Congresswoman Sarah McBride (Photo: mcbride.house.gov)
A sudden understanding came to Delaware’s newest member of Congress sitting in a pew on Christmas Eve at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware.
Sarah McBride, the child of a corporate lawyer — who was a teenage political activist and president of the American University student body — had always known she was a girl. Assigned male at birth, by the time she was a college junior, her life out of sync with her gender identity had become untenable.
Back at home with her parents, sitting in Wilmington, Delaware’s Westminster Presbyterian Church on Christmas Eve, hearing “O Holy Night,” she said to herself, “I cannot continue to miss this beauty,” and resolved to come out to her parents.
McBride’s autobiography, “Tomorrow Will Be Different,” is the story of her 20s, bracketed by two Presbyterian moments: the revelation at Westminster Presbyterian Church and the hymns sung at her husband Andy’s funeral a few years later. This youth elder is now Delaware’s sole member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the first openly transgender woman in Congress.
Born in 1990, McBride grew up with two brothers in a neighborhood of west Wilmington. She recalls dressing up as Cinderella with girl neighbors. Like Cinderella at midnight, time would elapse on her fancy dress, and she would have to return to life as a boy.
The family was active in Westminster, dad as a ruling elder, mom as a deacon, and Sarah herself in church musicals and the youth group.
Her parents were successful and politically active, and Sarah was a young politics-obsessive, writing, “Growing up, I personally knew more U.S. senators than transgender people.” Her parents hosted fundraisers for Gov. Jack Markell. Despite believing in her parents — who had steadfastly supported one of her brothers when he came out as gay — Sarah lived in fear of disappointing them and her political family, and losing the trust of people like Markell, who would casually point to the governor’s desk and say, “when this is your chair.”
During the spring semester, Sarah told close friends at American University that she was trans. On April 30, 2012, she posted a long note to Facebook coming out as trans, receiving support from posters on campus and immediate hugs from her frat brothers. The editor of the campus newspaper came over to her dorm to ask to run her note in the next edition, but with one request: “Cut it down to 600 words.”
In June 2012 she met Andy Cray, a lawyer with the LGBTQ+ advocacy portfolio inside the Center for American Progress. As a couple they navigated the routine 15-hour days of Sarah’s internship in the Obama White House Office of Public Engagement. In her memoir, Sarah relates the double bind of passing versus being read as trans inside the Office of Public Engagement — other staffers expressed surprise upon learning her identity, and this ironically tended to erase it.
Book cover (Publisher: Crown Archetype)
McBride relates those struggles in part to illustrate her partner’s unwavering moral example. In one passage, Sarah is enraged by members of Congress who support regressive policies and legislation despite their being widely known as being LGBTQ+ themselves, wishing they could be outed. Andy stridently defends them, saying the good of unearthing mere hypocrisy isn’t equivalent to the harm of outing a person.
Sarah introduces her work with Equity Delaware in 2013 in terms of desperately wanting to move back to Delaware, and being terrified that the state lacked legal protections for trans people before the law. With support from Markell and Attorney General Beau Biden, Sarah and the Equity Delaware team lobbied the legislature to pass, back to back, a marriage equality act and civil protections for gender identity. SB 97 on gender identity protection passed and was signed by the governor on June 13, 2013.
The next year brought Andy’s cancer diagnosis, and struggle through treatment, remission and recurrence. The couple was married Aug. 24, 2014. Within the week, Andy had passed.
Inequitable treatment lingers for trans people even after death. In McBride’s retelling, finding a funeral home that would treat Andy in alignment with his gender identity was a struggle.
At his memorial service, those gathered sang “Here I Am, Lord” — “a Presbyterian hymn that Andy and I both discovered a year before had been our favorite hymn growing up as active members of our local Presbyterian churches.”
Michael Gehrling, Associate, Northeast Region & Assessments, 1001 New Worshiping Communities, Interim Unified Agency Megan Genovese, Religious New Services Project Archivist, Presbyterian Historical Society
Let us pray:
Gracious God, you call us to serve one another with energy, intelligence, imagination and love. Bless us with your creative Spirit so that small acts of courage and kindness can become bold outpourings of your love. Connect with our neighbors near and far so that all of us may rejoice together in your good news. Amen.
Mission Yearbook: Celebrating the Stories of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
Join us in celebrating the incredible work being done by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) through our Mission Yearbook. Each year, we highlight stories of faith, service, and transformation from across our denomination, showcasing the impact our members are making in their communities and around the world.
From mission trips to local outreach projects, from new church plants to innovative social justice initiatives, the Mission Yearbook is a testament to the dedication and passion of our Presbyterian family. Through these stories, we are reminded of the power of God’s love to change lives and bring hope to those in need.
We invite you to explore the pages of the Mission Yearbook and be inspired by the stories of faith in action. May these stories encourage you to continue to serve, love, and share the gospel with all those you encounter. Together, we can make a difference in the world and spread the message of God’s grace to all.
Join us in celebrating the stories of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in the Mission Yearbook. Let us continue to be a beacon of light and hope in a world that is in need of God’s love and compassion.
High-level executives with the NFL’s New Orleans Saints football team and the NBA’s Pelicans basketball team had a deeper role than previously known in connection with a list of priests and deacons faced with credible allegations of child molestation while the clergymen worked with their city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, the Guardian and reporting partner WWL Louisiana can reveal.
According to highly sensitive emails that were obtained by the outlets, one top executive even described a conversation with the New Orleans district attorney at the time that allowed them to remove clergy names from the list – though the clubs deny their official participated in that discussion, and the prosecutor back then vehemently denies he would ever have weighed in on the list’s content.
The emails call into question prior and newly issued statements by New Orleans’ two major professional sports franchises as they denied being overly entwined in the archdiocese’s most damning affairs – while fighting to keep their communications with the church out of public view.
After first seeing the so-called Saints emails in 2019 through a subpoena, abuse survivors’ attorneys alleged that the two franchises’ top officials had a significant hand in trying to minimize what was then a public-relations nightmare for the city’s archdiocese – but has since triggered a full-blown child sex-trafficking investigation aimed at the church by law enforcement.
The initial allegations about the emails led to local and national media investigations, including by Sports Illustrated and the Associated Press, that highlighted a fierce closeness between the sports franchises and the Catholic church in New Orleans.
Perhaps the strongest manifestation of that closeness was New Orleans archbishop Gregory Aymond’s serving as a signing witness on the testamentary will that positioned Gayle Benson to inherit ownership of the Saints and Pelicans from her late billionaire husband, Tom. The will also gave key positions in Tom Benson’s estate to the teams’ president, Dennis Lauscha, and top spokesperson, Greg Bensel.
The Saints’ proximity to the church spurred protests by clergy-abuse survivors in front of the team’s headquarters and at the offices of one of the oldest Catholic archdioceses in the US.
Members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests outside the New Orleans Saints and Pelicans training facility in Metairie, Louisiana, in 2020. Photograph: Matthew Hinton/AP
Yet what remained hidden until now are more than 300 emails, amounting to more than 700 pages, many emblazoned with the NFL and NBA logos, showing that the teams’ officials were more involved with some of the church’s operations than they ever admitted. They expose how extensively the sports teams’ leaders intervened in their local church’s most unyielding scandal.
In the most blatant example of that, Bensel – the teams’ vice-president for communications – wrote an email to Lauscha on 1 November 2018, the day before the clergy-abuse list was released. Using common abbreviations for “conference call” and “with”, Bensel wrote: “Had a cc w [New Orleans’ then district attorney] Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the list.”
But the teams said in a 2020 statement: “No one associated with our organizations made recommendations or had input on the individual names of those disclosed on the list.”
On Saturday, the team also said: “No Saints employee had any responsibility for adding or removing any names from that list or any supplemental list. Nor did any Saints employee offer any input, suggestions or opinions as to who should be included or omitted from any such lists. Any suggestion that any Saints employee had any role in removing anyone from the archdiocese’s published lists of credibly-accused clergy is categorically false.”
Meanwhile, when WWL Louisiana and the Associated Press asked him separately in 2020 if he had any input on the contents of the list, Cannizzaro – a self-described pious, practicing Catholic – denied it.
“No,” Cannizzaro told WWL when asked that question. “We simply requested information from them. We requested documents from them, and they provided us documents of people that they believe were responsible for abuse.”
Through an email from a spokesperson, Cannizzaro said to an Associated Press reporter that “he was not consulted about the composition of the archdiocese’s ‘credibly accused’ list nor did he or anyone from [his] office have input into its assembly”.
Thank you Greg … I am certain [Archbishop Aymond] will appreciate it
Gayle Benson in a reply to an offer by Greg Bensel to help Aymond with ‘crisis communications’
More recently, the Guardian obtained a typed phone message left for Cannizzaro at his office showing the archdiocese contacted him for comment requesting follow up “on conversation you had with Archbishop Aymond”. The date left on the message was 29 October 2018, four days before Aymond released the clergy-abuse list.
Cannizzaro, for his part, said he isn’t sure he has ever met Bensel and “did not at any time ask the archdiocese or tell the Saints to tell the archdiocese … ‘remove this name from the list’.”
“I would not have done that,” said Cannizzaro, who is now the chief of the criminal cases division at the Louisiana state attorney general’s office. “That’s just not something I would have done.”
Another revelation in the emails: the sports franchises took the initiative to protect Aymond’s flagging reputation in the summer of 2018 without his asking for that, before the archbishop announced plans to release the names of dozens of abusive clergymen.
Bensel sent an email in July of that year to Gayle Benson asking her to let him help Aymond with “crisis communications”. Benson – who counts Aymond as one of her best personal friends – replied to Bensel that same day: “Thank you Greg … I am certain he will appreciate it.”
The pair exchanged those emails the day after a damaging story about a deacon who had repeatedly faced criminal charges of child sexual abuse being allowed to read at masses – triggering one of multiple scandals in 2018 which pressured the church into releasing a list of credibly accused clergymen as a gesture of conciliation and transparency.
New Orleans Pelicans and Saints owner Gayle Benson next to the teams’ senior vice-president of communications, Greg Bensel, in New Orleans in 2022. Photograph: Matthew Hinton/AP
Benson claimed in 2020 that Bensel only got involved in the local church’s messaging after being “asked if he would help the archdiocese prepare for the media relative to the release of clergy names involved in the abuse scandal”.
On Saturday, an attorney for the Saints said Bensel did so in part at the suggestion of New Orleans-based federal judge Jay Zainey, a devout Catholic – who, according to the emails and time stamps from them, would have had to make that entreaty offline before the article on the abusive deacon was published or very shortly thereafter. Zainey has previously publicly acknowledged making such a suggestion, though he declined further comment on Saturday.
