WWL Louisiana, Tegna’s CBS affiliate in New Orleans, aired a series of reports about Lawrence Hecker, an admitted pedophile priest, detailing some of his actions and the archdiocese’s leaders’ reactions to them.
The reports, “Losing Faith”, are the work of David Hammer, a WWL investigative reporter, and Ramon Antonio Vargas, a journalist with the Guardian.
Hammer and Vargas have done dozens of “Losing Faith” reports about the church sex abuse crisis in Southeast Louisiana, Hammer says. “Nobody else has been able to report on this,” he says.
Their most recent “Losing Faith” reports aired on WWL in late April when the pair got a hold of an extraordinary eight and half hour video deposition of Hecker from 2020, and a written confession by Hecker from 1999. “Nobody else has been able to report on this,” he says in reference to the video deposition.
That prompted Hammer and Vargas to confront Hecker at his residence, confession in hand.
“I did this 18-minute interview with him in August,” Hammer says. In the exclusive interview, Hecker admits to everything that was in written confession from 1999, Hammer says.
“I asked him specific questions about the stuff that’s in the written confession,” Hammer says. “He admitted it and then says that it was the sexual revolution and he was caught up.”
Two weeks after that interview, Hecker was arrested and charged with rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature, and theft from an incident that allegedly happened in a church in 1975, Hammer says.
That incident was reported to church officials at the time, but nothing was ever done about it, Hammer says.
Hecker received an honorary, Vatican-bestowed title of monsignor in 2000, even though he already confessed to molesting several children he met through his ministry.
Hecker, in sworn testimony given 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 says about the veil of secrecy used to shroud his acknowledged abuse, according to WWL.
Hammer says the reporting by Vargas and himself is intending to “hold the church’s feet to the fire and get them to acknowledge that these things were ongoing. There were way more of these credibly accused priests than they were willing to acknowledge.”
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