Louisiana Voice

As one of the oldest, uninterrupted political blogs in Louisiana (13 years and counting), you’re probably aware that we do not have a pay wall limiting our posts only to paid subscribers.

Told once by an influential lobbyist that I was not smart (no mystery there) for not having a paid subscription, I replied that I wanted my stories to be available to anyone who wishes to read them and that furthermore, my stories are rarely, if ever, copyrighted. That means anyone who wants to use what I write is free to do so.

Having said that, I do have expenses. That is why I hold two fundraisers each year for the past five years – in April and October.

This is October and LouisianaVoice is in its second day of that October fundraiser and I am humbly asking for whatever support you feel you are able to provide.

The goal is $7500, which computes to an annual operating budget of $15,000 to cover Internet subscription, gasoline, copies of official documents (courts and state agencies), litigation (when necessary to seek court rulings on public records) and, of course, the time I spend researching and writing fresh, informative stories that you won’t find elsewhere.

As revealed on Tuesday, an original copy of Huey Long’s autobiography, Every Man A King, will be awarded on November 1 to the individual making the largest contribution during our month-long drive. The book, being an original copy as published by the long-(no pun intended) defunct National Book Co. of New Orleans is worth an estimated $100.

Also to be awarded in a lottery drawing is a copy of Leo Honeycutt’s splendid biography of Edwin Edwards. The book is signed by the late four-term governor and the author. All who contribute $100 or more will be eligible to win the book.

Finally, a copy of my new book (actually first published more than a year ago as an e-book, but due out any day now as a physical book), The Mission, will go to everyone who contributes $50 or more (here’s hoping I run out of copies). I think you’ll find the plot twist surprising and more than a little of an eerie coincidence.

Make checks payable to me, Tom Aswell, because I mistakenly set the bank account up not in the name of LouisianaVoice, but my name. The mailing address is 107 North College Street West, Denham Springs, LA. 70726. Or you may pay by credit card by clicking on the oval yellow BUTTON to the right of this post and following the directions.

As always, I am deep appreciative for the support that you, the readers, have provided these 13-plus years.

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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.

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Well, it’s October and that means it is fundraising time, a time that LouisianaVoice comes begging ever-so-meekly for your support.

If you like posts like the one beneath this solicitation, I invite you to support LouisianaVoice with your contribution which, unlike those of Donald Trump, does not contain a sneaky notice that it will be a recurring contribution. IT WON’T. It’s one time – at least until April.

We’re not one of those Internet news services that routinely holds fundraisers for mega bucks for huge reporting staffs. We’re not nearly that big. That’s why we hold only two fundraisers per year – October an April. And we don’t come at you crying out for $100,000 or some such to keep the lights on.

We have a much smaller staff (one) and we’re leaner than the others. We set our goal rather low ($7,500 total) pay expenses (gasoline, Internet, news source subscriptions, public records, etc.).

And this month we’re trying to put a little more zest into our drive by offering book, books and more books in return for your generosity.

We have an anonymous patron who has donated two collectors’ books to be awarded.

First up is an original copy of Huey Long’s Every Man A King, published in 1933 by the National Book Co. of New Orleans, worth at least $100 and it’s to be awarded who contributes the largest amount to our fundraiser by October 31.

Next, we have a copy of Leo Honeycutt’s biography of Edwin Edwards, signed by both the later governor and the author. It will be awarded on a lottery basis to someone who contributes $100 or more.

Then, we have a copy of my book The Mission for anyone who gives $50 – $99. The Mission, at the printer’s as this is written, is about a NASA crew sent on a mission around the sun in earth’s orbit, but in the opposite direction. They unexpectedly discover a sister planet on the far side of the sun orbiting in the same path and at the same speed as earth – so that they never see each other. But this planet is more advanced by several centuries – or it was – until their America equivalent elected a despot who promptly plunged the entire nation and the world into chaos, war and ruin with his corrupt policies.

The NASA crew returns to earth acutely aware of their next mission: to prevent the same thing from happening to the U.S.

There are two ways for you to contribute. You may click on the yellow, oval BUTTON to the right of this post and pay by credit card or you may mail a check to Tom Aswell, 107 North College Street West, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70726. (Please note that checks should be made out to Tom Aswell NOT LouisianaVoice because I inadvertently set the account up that way.

Please provide your mailing address if you want a book.

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Incest is not normally a subject that’s broached in polite circles, especially as it might involve members of the clergy.

