Church abuse case haunts lawyer who defended priest

• Gilbert Gauthe was born in 1945 in the small Louisiana town of Napoleonville
• Before he turned 30%2C he had become a priest and started molesting young boys in southern Louisiana
• Lawyer Ray Mouton knew Gauthe was guilty%2C learned he wasn%27t the only one

On clear mornings he can see the steeple.

It rises from a little russet-stone Catholic church in the village in southern France where Ray Mouton, former Louisiana lawyer-turned-expatriate-American author, now lives.

The view from Mouton's terrace focuses squarely on that steeple as it cuts a line through the horizon, reaching heavenward against a backdrop of the Pyrenees, a symbol of solace, hope and inspiration to man.

But Mouton has never been to Mass in that church. He never has heard a sermon there.

Mouton no longer attends services — not since the case of the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, whose horrific crimes against children in the Diocese of Lafayette set off a wave of scandal in 1985 that reached across the USA all the way to the Vatican; not since Mouton defended Gauthe and almost ruined his life in the process.

Now, he enters churches only to light candles, candles for the children.

Journey from top to bottom, back again

Mouton is a man who had everything and lost it, a man who hit rock bottom then found a way back. Once a lawyer, he became a wanderer who watched his home, his family and his law practice fade away in an alcoholic haze, Mouton is now an author, a man who reinvented himself.

Gauthe is a pedophile who was a priest, an unassuming man whose monstrous crimes in south Louisiana set off a worldwide avalanche of scandal in 1985 that continues to rock the Catholic Church today.

In God's House is Mouton's latest book, a work of fiction mirroring reality so closely that Gauthe almost leers from its pages.

Mouton grew up wealthy, the scion of an historically prominent, staunchly Catholic, South Louisiana family. The Moutons began their Louisiana heritage with Jean Mouton, founder of the settlement that eventually became Lafayette, La. They count a Civil War general, a governor, a U.S. senator and other prominent Louisiana figures among their ranks.

Ray Mouton also made his mark as a star quarterback in high school. Two years later he ran off to Mexico with the prettiest girl in his sophomore college class, married her and went on to graduate from Louisiana State University law school.

As a lawyer, Mouton poured himself into his cases with the same zeal that made him a star quarterback, sometimes going days without sleep while he was preparing for trial.

It paid off. By the mid-1980s he had tried two personal injury cases that resulted in record verdicts and was involved in a number of other high profile trials.

"I had a significant media profile locally for a young lawyer," he said.

He was known as a firebrand and he lived up to the reputation. Mouton drove flashy cars. He liked champagne. He, his wife and their three children lived on a sprawling estate in a remote corner of Lafayette Parish.

"We had 15 acres," Mouton said. "We had a big home that was a replica of an 1850s Acadian farmhouse, a Cajun guest cottage, a large bass pond, stables, horses, a swimming pool, and landscaping. There were irises on the banks of the pond."

Abused boy turns to priesthood

Gauthe was none of those things. Born in 1945 into a poor farming family in Napoleonville, La., he was the eldest of eight children.

An introvert and a poor student, he more or less strayed into the priesthood. After failing several classes at two seminaries, he was ordained in 1971.

He might have remained obscure had he not been a predatory pedophile. As his crimes came to light and case after case was brought against him and the Lafayette Diocese, Gauthe's life was chronicled in multiple court records.

An older boy molested Gauthe around age 9. Gauthe preyed on boys of roughly the same age, the sons of his parishioners, scores of them.

Though timid around adults, he could be a fiend with children, once telling a reluctant boy that if he told about their sexual encounters, Gauthe would kill his father and, as a priest, "make sure he goes to hell."

He told family members and others that he never felt any real commitment to the priesthood but confided to his brother Richard, another pedophile eventually arrested and jailed in Great Britain, that it offered unlimited access to young boys.

Gauthe took advantage of that access and a pattern emerged. During a decade beginning in 1972, Gauthe moved from the Louisiana towns of Broussard to New Iberia to Abbeville to Henry, molesting boys in each location. The late Bishop Gerard Frey, then in charge of the Diocese of Lafayette and Gauthe's supervisor, repeatedly was told of Gauthe's crimes but responded only by moving the priest every time rumors began to spread.

Frey also told victims' parents to have their sons go to confession and repent their participation in the sexual episodes.

Then, he made Gauthe chaplain of the Boy Scouts.

However, it all came to an end in 1984. That year, parents of Gauthe's victims brought a number of suits against the diocese. At first, all the plaintiffs settled out of court. Then the late J. Minos Simon, a crusty, garrulous Lafayette lawyer, refused to settle.

Simon's suit became public, forcing the district attorney to file a criminal case against Gauthe, and Gauthe became the first Catholic priest in U.S. history to face indictment for multiple cases of child molestation.

The Diocese of Lafayette suddenly needed a criminal defense lawyer, a Catholic who would have the church's interest at heart. It turned to one of the best.

