Denver Newsroom, Oct 9, 2020 / 05:40 pm (CNA).- The Archdiocese of New Orleans defended on Friday its handling of a priest who sent text messages to at least one high school student, in violation of archdiocesan policy. An attorney representing the student said the priest’s texts were grooming behavior, and the archdiocesan response put students at risk.
“This man preyed on kids who were at risk, sons who were in need of strong, strong male figures in their lives, and that’s what he gave them,” attorney Bill Arata told CNA Oct. 9, in reference to Fr. Pat Wattingy, who was until July chaplain at John Paul II High School in Slidell, Louisiana.
Wattingy was removed from ministry Oct. 1, after he admitted that in 2013 he sexually abused a minor, the same year he was transferred from ministry at Archbishop Rummel High School outside New Orleans.
Until July, Wattingy was chaplain of John Paul II High School in Slidell, Louisiana.
Arata told CNA that in February 2020, he presented the archdiocese with 50 pages of text messages between Wattingy and students, which he claims were part of a pattern of grooming.
Arata said the texts repeatedly asked a male student when he would turn 18, and that both texts and calls came at inappropriate hours.
“So let me just be blunt. The calls came at midnight, one-o-clock in the morning. If that’s all you knew about a priest communicating with a child, a minor, we could stop there, right?”
“But we don’t. Let’s take it to the next level. No fewer— and I’m not talking about one child, I’m talking about several— but let’s just use a one-child situation. Six, seven times, he wanted to know when the child would turn 18. He brought him special lunches, he invited him to his house in Georgia, he’s sending pictures at Christmas from the house in Georgia,” Arata said.
“Did he mean with his mom? His dad? Maybe his older brother? No, none of those texts went to anybody but the child,” the attorney claimed.
The archdiocese claims that the texts did not contain “sexual references or innuendo” but still violated the archdiocesan policies about communication with youth.
The priest was reportedly admonished by archdiocesan officials to stop sending texts and permitted to remain in ministry at the school. He remained chaplain until he sent additional texts to at least one student and was reportedly sent by the archdiocese for a psychological evaluation.
Arata claims that an archdiocesan attorney acknowledged to him that the texts were grooming behavior, and that the priest began texting just six weeks or so after he was told to stop contacting children.
CNA requested copies of text messages to review, but Arata said his clients had not given him permission to release them to the media.
The school’s principal, Douglas Triche, wrote to parents this week saying that he had not been notified about the inappropriate texts sent by Wattingy. But Arata raised objections to Triche’s claims.
Triche told parents, Arata said, “that he may have heard rumors, but he did not know. Who’d he hear the rumors from? When did he hear the rumors? Why didn’t he act when he heard them? Those are questions I would automatically ask.”
The principal could not be reached by CNA for comment.
Arata told CNA that he believes the archdiocese had reason to be suspicious of Wattingy when the text messages were initially reported.
“The archdiocese has moved him seven times in 26 years. The average contract is five years, right? Help me understand, that’s 3.7 years per place. Why’d you move him? And then they want us to believe that the first time they ever heard of an issue at Rummel was on Thursday, October 1, 2020?” Wattingy asked.
The lawyer also said that he supplied additional text messages from the priest to students after the initial batch in February, and that he was told it was being handled. Then in June, he says he was told the priest was being sent for a psychological evaluation.
The lawyer said that if the text messages to students did not represent a problem, the archdiocese would have had no reason to send the priest for an evaluation. He said sending the priest for an evaluation confirms that the archdiocese knew the texts were not appropriate.
In a statement on Friday, in which New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond addressed the situations of Wattingy and Fr. Travis Clark, a New Orleans priest arrested for filming pornographic videos on an altar, Aymond said that Wattingy would never again serve in public ministry.
Aymond said of the 2013 abuse, “there was no prior accusation and we knew nothing about the abuse before Oct. 1.”
The archbishop repeated his claim that “the texts did not indicate abuse and there was no allegation of sexual abuse. I am sorry for the pain that this has caused.”
After the archbishop released his statement, CNA asked the archdiocese who at the archdiocese had evaluated the texts, and whether the archdiocese considered them to constitute grooming behavior.
“We stand by the assertion that they are not sexual in nature and did not indicate abuse but were a violation of our Technology Policy,” a spokesperson for the archdiocese told CNA.
Arata, whose child is a student at John Paul II High School, told CNA that he and his clients are weighing options regarding the possibility of litigation.
Jonah McKeown contributed to this report.
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
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Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?