As he walked into New Orleans’ historic St. Louis Cathedral in early January 2000 to receive the honorary, Vatican-bestowed title of monsignor, veteran Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker had already confessed to molesting several children he met through his ministry.
Hecker had been flown out of town and driven by limousine to a psychiatric facility which diagnosed him as an inveterate pedophile. He had been forced to take a monthslong sabbatical, to begin the week after his promotional ceremony at a cost to the archdiocese of $6,000. And he had already spoken personally to the archbishop of New Orleans at the time and his predecessor about the child sexual abuse allegations against him.
And yet, sworn testimony Hecker gave at a deposition in 2020 shows key higher-ups in the New Orleans Catholic Church went ahead with the ceremony and let him continue his ministry for another two decades.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker said about the veil of secrecy and charity used to shroud his acknowledged abuse.
Hecker said the archbishop who presided over his 2000 promotion – the late Francis Schulte – told him he regretted sending his name to his superiors in Rome to be elevated to the position of monsignor shortly before the priest confessed to being a serial child abuser.
“Archbishop Schulte told me – he said – ‘If I had known of this, I would not have sent in for your promotion,’” Hecker testified. “’I would not have asked for you to be a monsignor.’”
But to borrow one of Hecker’s favorite words when discussing his past, Schulte and his colleagues “evidently” got over it. First, they went through with conferring the distinction of monsignor upon Hecker, with approval from the late Pope John Paul II. And then, Schulte’s successors as archbishop – Alfred Hughes and the incumbent Gregory Aymond – went on to ignore a previously hidden recommendation from an official church review board calling on them to oust Hecker from the priesthood.
As a result, Hecker avoided being publicly exposed as a predator for nearly two decades. He was also able to collect tens of thousands of dollars in assistance from the US’ second-oldest archdiocese before at last facing a meaningful consequence: a grand jury indictment in September that charged him with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes.
The investigation which produced those charges has since evolved into an inquiry over whether members of the archdiocese – in Hecker’s case and others – operated as a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement,” according to a bombshell search warrant that Louisiana state police troopers served on the church in late April.
During the 2020 deposition, an attorney for a number of Hecker’s abuse claimants asked the priest whether he felt fortunate that he had managed to elude being criminally charged for so long after the truth about him had started to trickle out. Hecker replied: “I don’t think that was even thought about at the time.”
The 8.5-hour deposition offers the most complete accounting yet of the lengths to which an organization serving a region with about a half-million Catholics went to shield Hecker. He gave the testimony for a civil lawsuit seeking damages from him and the archdiocese.
The plaintiff in that lawsuit, Aaron Hebert, has publicly alleged that he was an underage altar boy at a church in Gretna, Louisiana, in the late 1960s when Hecker lined him and other children up against a wall, ordered them to drop their pants and fondled their genitals. The archdiocese’s May 2020 bankruptcy protection filing automatically put a halt to a wave of abuse-related lawsuits that included Hebert’s, but his legal team – led by Richard Trahant – got special permission to privately question Hecker under oath.
Lawyers for the archdiocese have repeatedly gone to court to oppose public access to that deposition. But WWL Louisiana and the Guardian collaborated to obtain video of Hecker’s testimony, along with hundreds of pages of evidentiary exhibits.
The session over two days in December 2020 provides an unprecedented look at how Hecker, now 92, evaded accountability for most of his life. That glimpse comes and he and his accusers wait to see whether a judge agrees with a psychiatric opinion that Hecker is not mentally competent to stand trial on rape and kidnapping charges.
Hecker’s testimony was enlightening even as he avoided answering many questions by invoking his rights against self-incrimination under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. He did so a staggering 117 times – or about once every four minutes.
Neither attorneys for Hecker nor the plaintiff immediately commented on the deposition.
In written answers to detailed questions, an archdiocesan spokesperson said the church stood by how Aymond handled complaints against Hecker and referred questions about his predecessors to living members of their administrations.