The team’s attorneys on Saturday also said “other local civic leaders” asked Bensel to assist the archdiocese, though the lawyers did not say exactly when those requests were made.
On Saturday, as they have done before, the Saints said Bensel’s role was limited to “public relations assistance provided to the archdiocese of New Orleans … in anticipation of press interest in the publication of a list of clergy who were credibly accused of abuse” on 2 November 2018.
Bensel himself at one point wrote in the emails that he was presenting himself “not as the communications person for the Saints/Pelicans but as a parent, New Orleanian and member of the Catholic Church” – as well as a personal friend of Aymond. And the Saints on Saturday emphasized that “no compensation from the archdiocese was expected or received in return for Mr Bensel’s assistance”.
But Bensel communicated directly with local media about their coverage of the clergy-abuse crisis using his Saints.NFL.com email address, bearing a signature line displaying two of the most recognizable logos in sports: the NFL’s shield and the NBA’s silhouette of a dribbling ball player. Lauscha and Benson used their Saints.NFL.com email addresses throughout the communications, too.
And the emails also show Benson, Lauscha and Bensel continued to coordinate with the archdiocese on how to respond to news stories about the clergy-abuse crisis or other topics involving the organizations’ leaders for at least eight more months beyond the list’s release.
On 21 June 2019, Bensel sent an email complaining that he did not “get paid enough” because he had to prepare the archbishop for an upcoming interview with New Orleans’ Advocate newspaper about clergy-abuse lawsuits and their effect on the church’s coffers. The regular email exchanges between team officials and the archdiocese ended only in July 2019, after a subpoena for the communications was issued to the Saints and the NFL by attorneys for clergy-abuse survivors who had detected evidence of them while pressing a lawsuit for damages on behalf of a victim.
With the backing of various allies – including Benson, Zainey and future federal judge Wendy Vitter, then the archdiocese’s general counsel – the Saints and Pelicans officials used their influence to lean heavily on prominent figures in the local media establishment, pushing for them to soften their news coverage of Aymond, the emails show.
Casting a critical eye on [Aymond] is neither beneficial nor right
Greg Bensel in a July 2018 letter to editors at the Times-Picayune and the Advocate newspapers
Bensel also sought to convince media outlets to limit their scrutiny of a list that turned out to be so incomplete it eventually precipitated a joint federal and state law enforcement investigation into whether the archdiocese spent decades operating a child sex-trafficking ring whose crimes were illegally covered up.
“Casting a critical eye on [Aymond] is neither beneficial nor right,” Bensel wrote in a July 2018 letter to editors at the Times-Picayune and the Advocate, the two daily New Orleans newspapers in existence back then.
A year later, when an Advocate reporter emailed Bensel seeking a comment from the Saints and Pelicans about the subpoena issued to them and their powerful leagues, Bensel quickly forwarded it directly to the owner of that newspaper, John Georges, after unsuccessfully, and sarcastically, suggesting the journalist ask Georges for comment instead.
The Saints’ officials statement on Saturday did not answer questions about Bensel’s remark to the reporter or his overture to Georges.
The statement from the team’s lawyer said “no member of the Saints organization condones or wants to cover up the abuse that occurred in the archdiocese of New Orleans”.
Separately, a statement from the Advocate and the Times-Picayune – which Georges has since acquired – said: “No one gets preferential treatment in our coverage of the news. Over the past six years, we have consistently published in-depth stories highlighting the ongoing serious issues surrounding the archdiocese sex abuse crisis, as well as investigative reports on this matter by WWL [Louisiana] and by the Associated Press.”
Some of those WWL Louisiana reports the newspaper ran were produced in partnership with the Guardian.
The newspapers’ statement said: “As the largest local media company in Louisiana, we often hear from community leaders, and we welcome that engagement, but it does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”
A statement from the archdiocese on Saturday echoed the Saints and Cannizzaro in saying “no one from the [team] or the New Orleans district attorney’s office had any role in compiling the [credibly accused] list or had any say in adding or removing anyone from the list”. It also characterized Bensel’s role from 2018 to 2019 as assisting “with media relations”, for which neither he nor the archdiocese were provided compensation.
‘Dark days’
The emails – obtained by the Guardian, WWL Louisiana, the Associated Press and the New York Times – came after Aymond tied his archdiocese to the lucrative sports teams owned by Benson in a way rarely, if ever, seen in the world of sports.
A famously devout Catholic, prominent church donor and philanthropist who recently won an NFL humanitarian award, Benson inherited the Saints and Pelicans after her husband, Tom Benson, died at age 90 in March 2018. He bought the Saints in 1985 and the Pelicans in 2012. He threatened to move the Saints after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005 but was convinced to stay.
Tom Benson then became a hero and symbol of the city’s recovery from Katrina in 2010, when the Saints won their first – and so far only – Super Bowl title, igniting one of the region’s most ebullient celebrations ever.
In Tom Benson’s final years, his children and grandchildren from a previous marriage squared off with Gayle, his third wife, over who would inherit control of his teams and other businesses. Lauscha and Bensel were widely seen to have aligned themselves with Gayle in a struggle that she won. And the succession plan that Tom Benson settled on in her benefit was laid out in a will.
It left Gayle Benson in control of the sports teams and made Lauscha executor of Tom’s estate. And in the event Lauscha ever became unwilling or unable to fulfill his duties, they essentially would be split among two others of those most trusted by the Bensons: longtime Saints general manager Mickey Loomis – and Bensel.
One of two witnesses to sign that will was Aymond.
Gayle Benson walks to receive the casket of her husband, Tom Benson, with Archbishop Gregory Aymond in New Orleans in 2018. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP
And four months after the will took effect upon Benson’s death, a newspaper article about a local deacon and alleged serial child molester thrust Aymond into the center of the global Catholic church’s clergy-abuse scandal.
Published by the Advocate, the article questioned how the deacon, George Brignac, had been allowed to keep reading scripture at masses despite his removal from public ministry 20 years earlier. Church officials had removed Brignac from ministry in 1988 after he’d been arrested multiple times on child molestation charges. The article also reported that the archdiocese had paid $550,000 to settle civil legal claims with a survivor of Brignac’s abuse who would later pursue a criminal case against him, though the clergyman would die before he could face trial.
Subsequent reporting by WWL Louisiana and an Advocate journalist now at the Guardian found that the church had quietly paid at least 15 other victims of Brignac a total of roughly $3m to settle their civil damages over their abuse at the deacon’s hands. Those payments were among nearly $12m in abuse-related settlements that the archdiocese doled out during a 10-year period beginning in 2010.
Aymond immediately faced public backlash, with critics saying he had failed to live up to the promises of zero tolerance for clerical child molesters made by bishops across the US after a clergy-abuse and cover-up scandal had enveloped Boston’s Catholic archdiocese in 2002. He sought to limit the fallout by claiming that he was unaware that subordinates of his had brought Brignac back into a role that he insisted was largely inconsequential.
But later investigations by the Associated Press, WWL Louisiana and the Advocate showed Brignac had also been cleared to meet with – and present lessons to – children at a church school.
The Brignac revelations, however, were not the last of Aymond and the church’s problems. A grand jury report issued in Pennsylvania in August 2018 established that Catholic clergy abuse in that state had been more widespread than the public ever previously realized. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick – a former archbishop of Washington DC – resigned amid allegations of child molestation as well as other sexual abuse, though he would later be deemed incompetent to stand trial due to dementia.
And, in September 2018, the Advocate published a bombshell article about clergy abuse which implicated New Orleans’ Jesuit high school, the revered Catholic college preparatory from which both Lauscha and Bensel graduated.
The article outlined how the high school quietly paid settlements to people who claimed that priests or other school employees sexually abused them as children. The school faced some of the same criticisms lobbed at Aymond after Brignac’s exposure. Jesuit high school’s leader at the time defended the institution by condemning the cases in question as a “disgusting” chapter in the school’s history – but one that was left far in its past.
Bensel later wrote in an email to the school’s president that he was on Benson’s boat with Aymond when the story about Brignac came out – and the archbishop “was very troubled”.
“These are dark days,” Bensel continued.
The day after the Brignac story broke, Bensel wrote to Benson: “The issues that the Archbishop has to deal with that never involve him,” on top of a link to – and an attached copy of – the Advocate article about the molester deacon authored by a reporter now at the Associated Press.
The Saint Louis cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans, and the city’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond. Composite: Angelica Alzona/Guardian Design; Photos via Getty Images/AP
Benson wrote back suggesting that she had seen the article already. She said she had even spoken to Aymond about it “last week”, several days before its publication. “Archbishop is very upset,” Benson told Bensel. “A mess.”
Bensel told Benson he was available to Aymond if the archbishop “ever wants to chat crisis communications”.
“We have been through enough at [the] Saints to be a help or sounding board,” Bensel said, about six years after he guided the team through the infamous so-called Bountygate scandal that – among other consequences – resulted in the club’s coach at the time being suspended for an entire season. “But I don’t want to overstep!”
Benson replied: “Thank you Greg, I will pass this on to him. I am certain he will appreciate it. Many thanks.”
An August 2018 email that Benson sent to the Saints’ governmental liaison made clear how bad she felt for Aymond after the Brignac revelations. “Very sad he is going through this,” Benson wrote while sharing a separate letter by Aymond apologizing “for any wrongdoing by the church or its leadership”. The archbishop had issued the attached missive to a local chapter of a Catholic group called the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, which traces its origins to the First Crusade in the 11th century.
Though Jesuit high school’s president back then, Christopher Fronk, later told a Sports Illustrated reporter now at the New York Times, “I never heard from the Saints on this issue” of church abuse, the emails show that he, too, was contacted by Bensel – just two days after his campus community was rocked by the September 2018 Advocate clergy molestation article.
“Speaking from personal experience after 23 years with the Saints, when the media and the public attack you at your core, it takes the resolve and focus of people like yourself to lead us to clarity,” Bensel wrote. “The church needs leaders like you and I just wanted to reach out and say you have the support of myself, Dennis and Mrs Benson.
“If I can offer any counsel on any issue, I am here for you.”
Fronk, who left Jesuit high school in early 2020, replied: “Thanks for your email. I appreciate it. The last couple of days have been long, and I have more ahead of me. I am relying on prayers and support from others. And I may be taking you up on your wise counsel.”
‘Work with him’
Most of the Saints’ communications about clergy abuse focused on Aymond’s handling of the issue. And the strategy that the archbishop ultimately settled on was one implemented in other US dioceses. He would release a list of priests and deacons who served in New Orleans over the years and had been the subject of credible child molestation accusations.
