and still continue our mission.”
But Aymond deflected pressing financial questions from an attorney representing the church’s bondholders, who alleged the church committed securities fraud by backing out of agreements to pay investors interest for purchasing $41m in church debts in 2017. Aymond said he deferred to a council of financial advisers.
The bondholders oppose the plan because they argue the church isn’t using enough of its money to pay them. But an expert also testified that the 600-plus survivors’ claims are worth about $1.2bn, meaning a $230m settlement would only pay them about 20 cents on the dollar.
Another key part of the plan is non-monetary – what the church promises to do to keep children safe in future and investigate new claims of abuse.
Aymond said many of those provisions were already in place. But he declined to answer questions from WWL Louisiana about previous efforts to weed out abusers, which failed to keep deacon and serial abuser George Brignac from returning to a church lector position and leading school programs as recently as 2018 – or priest Paul Hart from being installed as chaplain of New Orleans’ Brother Martin high school despite him admitting to sexual contact with a 17-year-old student.