The church also maintained that it properly reported Hecker to law enforcement and district attorneys across southeast Louisiana, despite the fact that a 2002 letter notifying New Orleans police about him failed to mention his confession three years earlier, among other omissions.
Long history of molestation allegations
The deposition covered allegations dating back to the 1960s – shortly after his career began – by more than a dozen Hecker accusers. Yet it’s unclear how many more people have claims against him, including in the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case. Hecker pleaded the Fifth Amendment when Trahant asked him, “You have committed so many sexual felonies against children that you can’t remember them all, correct?”
For decades, Hecker testified, his superiors did not take those victims or their advocates seriously, even in the rare instances when they promised a vigorous investigation.
He said Hannan confronted him in 1988 with allegations from the parents of a boy accusing Hecker of molestation in the late 1970s. Hannan then flew Hecker to a paid sabbatical in New York City, church documents show. There, Hecker took classes at Fordham University while he lived and worked at a Bronx church named St. Mary’s.
Church records presented at the deposition show that a high-ranking New York Archdiocese official wrote to Hannan asking him to vouch for Hecker. And records show Hannan wrote back saying Hecker had permission to be in New York – without mentioning child sexual abuse at all.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker testified. Hecker’s comment prompted his criminal defense attorney Eugene Redmann, who was present for the deposition, to exclaim, “Wow!”
Another complaint in 1996 by the mother of three boys prompted Schulte’s top aide to confront Hecker, who admitted taking showers, swimming in the nude and sleeping in the same bed as some boys, according to documents referenced in the deposition. Yet Hecker insisted that he stopped short of inappropriate contact with any of those children, and the archdiocese dismissed the complaint as unsubstantiated.
Promotion, confession, diagnosis, reinstatement
A fresh complaint was filed against Hecker in October 1999, about a month after Schulte announced that Hecker would be promoted to monsignor at the beginning of the following year. On Nov. 4, 1999, Hecker provided a typed statement to the archdiocese in which he acknowledged “overtly sexual acts” with or harassment of multiple children.
Soon after, Hecker said a limousine driver delivered him to a psychiatric clinic near Philadelphia where he was evaluated over the course of a few days. The clinic concluded Hecker was a pedophile who “takes little responsibility for his behavior” and recommended that he refrain from ministering to “children, adolescents or other vulnerable individuals.”
In the deposition, Hecker took pains to avoid admitting his official diagnosis. Trahant established that the archdiocese withheld Hecker’s treatment records for the session. But Trahant had medical insurance coding records – and he directed Hecker to read the code for his diagnosis as well as say what it meant.
Hecker balked. He told his attorney, “This seems like a trap,” before finally acknowledging the numerical code referred to pedophilia.
Hecker returned from getting his diagnosis, accepted his promotion to monsignor and then went on another forced sabbatical – this time to San Antonio.
Hecker had to resign his position as pastor from a church in Terrytown, and in a letter that he issued to his congregants, he attributed the break to physical fatigue and “aging.”
Thomas Rodi – who is now the archbishop of Mobile, Ala., but at the time was an aide to Schulte – signed off on an invoice authorizing a $6,000 payment to cover the sabbatical. Deposition records suggest at least some of that money went to cover $35-an-hour therapeutic massages, although Hecker denied getting more than one.
When Hecker returned, Schulte assigned him to St. Charles Borromeo church in Destrehan, which has a grammar school attached to it. Copied on the letter informing Hecker of his new assignment are Rodi and Aymond, then upper-level Schulte lieutenants, now among the highest-ranking Catholic church officials along the Gulf Coast.
Rodi didn’t respond to a request for comment. A New Orleans Archdiocese spokesman said Aymond, then a vicar general and auxiliary bishop, had no administrative role overseeing Hecker at the time.
Hecker at his deposition said they didn’t limit his authority at St. Charles Borromeo, but the pastor there was supposed to keep an eye on him. Pressed on whether the pastor could effectively do that, Hecker said:
“Frankly, obviously he couldn’t watch me … every moment. No.”