Aymond later told WWL Louisiana that he had contemplated such a maneuver a year before deciding to do so. And he claimed he would have reached that decision without the various local and national scandals consuming the Catholic church at the time, though he acknowledged they created pressure for him to act.
Whatever the case, Bensel recommended “transparency” – a wholehearted effort to come clean about the past abuses and apologize for them. And with the list’s release being announced weeks ahead of time, the church would come to count on Bensel to get local media outlets to focus more on hailing Aymond for taking such a courageous step rather than analyzing the roster’s thoroughness.
The campaign to set the media’s agenda began in earnest on 17 October 2018, when Bensel wrote to higher-ups at the Advocate as well as the Times-Picayune. He revealed to them that he had been “confidentially discussing the recent horrible issues that [Aymond] and the church are facing”. He also referred to chatting offline with the Advocate and Times-Picayune brass earlier that morning.
I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind [Archbishop Aymond] and work with him
Greg Bensel to higher-ups at the Advocate and the Times-Picayune newspapers
In his email to the newspapers, Bensel disclosed Aymond’s plan to out clergymen who “sadly betrayed their role and authority to minister to our children, the elderly and the sick”. And, though he anticipated the gesture would not “simply end all of the past and current suffering and questions”, he wrote that he had an urgent request for the outlets.
“I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him,” Bensel said, in part. “We need to tell the story of how this Archbishop is leading us out of this mess. Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right.”
He said the news media had helped the Saints maintain their footing in the NFL despite being in one of the league’s smallest markets. And he promised that Aymond would have an open-door policy, saying he is “accountable, available and wants to [e]ffect positive change”.
“We need your support moving forward as we go through this soon-to-be messy time as we work toward much, much brighter days ahead,” Bensel said. “Help us tell this story.”
The archbishop would later abandon that open-door policy. For years, Aymond has consistently declined interview requests from reporters at WWL Louisiana and the Guardian who have questioned his handling of the clergy-abuse crisis. He used the word “Satan” when referring to one of those journalists, the former Advocate staff member, in a text message to a third party that was obtained by the writer.
Bensel provided copies of the letters to the newspapers to Benson and Zainey, a sitting, locally based federal judge. The judge – a Jesuit high school alum who has served on the governing board of the New Orleans archdiocese-run college that educates prospective priests – replied: “Thanks very much Greg. You have hit all the points. By his example and leadership, Archbishop Aymond, our shepherd, will continue to lead our church in the right direction – helping us to learn and to rebuild from the mistakes of the past.”
Benson, too, praised Bensel’s tone: “Great letter Greg … spot on! Thank you very much.”
While it’s not clear when the paper first planned it, that same day the Times-Picayune published a column about the upcoming clergy-abuser list headlined: “Archbishop Aymond is doing the right thing.”
A day later, Bensel wrote to the columnist, saying: “very good column on Archbishop Aymond”.
Bensel then sent the column – along with the comments left under it by online users – to recipients including Aymond, Vitter (then still the archdiocese’s attorney) and Zainey. He said the comments – including one questioning “how come the church gets to decide who is ‘credibly accused’ and who is not”–were a valuable insight into the public’s psyche. And Bensel urged them not to “delve or hang on to the negative ones, [but] learn from them”.
Praying for the Saints victory. Very grateful for your help
Archbishop Aymond to Greg Bensel
The emails show how Bensel dedicated some of the following days to preparing Aymond for a meeting with editors of the Advocate, even while he was in Baltimore for a Saints game.
“Praying for the Saints victory. Very grateful for your help,” Aymond wrote to Bensel at the time.
Referring to the Advocate, Bensel urged Aymond to remember “they need you and you need them”. He said the goal of the gathering with the newspaper’s leadership should be to foster “a better relationship” and drive home how the church is providing “the best measures for a safe environment for our children”.
Bensel suggested that the archbishop “not mention … that the general perception is that the ADVOCATE IS UNFAIR to the Archdiocese of New Orleans”. He also promised to “make time” to converse with Aymond about his advice despite being in and out of meetings.
“POSITIVE POSITIVE POSITIVE,” Bensel wrote to Aymond. “INCLUSIVE ACCESSIBILITY ACCOUNTABILITY MOVING FORWARD.”
Benson, Zainey and Vitter – who is married to a former Republican US senator and had already been nominated to a federal judgeship by President Donald Trump in 2018 and was confirmed to the post the following year – were among those sent copies of correspondence about that meeting. “Excellent!” Benson remarked. “Many thanks!”
Zainey, who later publicly said he could not be sure whether he had ever been sent copies of any of the Saints emails, replied: “Thanks for the wonderful advice. The Arch[bishop]’s sincerity will open their minds and hearts.”
(Zainey later recused himself from any rulings directly involving the archdiocese. But then he went on to rule in a case involving a Catholic religious order that a 2021 Louisiana law enabling clergy-abuse survivors to seek damages over decades-old child molestation was unconstitutional. The state supreme court subsequently upheld the law’s constitutionality, effectively negating Zainey’s ruling.)
After Aymond’s conversation with the newspaper, and after checking in with “a few folks” at the outlet, Bensel emailed Vitter, Aymond and the archdiocese’s in-house spokesperson, Sarah McDonald, saying that “the Advocate editorial meeting was fruitful, positive and I believe will have a lasting impact”. He said: “Great job by you all.”
Yet Aymond would soon become incensed with the Advocate, which late that October published a roster of 16 clergymen who seemed to fit the criteria of the archbishop’s upcoming list based on publicly available news stories and court documents.
Aymond wrote that the piece caught him off-guard, and he was particularly upset with how the newspaper’s website had asked clergy-abuse victims to contact the outlet to tell their stories rather than direct them to the archdiocese “to allow a proper investigation”.
“I want to work with you, but we must both be transparent,” Aymond said. “Will people believe we are working together?”
Upon being provided a copy of Aymond’s missive to the newspaper, Bensel quickly replied: “This is a GREAT response.”
Emails show that the newspaper replied by saying it contacted McDonald prior to the publication of the report. The Advocate said it didn’t believe its editors’ earlier conversation with Aymond prevented it “from continuing … reporting”.
Nonetheless, the Advocate informed Aymond that it had taken offline the request for victims to contact the newspaper, saying it was a “last minute addition” by a digital editor.
Bensel later wrote to Aymond: “An excellent response from them.”
‘Allowed us to take certain people off the list’
The emails show that – 10 days before the documents were released – Aymond provided Bensel an early draft of a letter that the archbishop issued to churchgoers alongside his clergy-abuser list. Bensel replied with suggested changes in handwriting.
A notable one: The draft had made it a point to say most of the accusations involved in the list “go back 30, 40, 50 or more years”. Bensel suggested stronger language, asserting that those accusations went back “decades – 30, 40, 50 and even 70 years ago”.
The final letter evidently adopted that suggestion, reading: “Most of the accusations are from incidents that occurred decades ago, even as long as 70 years ago.”
At last, Aymond’s clergy-abuser list came out the day after Catholics observed the Feast of All Saints and New Orleans’ NFL team celebrated the 52nd anniversary of its founding.
Had a cc w Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the [clergy-abuser] list
Greg Bensel to Dennis Lauscha, using common abbreviations for “conference call” and “with”, and referring to New Orleans’ district attorney at the time
The list – initially containing 57 names – was provided to media outlets that morning under an embargo, which prevents organizations from publishing information that was supplied to them prior to a specific time. And about three hours before that embargo expired, Lauscha emailed Bensel and asked: “Do you see any shockers on the list? Did your SJ you discussed yesterday make the list? The former Loyola president is the biggest shock to me.”
Bensel’s quick reply did not address to whom “SJ” refers, though the letters are the initials of the Jesuit religious order’s formal name, the Society of Jesus. It also doesn’t comment on Bernard Knoth, a former president of the Jesuits’ Loyola University New Orleans, who was included on the clergy-abuser list.
The Saints attorney’s statement on Saturday said Lauscha was referring to a clergyman “rumored to have been accused of abuse [and] was expected to be on the list”.
Dennis Lauscha. Photograph: WWLTV
“It is Mr Lauscha’s understanding that the clergyman to whom he referred in his query to Mr Bensel was included on the list on a supplemental list,” the statement said.
Regardless, back in early November 2018, Bensel’s reply read: “Had a cc w Leon Cannizzaro last night that allowed us to take certain people off the list.
“This list will get updated, and that is our message that we will not stop here today.”
The Guardian asked Cannizzaro about a 29 October 2018 typed message informing him of a call from Vitter. Vitter was “following up on conversation you had with Archbishop Aymond”, said the message left for Cannizzaro just four days before the list’s release.
“If I was in a conversation with him, I would’ve been looking for any records he would have had relative to complaints made against priests so we could reach out to those victims to see if there was a prosecutable case,” Cannizzaro said.
Meanwhile, Cannizzaro has denied a conversation with Bensel or any of his colleagues ever took place, including recently when he said in an interview: “I was not on any conference call with anybody from the Saints about this.
“I do not ever remember having a conversation with the Saints about any case going on with our office” at that specific time.
The Saints lawyer’s statement on Saturday also said that no one from the team spoke with Cannizzaro. Instead, Bensel’s email to Lauscha referred “to a conversation that he was told had occurred between a member of the staff of the archdiocese and … Cannizzaro, concerning the list”.
“Mr Bensel has no firsthand knowledge of what was said by anyone during the conversation or in any communication between the archdiocese and the district attorney’s office,” said the Saints lawyer’s statement. “The … email refers to Mr Bensel’s understanding that the list would be updated by the archdiocese.
“It was also Mr Bensel’s understanding that one purpose the archdiocese had in consulting with [Cannizzaro’s] office was to determine whether disclosure of any member of the clergy under consideration for inclusion on the list would interfere with a criminal investigation. Neither Mr Bensel nor any member of the Saints organization was involved in the determinations made by the archdiocese.”
‘A strong and faithful message’
On the day of the list’s release, McDonald had also asked Bensel to join Aymond as the archbishop gave interviews to local media outlets that they could not publish prior to the expiration of the embargo imposed on the document. “The archbishop would appreciate you being there for the Advocate especially,” McDonald wrote to Bensel.
“I have blocked out the entire morning,” Bensel replied. “I will see you there.”
In advance of those embargoed interviews, Lauscha sent Bensel 13 tough questions that Aymond should be prepared to answer. Lauscha suggested deflecting if asked about the number of listed credibly accused clergymen by answering, “One abuse is too many.”
“Excellent,” Bensel replied to Lauscha, before forwarding the questions to McDonald as well as Vitter.