Defending the church he loved

"I took the case out of vanity and greed," Mouton said. "I knew it would be a high-profile case and I knew the church had unlimited funds to defend it."

Beyond that, Mouton said he waded into his defense of Gauthe with a certain naiveté. As a criminal defense lawyer, he thought he had seen the worst of humanity, but this was his mother church. Gauthe must be an aberration, he reasoned.

"I honestly believed the church was a repository of goodness," Mouton said. "As it turns out, it wasn't.

"When I decided to take that case, I destroyed my life, my family, my faith. In three years, I lost everything I held dear."

Mouton's first meeting with his client was unnerving.

"No one would have believed this nondescript, mild-mannered, soft-spoken person could have done the things he was charged with," Mouton said. "And then he began to speak about these things and being in that room with him was the creepiest experience of my life."

Mouton believed that he was representing a true sex maniac and his strategy was to have Gauthe admit to his crimes and plead insanity. The list of victims had grown to 37 by then. An insanity defense would keep the victims from having to testify and Mouton hoped to have Gauthe serve out whatever term he got in a treatment facility.

"The church fought me at every turn," Mouton said. "They wanted me to plead him out and make it go away."

Eventually, so did Gauthe. Though Gauthe first seemed fearful of prison, in the midst of the legal proceedings Mouton noticed that his client had become complacent and seemed to have few worries about his fate.

"I didn't know it then, but Gilbert had (the late) Judge Henry Politz on his side," Mouton said.

As the case progressed, Mouton's obsessive habits worked to his client's advantage but not his own. He would work days without sleeping, self-medicate with a bottle of vodka or gin, sleep fitfully and rise to begin again.

As news of the case spread, Mouton and his family began to receive threats. Mouton's son was embroiled in fights in school about his father, and the lawyer's long hours began taking their toll on his marriage.

His faith in the church, something he had never questioned, began to erode as well. As he dug into the Gauthe case, he found evidence that church officials had long known that Gauthe was a child molester. Worse, Mouton found evidence of first one and then another and another pedophile priest in the Lafayette Diocese.

That number eventually rose to seven.

And as he watched his health and his marriage slip away, Mouton began to lose something else, his unflinching faith in the church as the one institution of good.

"I didn't consider quitting. I couldn't quit," Mouton said. "I felt somebody had to do something, do all in their power, to protect innocent children from bishops who covered up crimes of demented criminal priests who belonged in prison."

Reporting on the problem nationwide

As the Gauthe case wound toward a close, its publicity brought forward other victims of other priests across the country. Lawsuits against the church began to multiply. Gauthe's crimes alone would cost the diocese at least $10 million.

Mouton joined with two priests, canon lawyer Father Thomas Doyle and the late Rev. Michael Peterson, a church psychiatrist who treated troubled priests, to write a report for the Vatican on the state of pedophilia in the U.S. church.

Working over several months and traveling the country, the trio compiled a report that concluded that the problem of pedophilia was so widespread in the Catholic clergy that the cost in dollars eventually could reach $1 billion and would be a public relations nightmare.

The cost to the church would be staggering, they warned. The cost in human suffering could not be measured.

Church leaders initially appeared thankful for the report, then turned their backs on it, Mouton said.

Doyle, who served as chaplain to the U.S. Air Force until 2004, agreed.

"In the beginning, both Ray and I naively believed that when confronted with the truth that the church would do the right thing and act in accord with its teachings," Doyle said.

"At a minimum, we thought it would have the common decency and common sense to do all in its power to heal the wounds of innocent victims, and in the process remove criminal clerics from the ministry, reporting them to police authorities," Doyle said. "How wrong we were. It shook my faith, and it shook Ray's."

Mouton ended the Gauthe case and the report a ruined man. By 1987, his law practice was gone and his marriage had ended. The country estate sat vacant and Mouton was falling apart.

"I felt then as I do now that every bishop who has covered up a clerical crime belongs in prison with the priest," Mouton said. "I knew no one in the church had ever done anything about this or ever would do anything about it.

"I worked, battling the diocese, the American church and the Vatican until I literally burned myself up spiritually, mentally, and physically."

Mouton was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the psychological driving wheel that can lead to great success or catastrophic failure.

And he said he had another problem: "I also was a full-blown alcoholic."

Prison not hard time

In prison, Gauthe led a charmed life.

In October 1986, he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of child molestation and was sentenced to 20 years. Under a plea bargain that Mouton worked out, he was to get psychiatric treatment and was to be required to take Depo-Provera to diminish his sex drive.

He was sent to David Wade Correctional Center in Homer, La., and the mantle of protection from Politz, at that point chief justice of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, followed him there.

The bond between one of Louisiana's worst child molesters and one of its most powerful jurists was both real and puzzling. Politz was a giant in Louisiana's legal community, a former president of the Louisiana Trial Lawyers Association, an officeholder on numerous boards and a man in whose name a scholarship has been established at the LSU law school.

From the day that Gauthe was charged, Politz became his protector. In an interview in 1998, Politz said that it was the result of family ties that reached back to Napoleonville.