Hecker defended the archdiocese’s decision to let him resume his clerical career despite his confession and the two abuse-related sabbaticals he’d already been forced to take. “You know, like I did a good job,” Hecker said. “Any time I was asked to do something, you know, I cooperated and so on.”
Keeping it quiet
Hecker retired with full benefits in 2002, just when a clerical abuse and cover-up scandal in the Boston archdiocese hit a fever pitch.
New Orleans’ archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, had come from Boston – an attorney general’s report published later said he helped “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse there.
A review board in New Orleans advising Hughes on managing local fallout from the Boston crisis urged him to laicize Hecker, according to documents provided for the priest’s deposition.
Laicization would have ejected Hecker from the clergy and demoted him to a member of the laity. At his deposition, he admitted he likely would have forfeited lucrative retirement benefits if Hughes had followed that recommendation, which has never before been reported and which Hecker said he only learned about from Trahant’s questioning.
But Hughes ignored that recommendation.
He instead wrote to Hecker to order him not to dress as a priest or celebrate masses in public anymore. Hecker showed his displeasure in a letter back to Hughes.
“If I never dress as a priest, fellow priests and family members will almost certainly talk about it and before long the word would be out,” Hecker wrote.
The archbishop said he would be “happy” for Hecker to work as a volunteer at the archdiocesan archives, where workers could “dress informally.” That way, no one would find it odd that Hecker was not dressing as a priest anymore.
The late monsignor Raymond Hebert, who once served as the archdiocese’s director of clergy, put it even more pointedly.
“Our only concern is that someone in (Hecker’s) past might decide to go public,” Hebert wrote to another top Hughes aide in 2000.
Hecker confirmed to Trahant that the archdiocese by then was invested in keeping his various misdeeds under wraps – whether acknowledged or just alleged.
“We all, you know, didn’t want big publicity or anything,” Hecker said. “Oh, yes.”
As an example, Trahant called attention to a 2002 letter that attorneys for the archdiocese – who reviewed the organization’s clerical personnel files – wrote to the New Orleans Police Department. It was ostensibly meant to notify officers of accusations against Hecker.
But that letter only mentioned a single person’s allegations against Hecker, including a purported crime that happened out of state, outside the agency’s jurisdiction. The letter made no mention of Hecker already confessing to several abusive acts, and police made no move against him.
An archdiocesan spokesman said, “Archbishop Hughes is responsible for reporting Mr. Hecker to law enforcement,” and referred questions to the retired archbishop emeritus. Hughes did not respond to requests for comment.
What Archbishop Aymond knew
Aymond succeeded Hughes as archbishop in 2009. Even though the church continued to suppress the reason for Hecker’s retirement seven years earlier, allegations kept flowing in.
A 2011 memo written by a nun serving as Aymond’s victim assistance coordinator informed the archbishop that “Larry” – Hecker’s nickname – “was known among … boys as a predator”. The memo told Aymond that Hecker once spoke of wanting “to put the past behind him” in a conversation with Hebert in 1996, but he “nevertheless continued to perpetrate through 1997.”
No additional details are available in the deposition exhibits, and the archdiocese said this week it has not further details about those allegations. But the memo contradicts repeated claims that Hecker had stopped abusing in the 1980s – assertions he made to both the archdiocese and the psychiatric facility that diagnosed him with pedophilia.
At Hecker’s deposition, Trahant asked him if he knew the archdiocese had paid more than $30,000 for his treatment from a local social worker, with many of the payments being approved by a top Aymond aide, Vicar General Pat Williams. Hecker said he wasn’t.
Hecker also spent part of his deposition saying he was mostly unaware about abuse complaints against him that came in under Aymond’s watch, costing the archdiocese at least $332,500 in out-of-court settlements during a 10-year period beginning in 2010.
Those agreements were among more than 130 abuse-related settlements that the archdiocese paid out in the decade before it declared bankruptcy. Many were negotiated by the local church’s general counsel from 2012 to 2019, Wendy Vitter. The US Senate confirmed Vitter as a federal judge in 2019 after she was nominated by then-president Donald Trump.