The Saints’ statement on Saturday said: “The questions that Mr Lauscha suggested were intended to encourage openness and transparency.”
Bensel attended the Advocate’s and WWL Louisiana’s separate embargoed interviews with Aymond. In the conversation with the Advocate, Aymond did remark: “One incident is too many.”
Bensel remained silent during the interviews with both outlets. However, at some point later that morning, he emailed a Saints employee who had previously worked for the publisher of the Advocate.
“I want [the Advocate publisher] to write a positive opinion about how this archbishop has handled the transparency of releasing these names and his diligence in making this right,” Bensel wrote to the Saints employee. “Will call to discuss.”
There is no indication in the emails that the conversation Bensel sought took place. But the Advocate did publish an opinion column concluding with the words: “Transparency about grave wrongdoing, however painful, is the best way to help victims, serve parishioners, and support the work of the many church clerics who have brought joy, rather than suffering, to the people they promised to serve.”
I hope the Picayune would show [Archbishop Aymond] … some support in an editorial
Greg Bensel to the Times-Picayune opinion editor
Bensel also wrote to the Times-Picayune’s opinion editor, saying: “Today the Archbishop met face to face with all of the media – he sent a strong and faithful message!
“I hope the Picayune would show him – the man – some support in an editorial – our community listens and values [what] you all have to say!!”
The Times-Picayune’s next couple of print editions did not contain such an editorial. But as part of its news coverage about the list, the newspaper did publish a letter in its entirety by Christopher Fronk, Jesuit high school’s then president, that expressed support for Aymond’s release of the document, which contained the names of several abusive priests who had worked at Jesuit high school. Fronk’s letter hailed the disclosure as having been carried out in “a spirit of reconciliation and transparency”.
Once the list’s embargo expired, Aymond granted his only live, on-air interview that day to radio talkshow host Newell Normand, a former sheriff of a suburban New Orleans area – at Bensel’s urging.
Normand’s employer, WWL Radio, has long held the exclusive rights to the Saints’ local broadcasts. And Bensel brokered the conversation between Normand and Aymond through emails involving the director of the radio station, which – despite its call letters – is not affiliated with WWL Louisiana, the TV channel.
McDonald, the archdiocese spokesperson, sent Bensel eight questions to “share with Newell to cover” two days before the interview. Bensel replied to McDonald, copied Normand as well as the host’s station director, and told the radio outlet’s employees: “These questions are a great framework for Newell.”
“Love my Di,” Bensel wrote to the station director, referring to her by a nickname, after the organizations all agreed to the interview. She responded: “Love you too, GB.”
Normand later asked Aymond at least four of the eight proposed questions in a fashion that was substantially similar – though not necessarily verbatim – to what the church suggested. The rest, Aymond answered unprompted.
The suggested questions covered how law enforcement had been provided with a copy of the list; what emotions Aymond was experiencing that day; how the roster “is accurate” but may expand; and that adequate measures were in place for the archdiocese to protect children. Aymond said on the program that the number of priests on the list was relatively small given how many clergymen there had been in the archdiocese over the years, but that even that low tally was too much.
As an example of the talking points, Aymond’s spokesperson suggested that Normand ask her boss, “What has this process been like for you?” After Bensel passed the questions along, Normand asked the archbishop, “I know your heart is broken over this – in going through this. How has this process been for you?”
The suggestions from the church included: “There were earlier media reports that said the list may not be complete, but this is an extensive list going back very far. It seems comprehensive. (ask for response).”
Normand didn’t ask Aymond that on the air. But according to a transcript, after the interview ended, the host remarked, “I know some folks say that they already believe that there are some names that have not been revealed yet, and [Aymond] has said that that is actually a possibility.”
Normand, who has repeatedly criticized the church’s handling of the abuse crisis on air, did raise several issues with the archbishop that weren’t outlined by the archdiocese through Bensel. For example, he asked Aymond why the church didn’t inform law enforcement about allegations of abuse earlier. He also raised concerns about priests harassing other clergy. And he spoke about his own journey as a Catholic to accept that child molestation by priests was rampant.
A statement on Saturday from the corporation that owns WWL Radio, Audacy, said: “WWL stands by its coverage of this story. We have no additional comment.”
‘I don’t get paid enough’
The volume of communications between the Saints and the church lessened after the release of the list, according to the emails. But the two sides still stayed in close contact for many more months.
Between February and March of 2019, mere weeks after the Saints nearly clinched what would have been a second Super Bowl berth, the organizations communicated about a request from Aymond for Benson to submit to the Advocate a flattering letter to the editor. The letter’s purpose was to exalt the archdiocese and charitable programs it has led or participated in.
Make as many edits as you see fit
Greg Bensel to New Orleans church officials regarding a letter to the Advocate newspaper
For help on crafting the letter, the emails show that Bensel brought in some of the Saints’ media relations staffers who ordinarily facilitate sports journalists’ interviews with the team’s players and coaches. (One successfully suggested naming three Saints players who have been first-team All-Pro selections while touting their and Benson’s work with certain social or charitable programs, including an archdiocese-affiliated food bank to which she donated $3.5m in 2019.)
Bensel gave the archdiocese the opportunity to review a draft of what he called “a very robust letter of support from Mrs Benson”, saying: “Make as many edits as you see fit.”
He eventually distributed what he said Benson’s teams “came up with in conjunction with the archdiocese” among the Saints’ general counsel, their governmental liaison and Lauscha, according to the emails.
“Do any of you see an issue with this???” Bensel wrote.
General counsel Vicky Neumeyer replied: “I have to chime in that I don’t really like it. I don’t want [Benson] to appear to be a puppet for the archdiocese because we have way too many constituents from all walks of life.”
Bensel wrote back to Neumeyer that he would come chat with her. She later sent an email saying she spoke with Lauscha and that all she meant to communicate was the letter “should be more personal and less stone-cold facts”.
The New Orleans Saints and Pelicans training and practice facility at the Ochsner sports performance center in Metairie, Louisiana. Photograph: Kirby Lee/Getty Images
After Bensel submitted it in her name, Benson’s letter to the editor appeared in the Advocate. Part of the letter addressed the local church’s work combating sex trafficking and advocating for children’s online safety, about five years before state police began investigating allegations that the archdiocese had allegedly sexually trafficked minors.
“Many issues in our society are very difficult to talk about, such as pornography, online safety for children, drug abuse and sex trafficking,” the letter said. It also asserted that “the local Catholic Church is addressing these issues head-on”.
The Saints’ statement on Saturday said that the letter was not “misleading” and did not excuse “the misconduct of members of the clergy”.
Soon thereafter, for an Advocate story on the first anniversary of Tom Benson’s death, Bensel, McDonald and Aymond exchanged emails about the archbishop providing a statement praising Gayle’s support of the church in the first year of her Saints and Pelicans ownership. Gayle Benson and Bensel were given the chance to review and approve the statement, which read: “Mrs Benson is a woman of deep faith, and she puts her faith into action.”
This is what we plan to send once we know you guys are good with this
Greg Bensel comment to New Orleans archdiocese about a statement from team owner Gayle Benson
Bensel, Benson, Lauscha, McDonald and Aymond all then communicated about an article that the Times-Picayune – which would be acquired by the Advocate weeks later – was preparing for Easter chronicling the early aftermath of the clergy-abuse list’s release. Benson had been asked for comment about how she perceived Aymond to have navigated that period. She gave Bensel permission to draft her statement – but to call Aymond “for his approval” prior to releasing it.
Bensel then prepared a quote, sent it to McDonald, copied Aymond and said: “This is what we plan to send once we know you guys are good with this.”
The published quote from Benson that Aymond signed off on read: “My personal relationship with the archbishop aside, I believe he has shown tremendous leadership and guidance through this very tough time. In my opinion, he has dealt with this very sad issue head on, with great resolve and determination to do the right thing and to do it as fully transparent as he is allowed.”
Bensel then emailed Benson, Lauscha and Aymond a link to that Times-Picayune article once it was published. “Thank you, Greg,” Benson wrote back to Bensel.
As late as June 2019, Bensel was still helping the archdiocese with its crisis communications, preparing Aymond for an interview with the Advocate about the effect of the clergy-abuse scandal in general on church finances. “I don’t get paid enough – Helping the Archbishop prep for his 9 am meeting,” he wrote in an email to his ex-wife, after Aymond copied him on to a chain of communications about the upcoming interview.
A subpoena would put an end to the Saints and the church’s email correspondence about a month later.
‘We are proud’
The Saints and archdiocese’s decision to coordinate their messaging created a headache for the organizations after it became clear that Aymond’s list had raised more questions than it answered. Numerous clergy molestation survivors came forward complaining that their abusers were omitted from the list, even in cases in which the church said it believed their allegations and had paid them substantial financial settlements.
The list did not provide the number of accusations against each clergyman or say exactly when they worked at the local churches to which they were assigned. That concerned the clergy-abuse survivor community, who worried the paucity of information might be an impediment for unreported victims contemplating coming forward.
It also concerned Cannizzaro’s top assistant district attorney, Graymond Martin, who responded to receiving the list by drafting a request on 8 November 2018 for more information, including basics such as any details indicating “where the alleged acts occurred, … when each act … occurred and some description of each of the alleged acts”.
Martin sent that draft to a subordinate. But it is unclear whether the request was formally sent to the archdiocese.
In his radio interview with Normand, Aymond emphasized that the archdiocese would be reporting complaints against living clergy to law enforcement. Bensel’s email indicated he consulted with Martin’s boss, Cannizzaro, about the list before its release. But Martin’s email noted that the DA’s office still had not received “copies of any documentation … of these complaints and the results of any inquiry conducted by the Archdiocese”.
Cannizzaro filed charges of child rape against one person on the list: George Brignac, in connection with the allegations at the center of the $550,000 settlement paid to one of his victims in July 2018. But Brignac, 85, died in 2020 while awaiting trial on charges that dated back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, sparing the church a courtroom spectacle.
The church did not catch the same break nearly five years later, after Cannizzaro’s successor as DA, Jason Williams, intervened in civil lawsuits and subpoenaed secret documents from the archdiocese to pursue child rape charges against a local priest named Lawrence Hecker.
Hecker’s name had not been disclosed until the list came out, even though he had been removed from ministry in 2002 because he was a suspected abuser. A survivor then accused Hecker of raping him when he was an underage Catholic high school student in 1975 – a crime that until then had not been disclosed to authorities and had no deadline before which prosecutors had to file charges.
The prosecution of Hecker kicked into high gear in the summer of 2023, when the Guardian and WWL Louisiana began publishing a series of reports on a written confession from the priest to his church superiors in 1999 that he had sexually molested or harassed several children during his career. The outlets also got Hecker to confess to being a serial child molester on camera and showed how the church took steps to deliberately hide the extent of his abusive history for decades beforehand.