"My father and his grandfather sharecropped together in Napoleonville," Politz told the Houston Chronicle. "When my father died at a very early age, Gilbert's grandfather befriended my mother.

"Gilbert's mother and my sister were best friends. It's as simple as that."

Largely because of Politz's intervention, Gauthe was given his own air-conditioned studio at Wade where he painted signs and portraits. The walls of that studio were glass, so guards could observe Gauthe. But he soon hung portraits on the walls, hiding himself and his teenage assistants from sight.

He was allowed to leave the prison for extended furloughs to visit his mother. Politz visited him regularly and, on occasion, took him and prison officials to lunch at a nearby country club.

In September 1995, Gauthe was released from prison 11 years early. He moved to Polk County, Texas, to the tiny community of Ace where he was arrested months later and charged with molesting a 3-year-old boy.

Once again, Politz stepped in. Robert C. Bennett, a powerhouse Houston lawyer who practices primarily in federal courts, arrived in Polk County to defend Gauthe. With Bennett's help, a lack of cooperation from Louisiana authorities and what the district attorney described as a weak case, Gauthe was allowed to plead no contest to a nonsexual charge of injury to a child.

He was given seven years probation.

He later moved to Waskom, Texas, on the Texas-Louisiana border, then south of Houston to Galveston County.

By then, Gauthe's mentor was gone. Politz died in 2002, and in 2008, Gauthe was arrested for failing to register in Galveston County as a sex offender. He served two years and was released in April 2010.

Mouton takes back control of his life

As Gauthe was painting in his prison studio, Mouton was running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain.

He still had money and, with his life at a crossroads, he headed for Europe.

"I quit drinking," he said. "My sobriety date is Nov. 15, 1987. I have not had a sip of alcohol since."

Instead, he found release running 2 feet in front of the horns of a 1,500-pound beast that wanted to kill him.

The running of the bulls is a tradition across Spain, but particularly in Pamplona. There, a dozen or more fighting bulls are loosed in the streets and members of the crowd run in front of them to test their courage.

"I first attended Fiesta De San Fermin in Pamplona in July 1970 and ran with the bulls for the first time that summer," Mouton said.

He did it again after the Gauthe case and continued the practice until 1998, when he fell, breaking an arm and almost dying from a subsequent heart attack.

He found another release as well. Mouton had always written: essays, short stories, observations. In writing he found an outlet for the manic obsession that drove him in law, but one that did not threaten to kill him.

Mouton began spending most of his time in Europe. In 2002, he published Pamplona, Running the bulls bars and barrios in Fiesta de San Fermin. The book, replete with stunning photographs and vivid descriptions, has been praised as the definitive account of Pamplona's fiesta and running of the bulls.

More recently, he has written another book, In God's House, a sprawling novel about a Louisiana lawyer who defends a pedophile priest and almost loses everything in the process.

"This is a work of fiction, but, obviously, it wouldn't be the same if I hadn't lived through what I did," he said. "It's dedicated to the victims, children around the world who are survivors of clergy abuse and those who did not survive."

The book has done well in England, Ireland and Scotland, and is available on amazon.com. It does not yet have a U.S. publisher, and Mouton said he intends to begin searching for one this fall.

The church won't welcome the book. A spokesman for the Lafayette Diocese said the diocese was not aware that the novel had been published and would have no comment on it.

Now, Mouton spends most of his time at his home in southern France, where he is working on several other novels. In the mornings, he often walks out on his terrace and looks across the valley to the little church below.

Mouton no longer considers himself a member of the Catholic Church or any organized religion. Still, old habits die hard, and once in a while, he quietly slips into the little church alone.

"I only go into churches to light candles and pray while lighting them," Mouton said.

"To me, the perfect prayer is when one focuses all of their energy on another in the moment when a candle is lit," he said. "I light candles for people I know who have troubles of any kind in their life, especially those who are ill.

"But I always light the first candle for all the innocent children whose names I will never know," Mouton said, "all those children who have been abused."

Evan Moore, city editor at the (Opelousas, La.) Daily World, previously covered the Gauthe case extensively for the Houston Chronicle.

Since Gilbert Gauthe

The case of pedophile priest Gilbert Gauthe from 1985 to 1986 in Lafayette, La., was the first of many. In his wake was a bevy of civil and criminal cases against priests and dioceses. BishopAccoutability.org, a nonprofit Massachusetts organization, maintains the most extensive records on such cases. The following facts are based on their data:

• Between 1984 and 2009 more than 3,000 civil lawsuits involving pedophile priests were filed in the United States.

• More than $3 billion in awards and settlements have been made between 1984 and 2008.

• Between 1986 and 2009, 37 civil cases went to trial.

• Between 2001 and 2010, the Vatican acknowledged that 600 priests accused of sexual abuse had been removed from the clergy worldwide, half at their own request and half by papal decree. Of those, 325 have been identified in the USA.

• Data from the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops includes 16,795 persons who have reported being abused as minors by priests since 2004.