Louisiana Voice

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because of the graphic nature of the post below, it may not be appropriate for everyone. Readers are advised to exercise caution.

Several weeks ago, I solicitated information from victims of child sex abuse as residents of group homes for children or at the hands of religious leaders.

One response stood out as particularly egregious. His was a sordid story of sexual abuse by not a single priest in the Catholic church in the heart of Acadiana, but several priests in more than one church in the Lafayette area.

After reading the police report that he filed, some clarification was needed as to whether he was victim number one or was he number two?

Turns out he was victim number one. Victim two in that report was another kid who was about a year or so older than he.

The State Police report says he claimed that Father Gerardus Clement Smit began sexually assaulting him when he was an altar boy at St. Anne Catholic Church.”

That’s in Youngsville, in Lafayette Parish.

According to the police report, the complainant was ten or eleven when Smit, under the guise of “practice for Mass,” began touching the boy’s penis and testicles and inserting his finger into his anus. Again, quoting from the report, the boy said said that his abuse escalated over time to oral and anal sexual intercourse and that he cried during his assaults and experienced rectal pain and bleeding.

The State Police report continued, saying that Smit warned the boy to never tell anyone about his “practices” and further quoted the boy as saying that Smit sexually assaulted other altar boys as well and that he took two other altar boys to a camp off Interstate 10 in Acadia Parish,

So, instead of just two altar boys who were abused, there were several. Only two victims actually reported it. Two of the others committed suicide, the report noted.

He was then quoted as saying that he was taken to Acadia Parish where other priests sexually assaulted him by pulling his hair and “shooting fluids on my body and face” and that Smit continued his assaults for a couple of years until he was transferred “to a hospital to get treated in a facility for priests.” He said that he then pursued Smit “for decades” and that Smit attempted to pay him off with a $10,000 personal check “but it (the check) bounced.”

The trooper’s report alone would have been a difficult story to believe, but there was more, plenty more. There were letters from the Lafayette bishop to the Lake Charles bishop where Smit had transferred before yet another transfer took him to Wilmington, Delaware; a letter to Smit himself from a church official and stories about claims against Smit in the Wilmington newspaper.

And then there was another report from a time that Smit served as a soccer coach for an elementary school. The report said he came upon one of the boys on the team alone in the team’s dressing room and took the opportunity to molest the child who was dressed only in his briefs. Smit pushed the boy down, pulled his briefs off and inserted his finger in the boy’s anus. Smit then forced him to perform oral sex and ejaculated in the victim’s mouth, the report said.

An interrogatory outline submitted as part of a separate report on a canonical investigation was even more graphic and more horrifying than the State Police report. A court document, it described in lurid detail how not only Smit, but other priests as well who may have sexually abused dozens of young altar boys and even one girl at a summer camps near the towns of Estherwood and Mamou

“There were different priests who would go there (to the camp) and brought altar boy groups from other [church] parishes during the summer,” the report said. “There were approximately fifty to one hundred altar boys, both in Mamou and at the Estherwood locations.”

It began with boys being invited to the Youngsville church where Smit would organize games that involved having the boys remove their clothes and compete at push-ups and sit-ups while naked. After a few months, Smit would select two or three boys to take to the Estherwood camp where there were other priests who also brought young boys with them. One of the other priests was from Lake Arthur and two others were from Baton Rouge and yet another from Church Point. One of the priests also brought a young girl along whom the report said was molested for years by Smit who, the report said, may even have impregnated her.

The children slept in one large room. “During the night a different priest would give a talk, organize games and then proceed with molestation,” the report said. One victim, whose name was redacted from the report, said Smit would take groups of altar boys to churches in nearby LeBlanc and Milton, taking only those whom he could trust not to tell their parents about the molestations. He said Smit would take him into a room at the camp and if they objected, he would threaten to tell the boys’ parents.

Altar boys were “switched” to go swimming in the lake with priests where they were again molested, according to court records. The various participating priests would plan which altar boy would be paired with a priest. The priests told the children that they (the priests) were getting messages from God and that when they (the boys) grew up, they would understand. Two of the boys later committed suicide.

When confronted about the allegations by Delaware State Police, Smit’s attorney’s response was, “I thought the statute of limitations had run out on that.”

Finally, in 2002, some 40 years after the incidents described by the victim and State Police, Smit, living in retirement, was officially relieved of the right to act as a Catholic priest.

Nowhere among the 130 Louisiana priests identified by the church as abusers, however, was the name Gerardus Clement Smit.

UP NEXT: A look at how characterizing each archdiocese as a separate entity unto itself protects the Vatican from liability is considered by at least one authority to be a form of corporate fraud.

ON DECK: Think Catholic priests have the market cornered on child abuse? Think again. The Southern Baptist Convention has its own skeletons it would very much like to keep closeted and the Mormons are not exactly lily-pure.