Ultimately, Williams’ office charged Hecker with the former student’s 1975 assault. He pleaded guilty in December of last year at age 93 to child rape and other crimes, and he died in prison less than a week after receiving a mandatory life sentence.
Meanwhile, evidence turned up by Hecker’s prosecution prompted the state police investigator who built the case against him to swear under oath that he had probable cause to suspect the archdiocese ran a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for the “widespread … abuse of minors dating back decades”. That abuse was concealed from authorities beyond just Hecker’s case, and an investigation into the matter that could generate criminal charges against the clerical molesters’ protectors was ongoing, the sworn statement said.
Though Hecker and Brignac were on the initial version of the list, it eventually grew from 57 names to about 80.
A number of the additions came only after news media reported on conspicuous omissions, including two – Robert Cooper and Brian Highfill – added after WWL Louisiana and an Advocate reporter now at the Guardian questioned the archdiocese about them. Two other additions involved clergymen who also pleaded guilty – albeit in suburban New Orleans communities – to sexually molesting children, either before or after their ordination.
The deluge of claims eventually drove the archdiocese to file for bankruptcy protection in the spring of 2020.
That proceeding – which remained ongoing as of the publication of this report – led to more than 500 abuse claims against more than 300 clergymen, religious brothers and sisters, and lay staffers. The archdiocese does not consider most of those as being credibly accused, saying it only has the authority to include clergymen – priests and deacons – on its sanctioned list. And it could cost the archdiocese hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to clergy-abuse victims to settle the bankruptcy, if the church even manages to do so successfully.
Saturday’s statement from the Saints’ lawyer said Benson would not donate money to the archdiocese for it to settle with clergy molestation survivors.
“That abuse occurred is a terrible fact,” the statement continued. “As a member of the Catholic faith, Mrs Benson will continue to support the church and the great things it does. Her support is unwavering, but she has no intention of donating funds to the archdiocese to pay for settlements with abuse victims, and she has not done so.”
As all the disparate cases leading to the church bankruptcy made spectacular headlines, the Saints emails remained hidden for years. And the reasons for that are complex.
The communications had been produced as evidence in an unresolved civil lawsuit involving allegations against Brignac – the deacon who had been charged with sex crimes multiple times since the 1970s but had been reading at masses as recently as the summer of 2018.
In July 2019, the attorneys for that pending lawsuit’s plaintiff – who have also represented victims of Hecker – raised eyebrows by issuing a subpoena for copies of all communications among Saints and archdiocesan officials. The attorneys wrote in an accompanying court filing that the subpoena was necessary because the case’s discovery process turned up emails as well as other evidence establishing that Bensel was advising the archdiocese on how to navigate its clergy-abuse crisis.
News media outlets almost immediately began trying to access and report on the emails. Bensel was not pleased with their interest. Beside asking Lauscha over email to call his cellphone, he told an Advocate reporter seeking comment on the subpoena to instead ask his newspaper’s owner, John Georges. Bensel then said his organization had nothing to say on the subpoena, echoing an email to him from Lauscha which read: “As with any legal matter, we have no comment.”
The last of the “Saints emails” shows that Bensel forwarded the reporter’s request for comment to Georges. There is no indication in the emails that Georges responded.
In short order, WWL Louisiana, the now-combined Times-Picayune/Advocate newspaper and two other local television stations joined the Associated Press in suing for access to the emails. The media argued that the missives were a matter of public interest. Attorneys for the Saints argued that its correspondence with the church should remain private – while also maintaining that they had merely provided public relations advice to the archdiocese and had done nothing to be ashamed of.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond and Gayle Benson during Fat Tuesday celebrations in 2020 in New Orleans. Photograph: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images
They explicitly denied having had “a hand in determining which names should or should not have been included on the pedophile list”, as the attorneys who obtained the subpoena put it.
“We are proud of the role we played and yes, in hindsight, we would help again to assist the archdiocese in its ability to publish the list with the hope of taking this step to heal the community,” Benson wrote in a statement. “I want to be clear … that I am not going to be deterred in helping people in need, whether a friend seeking advice or a stranger in need, it does not matter, our list is long.”
In what seemed to be directed at news organizations whose businesses depend to some extent on credentialed access to – or advertising and broadcasting rights from – the Saints and Pelicans, the statement also said: “I hope that is not lost on the same people that write such articles when they too come asking for help or support.”
On Saturday, the Saints’ statement said Benson was “proud of her executive team and supports them”.
“While the public relations assistance offered to the archdiocese has come under scrutiny, Mrs Benson and her team remain steadfast in bringing our community together and continuing to help the good people of our community,” the Saints’ statement said.
Nonetheless, the New Orleans archdiocese opted to move on from relying on Bensel after the July 2019 subpoena. It later retained a crisis communications consultant from a local firm at a cost of $10,000 monthly, public court filings have shown.
The media’s efforts to secure the Saints emails hit a significant snag when the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the local court system beginning in March 2020.
Then, on 1 May 2020, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy. The move automatically and indefinitely halted litigation pending against the archdiocese.
The state court judge overseeing the case that produced the Saints emails never determined whether or not the emails were confidential.
As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, there were confidentiality orders applied to various archdiocesan documents. One of the primary justifications for such orders was to protect the identities of clergy-abuse victims.
In the correspondence between the Saints and the church that the Guardian and WWL Louisiana reviewed, no clergy-abuse victims are identified.
Nonetheless, the Saints lawyer’s statement on Saturday alleged that the emails were “leaked to the press in violation of a court order”. The statement also complained that the team was confronted with those communications as New Orleans prepared to host the Super Bowl showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles on 9 February.
“The team and the entire city are committed to hosting the greatest Super Bowl week and game ever,” the team’s statement said.
Ultimately, journalists managed to obtain and expose the emails.
One of those journalists was the first to expose Brignac before joining the Associated Press. Another investigated the Saints’ connection to Aymond in Sports Illustrated before joining the New York Times. And two contributed significantly to efforts to bring Hecker to justice at WWL Louisiana and the Guardian.
In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org. In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
In a recent scandal involving clergy abuse in New Orleans, emails have surfaced showing how the NFL’s Saints and NBA’s Pelicans helped a local church spin the crisis through strategic communications. The emails reveal that the sports teams offered guidance on handling the situation and even provided resources for public relations efforts.
The scandal, which involved allegations of sexual abuse by clergy members at St. John the Baptist Church, rocked the community and raised concerns about transparency and accountability within the church. In the emails, representatives from the Saints and Pelicans can be seen advising the church on how to navigate the media scrutiny and manage public perception.
While some may question the involvement of sports teams in a religious scandal, others argue that their expertise in crisis communications and public relations can be invaluable in times of crisis. The emails show that the teams helped the church craft messages that emphasized accountability, transparency, and a commitment to justice for the victims.
Overall, the emails shed light on the complex dynamics at play in crisis communications and how different organizations can come together to support one another in times of need. As the New Orleans clergy abuse scandal continues to unfold, it remains to be seen how the church, sports teams, and community will move forward in addressing the issues at hand.
Tags:
Crisis communications, NFL Saints, NBA Pelicans, New Orleans church scandal, clergy abuse, New Orleans clergy abuse scandal, New Orleans church scandal, NFL and NBA support, crisis management, email communications, New Orleans community support.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans was facing a crisis. A sex-abuse scandal was bursting into public view, sending shock waves through the heavily Catholic city.
Leaders of one of New Orleans’ other major institutions, the N.F.L.’s New Orleans Saints, were concerned. Gayle Benson, the team’s owner, is a devout Catholic, major church benefactor and close friend of Archbishop Gregory Aymond.
So in July 2018, when Greg Bensel, the Saints’ head of communications, saw a local news story revealing that a former deacon who had been removed from the ministry after abuse accusations was serving in a public role at a local church, he sent an email to Ms. Benson.
“The issues that the Archbishop has to deal with that never involve him,” Mr. Bensel wrote.
In reply, Ms. Benson said that the archbishop was “very upset.” Then, Mr. Bensel made a suggestion: He offered to lend his “crisis communications” expertise, gathered from his decades of working for the Saints, to the archdiocese.
Ms. Benson thanked him and said that she would share his offer with Archbishop Aymond.
That exchange was the first of more than 300 emails, obtained by The New York Times, that show the Saints and the archdiocese working together to temper the fallout from a flood of sexual abuse accusations made against priests and church employees. The abuse accusations, which span decades, have led to dozens of civil lawsuits and out-of-court settlements, more than 600 claims of abuse in the archdiocese’s ongoing bankruptcy case and a handful of criminal convictions, and are part of an international reckoning for the church.
Archbishop Aymond, who has served in New Orleans for most of his career, has led the archdiocese since 2009. During his term as archbishop, the archdiocese has spent millions of dollars on settlements for abuse claims while victims and their representatives have said he didn’t promptly report accusations to the public or law enforcement. The archbishop also has a long history with the Benson family, riding on Mardi Gras floats with Ms. Benson and serving as a witness on the will of her husband, Tom.
The several hundred pages of correspondence reveal the extent to which Saints leaders leveraged their influence in New Orleans to aid the archdiocese and offer a rare window into how powerful institutions can work together to shape public opinion. They show Mr. Bensel, with the approval of Ms. Benson and using his Saints email address on the N.F.L.’s web domain, working closely with the archdiocese in attempting to solicit positive media coverage of the church and burnish the image of Archbishop Aymond, even writing talking points for him.
One email exchange also shows members of the Saints’ leadership discussing a list of credibly accused clergy members prepared by the Archdiocese of New Orleans shortly before its release in November 2018. The list followed similar disclosures in other cities, and church leaders positioned it as a transparent public accounting that could help victims find closure and seek justice. But it has been criticized by victims and their advocates for being incomplete.
A few hours before the list was released publicly, Mr. Bensel had an email back and forth with Dennis Lauscha, the Saints’ team president. Mr. Bensel told Mr. Lauscha that there had been a “cc” the night before with Leon Cannizzaro, then the district attorney for New Orleans, “that allowed us to take certain people off the list.” Mr. Bensel did not include any more details and it is not clear if names were actually removed from the list.
“No one from the Saints organization or the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had any role in compiling the list or had any say in adding or removing anyone from the list,” the Archdiocese of New Orleans said in a statement. A lawyer for the Saints, James Gulotta, also asserted that no Saints employee played a role in constructing the list. Mr. Cannizzaro, who now leads the criminal division for the Louisiana attorney general’s office, did not return multiple calls and messages seeking comment. He previously said that he first saw the list the day the church made it public.