But incestuous would seem to be the appropriate description of the mess that is the sexual abuse litigation in the New Orleans Catholic Archdiocese – especially as it pertains to all the legal eagles involved, both directly and peripherally.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, some 550 claimants have now come forward to accuse more than 80 priests of sexual abuse of children just in the New Orleans Archdiocese. Those numbers do not account for the suspected high number of cases that go unreported. Nor do they even come close to the number of sexual abuse allegations that have swept through the Catholic Church from Boston to San Diego, from Alaska to Florida.

But for this post, I’m going to focus only on the New Orleans Archdiocese, second oldest archdiocese in America.

Rather than agree on compensation for the victims, whose demand is now $1 billion (an average of about $1.8 million per claimant), the archdiocese offered $62.5 million (about $113,600 each), putting the two sides nearly $940 million apart, the archdiocese would rather spend some $41 million on legal and professional fees to fight the claims.

And it’s those fees that have caught the attention of observers and which have produced at least one legal filing objecting to some of the legal fees paid by the archdiocese.

It should be worth noting that in May 2020 the archdiocese declared bankruptcy even though it currently has real estate holdings worth something north of $1 billion. Archbishop Gregory Aymond, in filing the bankruptcy petition, notified the Vatican that the archdiocese’s legal exposure did not exceed $7.5 million and that the costs would be borne by the church’s administrative offices and not the apostolates (individual Catholic churches, schools and ministries within the archdiocese). But with legal and professional fees alone already surpassing $41 million – and counting – Aymond reversed his position and in a letter to area churches, informed them that the apostolates would have to bear some of the cost of resolving the litigation after all. He immediately attempted to shift the blame for the burgeoning costs by claiming that expenses to defend the lawsuit far exceeded the predictions of New Orleans law firm Walker Jones, which is representing the archdiocese in the ongoing legal battles.

And, as Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There’s the rub” and you’ll probably need a program to keep up with the players.

• Eastern District of Louisiana Bankruptcy Judge Meredith Grabill quite possibly owes her job to Eastern District Judge Wendy Vitter, wife of former US Sen. David Vitter and, prior to her appointment by Donald Trump to a federal judgeship, worked as legal counsel for – wait for it – the Archdiocese of New Orleans.
• The current archdiocese general counsel? That would be Susan Zeringue, wife of Jones Walker partner Wayne Zeringue.
• Grabill, by the way, succeeded Elizabeth Magner as a bankruptcy judge. Magner is a former Bankruptcy Section partner of another big New Orleans firm, Lemle & Kelleher. She is married to former federal prosecutor and now Jones Walker partner Michael Magner.
• Then there’s Eastern District Chief Judge, Sarah Vance, who is married to Jones Walker Bankruptcy Section Co-Chair Patrick Vance. He shares the co-chair position with Mark Mintz who is actually the lawyer representing the archdiocese in the bankruptcy case. Mintz once taught a course with Grabill.
• And just to add a little spice to this legal stew, the husband-and-wife team of Wayne Zeringue (Jones Walker partner) and Susan Zeringue (legal counsel for the New Orleans Archdiocese) each actually billed the archdiocese for communicating about the litigation – with each other. Wayne, for instance, billed 11.8 hours at $400 per hour in what one observer said amounted to “pillow talk” between spouses.

Soren Gisleson, of Herman, Katz, Gisleson & Cain, is the attorney representing abuse victims who filed a formal objection to many of the fees of Jones Walker, which had an astounding 54 attorneys who have billed the archdiocese for legal work, some at rates as high as $490 per hour. “Sexual abuse survivors have waited more than four years to find a fair resolution while Jones Walker takes as much as it can at their expense,” Gisleson said.

The real indication of just how far the archdiocese is willing to go in order to deny justice for the victims can be found in the controversy swirling around the legislature’s 2021 passage of R.S.9:280.9, the so-called look-back statute which gave plaintiffs additional time in which to file claims. Aymond’s publicly expressed agreement is to not  fight the so-called look-back statute but there was strong lobbying against passage of the bill and once passed, the Diocese of Lafayette, which is part of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, challenged the look-back window in court which was ultimately upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court. The Diocese of Lafayette had a dog in the hunt because of Aymond’s reversal on the apostolates’ being on the hook for a part of any payout.

And despite Aymond’s saying before the Supreme Court’s decision that he was never opposed to the look-back window and that the archdiocese would contribute the same amount of funds toward a settlement regardless of the court’s ruling, Jones Walker continued to bill (57.2 hours, or $21,640) on prescription-related issues, according to Gisleson.

UP NEXT: A look at an individual case in the Diocese of Lafayette and 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.

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