In a strange moment during the deposition, Hecker described receiving an instruction – from someone he swore he could no longer remember – to never contact Vitter under any circumstances. He didn’t elaborate on why he thought that was, but in addition to her legal career, Vitter is known for being married to former US Sen. David Vitter.
A federal judiciary spokesperson said Vitter was unsure who had instructed Hecker not to speak with her – or why.
Ultimately, acting in part on advice from Vitter, Aymond decided to include Hecker on the first version of 57 clergy credibly accused of molesting children or vulnerable adults. That list has since grown to include nearly 80 names. But Hecker’s deposition revealed some of how reluctantly the archdiocese did that.
Just 11 days before that list came out in early November 2018, the archdiocese fielded a new complaint accusing Hecker of spending a weekend in the early 1970s molesting a boy he met at a high school, records mentioned at the deposition show. The accuser alleged that he had tried to report Hecker earlier to a well-known priest named William Maestri, who at various points has been the archdiocese’s spokesperson and its superintendent of parochial schools.
The complainant “was not impressed” with the response from Maestri, whose name is misspelled as “Maestre” in the deposition records.
“Yes, we heard stories about things like this,” Maestri reportedly said, according to a written document provided for the deposition. “We did move him around but eventually had to retire him.”
The complainant reportedly said that he wanted to see Hecker’s name on the credibly accused list, which the church had already announced would be released soon. But before that, Aymond spoke openly about how difficult it would be to determine exactly who would merit inclusion on the list.
And, in an email to Aymond, a top aide says he told the complainant it “might not be possible” to include Hecker on the list. When asked about that, the archdiocese said that aide, Victims Assistance Coordinator Stephen Synan, was not involved in creating the list.
Hecker charged with rape
Hecker’s entry on the 2018 credibly accused disclosure makes no mention of how many separate accusations of child molestation he has faced. It says the first allegation reported against Hecker arrived in 1996, apparently ignoring the one Hannan addressed with him in 1988.
“That is not true, is it?” Trahant asked Hecker at the deposition. Despite initially resisting answering the question, Hecker replied: “Yeah. Evidently, that must be an error.”
The archdiocese says it has no record of any complaint made to Hannan in 1988, despite Hecker’s confession and testimony that it existed.
After the list’s release, archdiocesan officials sought to assure parishioners that Hecker for years had been restricted from presenting himself as a priest – much less saying mass.
But at his deposition, Hecker recounted how during the last 18 years he had presided over masses for residents at a priests' retirement home where he had lived.
He even detailed how Aymond himself went to a mass and brunch there in July 2019, breaking bread with Hecker and at least two other priests on the credibly accused list, confirming a long-held rumor that offended clergy molestation survivors and their advocates.
“Yes, I’ve been celebrating the mass there,” Hecker said when asked if he had served as an officiant at the retirement home. Asked if archdiocesan higher-ups were aware, Hecker said, “Yeah, they knew.”
An archdiocesan spokesman said church law allows priests to continue saying mass in private without a “congregation.” But Tom Doyle, who served as staff canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, DC, said in cases like Hecker’s, he cannot say mass for more than himself and perhaps an altar server.
Eventually, though, Hecker’s inclusion on the 2018 roster kicked up the heftiest ramification for him. A member of the US military went to law enforcement and reported that he was a teenager in 1975 when Hecker, a staff member at his high school, strangled him unconscious under the guise of teaching him a wrestling move, and then sodomized him.
The archdiocese waited until it received a subpoena from the local district attorney’s office to turn over Hecker’s complete personnel file in June 2023. Three months later, a grand jury empaneled by the DA charged Hecker with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted of every charge, he would receive mandatory life imprisonment.
At the 2020 deposition, Trahant asked Hecker whether he had raped the victim at the center of the one criminal case ever opened against him.
When asked about those allegations last year by WWL and the Guardian, Hecker flatly denied choking out and raping anyone. But when asked under oath, he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights for one of the final times of the marathon deposition.