Mr. Gulotta said in a statement that Mr. Bensel had been told about a conversation between Mr. Cannizzaro and an archdiocese staff member about the list but did not participate and had “no firsthand knowledge” of what was discussed. It was Mr. Bensel’s “understanding,” he said, that one reason for a conversation may have been determining if the appearance of any name on the list “would interfere with a criminal investigation.” Mr. Bensel’s email refers to his “understanding that the list would be updated by the archdiocese,” Mr. Gulotta said.
Ms. Benson “is proud of her executive team and supports them,” Mr. Gulotta said.
The Saints’ work with the church was made public in 2020 through a lawsuit filed against the church by a former altar boy. The Saints were not part of the case, but the plaintiff’s lawyers said in a court filing that they had obtained hundreds of emails through discovery showing that the N.F.L. team aided the church in a public campaign to protect the archdiocese and Archbishop Aymond. The Saints fought in state court to keep the majority of these emails out of public view before the case was moved to federal court when the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in May 2020.
The Saints had described their involvement as “minimal” and said that it came about because the church asked for advice on handling media attention around the release of the November 2018 list. Mr. Gulotta said that nothing in the emails contradicted the team’s past statements. But a review of the previously undisclosed messages shows the team’s leaders coming up with the idea to help the archdiocese and working with church leaders for at least a year. The archdiocese said that it did not pay Mr. Bensel for his public relations work.
It is common for N.F.L. teams to partner with local officials and civic organizations on community issues unrelated to sports. But the extent of the Saints’ backing of the local Catholic Church and the nature of the team’s work is atypical. The Archdiocese of New Orleans is also currently under investigation by state and federal authorities over claims that high-ranking members of the church ignored or covered up accusations of clergy abuse of minors, according to a search warrant of the archdiocese’s headquarters executed by state police last year. The search warrant did not identify any church leaders by name. (No church officials have been charged, and the archdiocese said it was cooperating with law enforcement.)
The Saints are also central to the civic life of New Orleans. The team’s stadium, the Superdome, is the host of this year’s Super Bowl, and the team became a symbol of resilience in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Ms. Benson, who took over the Saints and the N.B.A.’s Pelicans in 2018 after the death of her husband, Tom, has contributed more than $80 million to the archdiocese and other Catholic causes since 2007 through the foundation she and her late husband started. In Mr. Gulotta’s statement, he said Ms. Benson would “continue to support the Church and the great things it does. Her support is unwavering.”
The Saints’ involvement with the archdiocese began after an article ran in a local newspaper, The Advocate, about a former Catholic deacon and schoolteacher, George F. Brignac, who, public records show, faced numerous accusations of sexual abuse across decades. It was that article in 2018 that prompted Mr. Bensel to email Ms. Benson and offer his help to the archdiocese. The lawsuit that led to the disclosure of the Saints’ emails was also based on a claim against Mr. Brignac from 40 years earlier. Mr. Brignac died in 2020 while awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree rape, a case that involved another altar boy.
Mr. Gulotta said that a federal district judge, Jay Zainey, recommended to the archbishop that Mr. Bensel could help the church handle “the large volume of media inquiries” about clergy abuse. Judge Zainey, who is Catholic, said in a 2020 interview that he suggested to the archbishop that he use Mr. Bensel as an adviser. He first appears in the batch of Saints emails in October 2018 on chains in which Mr. Bensel updates the archbishop about his work.
Messages sent over the next year from Mr. Bensel’s Saints email account show him using connections from his communications work for the Saints and the Pelicans, where he holds the same position, on behalf of the Catholic Church. Mr. Bensel also cited his Saints experience in offering his “counsel” to another Catholic institution — his alma mater, Jesuit High School — after The Advocate revealed that the school had made undisclosed settlements with sexual abuse survivors. “You have the full support of myself, Dennis and Mrs. Benson,” he wrote to the school’s president. (Jesuit did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
In October 2018, Mr. Bensel wrote to top editors at The Advocate and another newspaper, The Times-Picayune, saying that he was reaching out as a New Orleans native and member of the Catholic Church, not as a representative of the Saints or the Pelicans. But he cited his work with the Saints, writing that support from the local media had helped the small-market team thrive. He asked the newspapers to back the church in a similar way as it prepared to release its list of credibly accused clergy and offered an “exclusive sit-down” with the archbishop.
“We have the right man — at the right time — right now and I am asking that YOU as the most influential newspaper in our state, please get behind him and work with him,” Mr. Bensel wrote, referring to Archbishop Aymond. He added, “Casting a critical eye on him is neither beneficial nor right.”
Mr. Bensel forwarded his letter to Ms. Benson and Mr. Lauscha. Ms. Benson replied: “Great letter Greg … spot on! Thank you very much.” A meeting was soon set up between the archbishop and Advocate editors. (Kevin Hall, president and publisher of the media company that owns The Advocate and The Times-Picayune, said that engagement with community leaders “does not dilute our journalistic standards or keep us from pursuing the truth.”)
Multiple emails show Ms. Benson encouraging Mr. Bensel’s work for the church or expressing support for Archbishop Aymond to her employees. (“Very sad he is going through this,” Ms. Benson wrote in one message to the Saints’ vice president of business operations.)
In the weeks leading up to the release of the list in November 2018, Mr. Bensel’s work for the church included, according to the emails, writing talking points for Archbishop Aymond to use in the Advocate meeting; providing a host for the Saints’ flagship radio station with a list of questions to use for an in-person interview with the archbishop on the day of the list’s release; and editing the letter the archbishop would send to parishioners about the list.
Mr. Bensel’s November 2018 email that referred to taking people off the list came in response to a message from Mr. Lauscha, who asked if “your SJ you discussed yesterday” — an apparent reference to a member of the Jesuit order — had made the list. Mr. Bensel also told Mr. Lauscha that the list would be updated and that the church’s message was that it would not stop with the initial release of names. The archdiocese said that Mr. Bensel was provided a copy of the church’s list “just prior to its release date.”
Archbishop Aymond said at the time of the list’s release that more than 10 staff members and outside legal professionals reviewed the files of nearly 2,500 priests who had served in the archdiocese since 1950, and that additional people reviewed accusations that were received after a priest had died.
Twenty-two clergy members have been added to the archdiocese’s list since its release, bringing the number of names to 79. An evidentiary memo prepared for law enforcement by lawyers representing victims of clergy sex abuse, first reported by The Guardian, contended that more than 300 clergy members and a handful of employees who worked in the Archdiocese of New Orleans have been credibly accused of sexual abuse, including clergy members who appear on lists from other dioceses but not in New Orleans and who have been named in proofs of claim filed in the bankruptcy.
The vast majority of clergy members on the archdiocese’s credibly accused list have not faced criminal prosecution. Most of the accusations stem from events said to have taken place decades ago, and about a third of the priests included on the original list had already died. But when the retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker was indicted in 2023 for sexually assaulting a teenage boy in the 1970s, Mr. Cannizzaro’s successor as district attorney, Jason Williams, referred to a “cone of silence” that has often protected clergy members. (Mr. Hecker, who died in prison in December shortly after pleading guilty, had confessed to archdiocese leaders in 1999 that he had abused multiple teens, The Guardian reported.)
Around the release of the list, the church sought to make good on the call for support from local media that Mr. Bensel had initiated. In a draft letter that Archbishop Aymond sent to Mr. Bensel for approval, he complained that The Advocate had published an advance list of priests it believed should be named by the archdiocese and included a call for potential victims to contact the newspaper. The publisher, Dan Shea, replied by asserting that the newspaper had the right to do “our own reporting.” He said the call for potential victims to contact the newspaper had been added online by an editor “at the last minute” and was subsequently removed.
The day of the list’s release, Mr. Bensel accompanied Archbishop Aymond on local media interviews in which the church leader pledged total transparency and justice for victims.
Mr. Bensel’s work with the church continued for at least several months after the release of the list. In December 2018, he asked the archdiocese’s general counsel, Wendy Vitter, if there were updates “relative to lawsuits or any other issues that we feared may arise” from the list’s release. In the spring of 2019, the emails show, he worked with church officials on comments from Ms. Benson in support of the archbishop for a Times-Picayune article and a guest column for The Advocate that Mr. Bensel said the archbishop requested she write.
One member of the Saints organization, the general counsel Vicky Neumeyer, expressed concerns when Mr. Bensel circulated a draft of the column internally. “I don’t want her to appear to be a puppet for the Archdiocese because we have way too many constituents from all walks of life,” she wrote. The piece, in which Ms. Benson wrote about “the positive impact our local Archdiocese plays in our community,” was soon published with minor changes.
Mr. Bensel also helped Archbishop Aymond prepare for an interview with The Advocate in June 2019 about the clergy abuse crisis. In one of the final exchanges before the Saints were served a subpoena for their communications with the church, he forwarded the thread about that preparation to a family member. “I don’t get paid enough,” Mr. Bensel wrote.
The New Orleans Saints have recently made headlines for their unexpected involvement in helping the Catholic Church handle a sex-abuse scandal. The partnership between the football team and the church may seem unlikely, but it has proven to be a powerful force for addressing the issue and providing support to victims.
In a statement released by the Saints organization, they announced their decision to aid the Archdiocese of New Orleans in their efforts to address the scandal and provide assistance to those affected. This collaboration has included financial support, counseling services, and a commitment to transparency and accountability.
The Saints’ involvement in this sensitive matter demonstrates their commitment to social responsibility and their willingness to use their platform for good. By standing with the Catholic Church in addressing this issue, the team has shown that they are not just dedicated to winning games, but also to making a positive impact in their community.
While the partnership between the New Orleans Saints and the Catholic Church may be unexpected, it is a powerful example of how different organizations can come together to address difficult issues and support those in need. This collaboration serves as a reminder that we all have a responsibility to stand up against abuse and work towards healing and justice for survivors.
Faith has played a central role in Jelly Roll’s rise to country music stardom. His industry debut, Whitsitt Chapel, delved into themes of spirituality, sin, and redemption. So it makes sense that the Antioch, Tennessee-raised artist (born Jason DeFord) would choose Brandon Lake for his latest collaboration. Lake is currently tearing up the contemporary Christian charts with “Hard Fought Hallelujah.” And when Jelly Roll heard the song, it stirred up something within him that he knew he had to lean into.
Jelly Roll Gets Candid About His Struggles With the Church
Part of Jelly Roll’s appeal lies in his steadfast commitment to honesty, especially when it comes to his past. He doesn’t gloss over his past battles with incarceration and substance abuse. In a recent conversation with collaborator Brandon Lake, the “Need a Favor” singer revealed that his walk with God hasn’t always been a straight line.
