Self-acknowledged serial child molester and retired Roman Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker pleaded guilty on Tuesday morning in New Orleans to kidnapping and raping a boy in the mid-1970s, the Guardian reports. The 93-year-old is scheduled to receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment on December 18 in New Orleans’s state criminal courthouse, where it has been rare for a Catholic clergyman to be charged – much less convicted – in connection with the church’s decades-old clerical molestation scandal. Hecker’s attorney, Robert Hjortsberg, said on Tuesday that his client “took responsibility for the charges … and now everyone involved will have the opportunity to move forward”.
The victim in the case maintained that he was an underage student at a Catholic high school to which Hecker had ties when the priest choked him unconscious and raped him in about 1975. The accuser reported telling his school principal about the rape, which unfolded in a space in a church bell tower that had been converted into a weightlifting room. But the accuser has said the principal, Paul Calamari, never alerted police and instead arranged for him to undergo psychological treatment. Hecker initially denied those accusations. But in 1999, he did admit in writing to Catholic church leaders in New Orleans that he had molested or sexually harassed several other children whom he met through his ministry. New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese nonetheless allowed Hecker to return to work before he retired a few years later. The archdiocese then waited until 2018 to finally notify the public that Hecker – along with Calamari and dozens of their fellow clerics – had been the subject of substantial, credible child sexual abuse allegations that eventually drove the institution to file for bankruptcy protection in 2020.
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