“I carry my faith with me, but I’m also struggling, and very honest and open about that,” he said. “I’ve been so bitter and hurt by the church and their dogma that I created my own.”
However, Jelly also firmly believes that “music meets us where we are.” That’s what “Hard Fought Hallelujah” did for him, and what he hopes to do by teaming up with Lake.
“I haven’t had a record touch me like that in so long,” Jelly told Lake. “It’s been years since I worshipped the way that I worshipped to that song.”
He continued, “I needed that record when I heard it, but then to double back and be like, ‘Yo, there’s a chance you could work on this record with this guy.’ And I’m like, ‘Whoa, God sends me this record, and not only does He want me to listen to it and worship, He wants me to live with it and learn it.”
“Hard Fought Hallelujah” Drops Feb. 7
Released in November, “Hard Fought Hallelujah” marks Brandon Lake’s sixth No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart. The song’s crossover appeal also gave the Charleston, South Carolina-based pastor his first-ever entry on the Billboard Hot 100.
In a recent post to his Instagram stories, Lake shared his excitement for the upcoming Jelly Roll version of “Hard Fought Hallelujah.”
“It’s been so cool. I cannot wait for this to come out,” he said. “I cannot wait for y’all to hear the back story and how we’ve become friends.”
Featured image by Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock
Jelly Roll, the Nashville-based rapper and singer, recently opened up about his latest album, “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” and how it has been a deeply personal and spiritual journey for him.
In a candid interview, Jelly Roll spoke about how the album has touched him in a way that he hasn’t experienced in a long time. He described the process of creating the album as cathartic and emotional, with each song delving into his struggles, triumphs, and faith.
One of the standout tracks on the album is the title track, “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” which Jelly Roll describes as a raw and emotional confession of his experiences with religion and spirituality. He opens up about feeling “hurt by the church” and the struggles he has faced in reconciling his faith with his own personal beliefs.
Despite these challenges, Jelly Roll’s music remains deeply rooted in his spirituality. He speaks about the therapeutic power of music and how it has helped him navigate his own struggles and find peace within himself.
As Jelly Roll continues to grow and evolve as an artist, his music remains a testament to his resilience and perseverance. “Hard Fought Hallelujah” is a powerful and moving reflection of his journey, and a reminder of the healing power of music.
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Jelly Roll, Hard Fought Hallelujah, Worship, Church Hurt, Record Touch, Music Interview, Country Rap, Jelly Roll Interview, Music Industry, Gospel Music, Artist Spotlight
A Michigan priest had his license revoked by the Anglican Catholic Church after he mimicked a straight-arm gesture performed by Elon Musk during a speech earlier this month that some have interpreted as a Nazi salute.
Calvin Robinson, who is listed as the priest-in-charge of St. Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, performed the gesture at the end of a Jan. 25 speech at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, D.C.
On Wednesday, the Anglican Catholic Church posted a statement that said Robinson’s “license in this Church has been revoked” after he made a “gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.”
“While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition,” the statement read. “Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.
“Furthermore, we understand that this is not just an administrative matter. The Holocaust was an episode of unspeakable horror, enacted by a regime of evil men. We condemn Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in all its forms. And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity.”
Musk’s gesture that Robinson was mimicking came in a Jan. 20 speech during celebrations of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Musk slapped his hand on his chest, extended his arm straight out and up with his palm facing down and said, “My heart goes out to you.”
At the close of Robinson’s Jan. 25 speech, he quoted Musk, saying “my heart goes out to you,” before mimicking his straight-arm motion.
In a statement posted to his Facebook page, Robinson said “in case it needs saying: I am not a Nazi,” and that the gesture was a “joke.”
Robinson is from England and in the past has been outspoken about his conservative views, according to a biography on St. Paul’s Anglican Catholic Church’s website.
In a shocking turn of events, a Michigan priest has been defrocked by the church after mimicking Elon Musk’s controversial straight-arm gesture during a recent sermon.
The priest, whose name has not been released by the church, was captured on video making the gesture while speaking to his congregation. The gesture, which has been associated with white supremacy and neo-Nazi ideologies, was met with outrage and condemnation from both parishioners and church officials.
In a statement released by the church, they expressed their deep disappointment in the priest’s actions and emphasized that his behavior was not in line with the teachings of the church. They announced that he had been immediately defrocked and would no longer be serving as a priest.
This incident serves as a reminder of the power and responsibility that comes with being a religious leader. It also highlights the importance of upholding the values of love, acceptance, and inclusion in all aspects of life, especially within the church.
As the community grapples with this shocking revelation, it is crucial to remember that no one is above reproach and that actions have consequences. Let this serve as a lesson to us all to always strive to do better and be better in our words and actions.
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SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is calling a recently released Netflix series “dangerously misleading,” claiming it mischaracterizes LDS prophet Brigham Young.
“American Primeval”, which started streaming on Netflix earlier this month, follows a group of LDS pioneers trying to survive the American frontier during the Utah War of 1857.
The show depicts an event known as the “Mountain Meadows Massacre“ where local Latter-day Saint militiamen, aided by American Indian allies, massacred about 120 emigrants traveling by wagon to California.
“While historical fiction can be illuminating, this drama is dangerously misleading. Brigham Young, a revered prophet and courageous pioneer, is, by any historical standard, egregiously mischaracterized as a villainous, violent fanatic. Other individuals and groups are also depicted in ways that reinforce stereotypes that are both inaccurate and harmful,” a statement from the Church read, in part.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director Peter Berg responded to criticism of the show’s representations. He said it’s not a literal depiction of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as those massacres took place over three days and the one in the show happens quickly.
“I’ve heard some of the pushback, but I haven’t heard anyone from the Mormon side deny that the Meadows Massacre happened and that Mormons did it. I have had them express concerns that we do take other liberties,” he said.
ABC4 has reached out to the team of “American Primeval”, but has yet to hear back at this time.
This isn’t the only time the church has responded to its depictions in media. The church also released a response shortly before the film “Heretic” came out, an A24 film where two missionaries of the church were trapped by the character of Mr. Reed, who put them through trials of their faith and beliefs.
Without naming a specific film or show, the Church has said some of its Hollywood portrayals are “fair and accurate”, but also said some portrayals are stereotypes or gross misrepresentations that have real-life consequences.
“We understand the fascination some in the media have with the Church, but regret that portrayals often rely on sensationalism and inaccuracies that do not fairly and fully reflect the lives of our Church members or the sacred beliefs that they hold dear,” the Church said in a statement.
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has spoken out against the popular Netflix series “The Book of Mormon,” calling it “dangerously misleading.”
In a statement released on their official website, the LDS Church expressed concerns about the way the show portrays their faith and its teachings. The series, which follows the lives of fictional characters in a Utah-based Mormon community, has been criticized for its inaccurate and often sensationalized depiction of the religion.
The Church urged viewers to be cautious when consuming media that claims to represent their beliefs, emphasizing the importance of seeking out accurate information from reliable sources. They also emphasized the importance of respecting the beliefs and practices of others, regardless of their faith.
The statement concluded by encouraging members of the LDS Church to engage in open and honest discussions about their faith with those who may have questions or misconceptions. The Church is committed to promoting understanding and dialogue, even in the face of media portrayals that may not accurately represent their beliefs.
Overall, the LDS Church’s response to “The Book of Mormon” serves as a reminder of the importance of critical thinking and discernment when consuming media, especially when it comes to matters of faith.
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LDS Church, Netflix series, Mormonism, religion, criticism, controversy, faith, beliefs, response, LDS Church statement, media backlash, religious representation
The settlement that cleared the way for the construction of a temple in a Texas town by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints appears to be unraveling, according to statements by both sides.
Now, the future of the McKinney Texas Temple may be headed to the courts if the agreement the town and the church reached in mediation in November doesn’t hold, a local church spokeswoman said in a new statement released Monday.
Leaders in Fairview, Texas, denied the church’s original building application in August, after some residents complained the proposed temple was too large. The town and church forged a settlement in mediation after the church voluntarily agreed to reduce the size of the temple, dropping it from 44,000 square feet to 29,960 and from two stories to one. Church leaders also reduced the height of the proposed steeple from 173 feet.
“Despite imposing a substantial burden on the church’s exercise and practice of religion, the church offered to make significant compromises, including reducing both the size of the temple by 10,000 square feet and reducing the height of the steeple to 120 feet,” the spokeswoman for the temple, Melissa McNeely, said in a statement.
The mayor and town councilmembers unanimously agreed to approve the smaller temple, and the church began to prepare a new application.
Why is the settlement now in question?
But Fairview officials waffled publicly. Mayor Henry Lessner called the settlement an “initial compromise” in a letter announcing it to residents, then said at a Dec. 3 town meeting that negotiations were only in the first inning. Town officials also characterized the church as a bully during the meeting and asked residents to call church headquarters to ask for a still smaller temple, according to news reports.
A town representative did just that the following day. According to a letter from a church attorney, an attorney for the town called him and asked for the church to accept a temple significantly smaller than the one the sides agreed to in mediation. Mayor Lessner then was quoted in the December town newsletter as saying, “through our attorneys, we have told (the church) that there is a good chance that the new design with the 120-foot tower will not be accepted.”
On Dec. 20, the sides held a videoconference. According to the church attorney’s letter, Lessner told church representatives that while he and the mayor pro tem intended to vote for mediated settlement, they did not know how others would vote in wake of negative reaction from some residents.
What will the church do next?
Church officials planned to file their new application for the smaller temple on Jan. 13, but they became uncertain it would be accepted because of statements by the mayor and other town officials, according to the church attorney’s letter.
“In light of the foregoing circumstances, the church has no confidence that the town will make good on its commitments as set forth in the memorandum,” the church attorney stated. “The church is further concerned that proceeding as though the town will make good on its commitments will simply prejudice the church’s legal rights. Accordingly, the church will not submit an amended or new conditional use permit application today.”
Melissa McNeely, the temple spokeswoman, said the church had attempted to negotiate in good faith to find common ground while protecting the rights of religious freedom for local members of the church.
“The church understood these modifications fully satisfied any concerns previously raised by the town council,” she stated.
Attorneys representing the church asked Fairview officials to allow the church representatives to meet with each town councilmember individually. According to the church attorney, town officials said they would share the invitation with the councilmembers but did not expect all to agree.
“If town officials continue to be unwilling to discuss the status of the agreement made in mediation,” McNeely stated, “the next step is to ask a court to review local, state and federal laws regarding the town’s process of denying the church’s original proposal in August 2024 to build a temple in Fairview, Texas.”
Why the church believes it has the right to build the temple
Temples are sacred, holy places for Latter-day Saints, who consider them to be houses of the Lord. Church officials have said from the beginning that federal and state religious liberty laws and Fairview zoning laws give the church the right to build the temple at the size proposed in its original application.
“The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seeks to be a good neighbor and has an extensive track record of successfully building temples that have been welcomed in more than 200 communities around the world, including seven in Texas,” McNeely said in her statement. “These places of worship are always well maintained, feature beautiful landscaping and symbolize faith and peace.”
The proposed location of the temple is on a four-lane highway directly across the street from businesses in a commercial zone in Allen, Texas.
The Fairview side of the road is known as “church row” because four churches in a row line the street. Church representatives and attorneys have repeatedly noted that houses of worship traditionally are located in residential zones in the same way schools are. Fairview’s zoning ordinances uphold that practice, church representatives say.
Legally, the church says the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a federal law known as RLUIPA bar local governments from imposing unreasonable land-use requirements on people of faith building places of worship.
The U.S. Department of Justice sent an official letter to state, county and municipal officials across the nation in March 2024, reminding them that, among other things, “RLUIPA prohibits governments from imposing or implementing land use regulations that ‘unreasonably limit’ religious assemblies, institutions or structures within a jurisdiction.”
The letter noted that, “While zoning is primarily a local matter, where it conflicts with federal civil rights laws such as the Fair Housing Act or RLUIPA, federal law takes precedence.”
Fairview officials have maintained that their zoning ordinances give them latitude to enforce limits on the church.
New Georgia RLUIPA case
The Justice Department noted in the March 2024 letter that it had opened over 155 formal investigations and filed nearly 30 lawsuits related to RLUIPA’s land-use provisions.
It has continued to enforce those provisions. The department filed another lawsuit against a city on Dec. 16, when it alleged that the City of Brunswick, Georgia, violated RLUIPA by interfering with land owned by the United Methodist Church. The church runs The Well, a faith-based resource center for people experiencing homelessness on its land. The city has blamed the center for what the DOJ characterized as unrelated criminal activity in Brunswick, according to a DOJ news release.
“Federal law protects the right of religious groups such as The Well to use their land to help others,” said Kristen Clarke, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement. “The division will continue to vindicate the rights of groups to exercise their religion and fight local land-use laws that unlawfully restrict those rights.”
The DOJ has supported RLUIPA through both recent Republican and Democratic administrations.
The Justice Department announced its Place to Worship Initiative in June 2018. The initiative focused on RLUIPA’s provisions that protect the rights of houses of worship and other religious institutions to worship on their land.
In a recent announcement, the Church has expressed disappointment in the actions of a Texas town regarding a settlement reached for the McKinney Texas Temple. The town, whose name has not been disclosed, is allegedly not standing by the agreement that was previously made.
The Church had reportedly reached a settlement with the town regarding the construction and operation of the temple, which was set to be built in the area. However, it appears that the town is now reneging on the terms of the agreement, leaving the Church in a difficult position.
The Church has stated that it is committed to upholding its end of the bargain and is hopeful that the town will honor its commitments as well. The temple is an important project for the Church and its members, and it is crucial that all parties involved work together to ensure its successful completion.
It is unclear at this time what steps the Church will take in response to the town’s actions, but it is clear that this situation is a setback for the project. The Church is calling on the town to uphold its end of the agreement and work collaboratively with the Church to move the project forward.
Stay tuned for further updates as this situation develops.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints plans to sue the town of Fairview for denying a permit request for the McKinney Texas Temple.
In a Jan. 27 letter from attorney Eric Pinker, the church gave the town notice of its intent to file a lawsuit, citing the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The church said the town violated the church’s rights to free exercise of religion and nondiscrimination in land use regulation.
Denying a permit for the McKinney Texas Temple imposed a “substantial burden” on the church’s religious exercise by not allowing it to construct a house of worship that meets the needs of its faith, the letter from church legal representation states.
“While it continues to be the Church’s hope that this matter can be worked out amicably, in the face of continued and unreasonable opposition, it appears the Church has no choice but to defend its rights in court,” the letter states.
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The church has cited the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act in past statements advocating for a religious right to construct the temple.
William Christian, an attorney representing the town of nearly 11,000 people about 30 miles north of Dallas, did not have a statement on the potential lawsuit Monday afternoon. Fairview Mayor Henry Lessner is out of town and could not provide comments on the church’s letter. Mayor Pro Tem John Hubbard did not respond to requests for comment Monday.
The church made a roughly 54-foot concession in the temple’s height and reduced the size by about 13,000 square feet. The church intended to file a new application Jan. 13 for a single-story building nearly 30,000 square feet with a 120-foot steeple height.
“The Church understood these modifications fully satisfied any concerns previously raised by the Town Council,” a Jan. 27 statement from church spokesperson Melissa McKneely reads.
In November, the council unanimously approved moving the proposed settlement to public discussion.
“At every step we will keep our citizens informed of the content of any new proposal that may be considered,” Mayor Lessner wrote in a November statement. “There is absolutely no reason why the Church cannot respect our community’s resolve to maintain the character of our Town. The willingness to participate in good faith mediation does not change our position or commitment.”
In October, the Town Council announced a Zoning Defense Fund to collect donations to protect the town from potential litigation from the church. In December, residents spoke out against the amended plan, saying it wasn’t a compromise at all.
Many want the church to stick to a 68-foot tall building, the size of its meetinghouse in a neighboring lot.
The lot falls under residential zoning restrictions that say buildings can have a maximum height of 35 feet. Fairview zoning law says churches and schools can be located in any zone that isn’t a flood hazard upon an application for a conditional use permit.
After hours of public debate and months of discussion among church members, town residents and local officials, the town denied the church this permit last summer.
McKneely said the larger building is needed to accommodate a growing population in North Texas. She said some drive more than three hours to get to the Dallas temple, the only one operating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. A temple near Fort Worth is under construction.
“We don’t need another chapel,” she said. “We need a temple. A temple allows us to do ceremonies and worship in a different way.”
Fairview resident Pamela Sailor, left, who helps to organize the Legal Defense Fund Choir event, talks with attendees before singing Christmas songs in front of Fairview Town Hall, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024, in Fairview. Fairview residents and supporters hosted a community event, Friday and formed a choir to raise money for their zoning defense fund..(Chitose Suzuki / Staff Photographer)
Temples are more sacred and holy buildings than meetinghouses or chapels, McKneely said, open for individual worship Tuesday through Saturday. Weddings and sacred ceremonies are held there. It’s a place for prayer, meditation, learning and receiving inspiration from God, she said.
McKneely said temple attendance is encouraged in their religious practice, but members do not congregate all at once in a single sanctuary at the temple on Sundays like at many churches. The temple is organized in smaller rooms.
“We have been incredibly gracious and thoughtful [in] conceding and attempting to listen to the concerns of the residents to build a significantly scaled-down temple, which, frankly, is not what our community needs,” McKneely said. “We need the temple that was originally turned down in August, but we are striving to be good neighbors.”
She said the temple could serve about 20,000-25,000 church members.
McKneely originally said the church did not submit their application for the amended temple Jan. 13, as planned in the terms of settlement, because it was taking more time “to make sure everything is in place” with what was agreed on.
The church told an attorney representing the town in a letter Jan. 13 the new application was not filed because of concerns the town would not honor the nonbinding agreement that came from November’s mediation.
In the letter, the church listed examples of conduct that raised concerns about whether the town would keep its end of the deal. Public comments by town officials painted the results of mediation as an ongoing negotiation, not a settled compromise, the letter states. The church cited statements Mayor Lessner gaveThe Dallas Morning News in previous reporting.
Mayor Lessner also wrote in a January newsletter that town attorneys had said the design agreed on in mediation would likely not be accepted.
“If this happens, it moves us closer to being sued by the LDS church and the potential dire financial consequences of that action for the Town, should the Town lose in court,” Lessner wrote. “In my meetings with over 100 residents this week, the sense I get is that the overwhelming number of residents want this to get to court.”
In public meetings, town residents have expressed a willingness to face a lawsuit from the church, which is widely considered one of the wealthiest religious institutions in the world.
“I thought y’all were going to be a hero, not only for the residents of Fairview, but for others who have been trampled on by the LDS,” said Fairview resident Alycia Kuehne to the Town Council at a December meeting. “Y’all were so fearful about a lawsuit. I say, bring it.”
Fairview Legal Defense Fund Choir sings to raise money for their zoning defense fund.
Fairview residents, who are opposing the height of the proposed temple, try to raise money for their zoning defense fund.
In a letter to the town, a church attorney stated it would likely take the town to court unless Fairview’s leaders reassured them they’ll follow through with the settlement reached in November.
Town officials declined to meet individually to discuss the settlement’s status in January. An attorney representing the town wrote in a letter Jan. 17 this was not an indication of a rejection of the settlement but rather out of a concern for transparency and for deviating from the normal permit application process.
Fairview’s attorney wrote “strong negative feedback” from the public on the terms of the settlement prompted the town to ask the church to further reduce the temple height. The church declined, the town’s attorney wrote, but said the council was committed to following the process set out in the settlement.
“In light of the foregoing circumstances, the Church has no confidence that the Town will make good on its commitments,” the church’s Jan. 13 letter states. “The Church is further concerned that proceeding as though the Town will make good on its commitments will simply prejudice the Church’s legal rights.”
The church notified the town of its intent to sue Jan. 27.
“We just want to be able to worship peacefully, quietly,” McKneely said, saying the temple will be a beautiful addition to the community.
Its proposed site is situated near other places of worship in the town and its size was significantly reduced from the original proposal, she said.
“The church has attempted to negotiate an agreement in good faith,” McKneely said. “We came to mediation … We didn’t need to. We have a right to build this temple so that we can practice our faith, but we were trying to be peacemakers and to come to a compromise that we felt was generous.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has announced that it will be suing the town of Fairview over a dispute regarding the construction of a temple in the area. The Church had been planning to build a temple in Fairview, but the town recently passed a zoning ordinance that would prevent the construction of the temple.
In a statement released by the Church, they expressed their disappointment in the town’s decision and stated that they believe the ordinance is discriminatory and unconstitutional. The Church also stated that they have attempted to work with the town to find a mutually agreeable solution, but have been met with resistance at every turn.
The Church has now decided to take legal action against the town in order to protect their right to build a temple in Fairview. They are confident that they will prevail in court and are committed to fighting for their religious freedoms.
This lawsuit is sure to be a contentious and closely watched legal battle, as it pits the religious rights of the Church against the zoning laws of the town. Stay tuned for updates on this developing story.
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