Ray Mouton, a Louisiana lawyer who defended one of the first Roman Catholic priests in the United States to be criminally charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse, and who then tried to warn Catholic bishops that pedophilia was a plague in the church — a warning that was ignored, sending Mr. Mouton’s life skidding — died on Feb. 5 in Jefferson, La. He was 78.
His death, in a hospital, was from lung and throat cancer, his son Todd said.
A fifth-generation son of Lafayette, La., a small city west of New Orleans, Mr. Mouton was hired in 1984 by the Diocese of Lafayette to defend a priest who had admitted to molesting 37 children.
The case gained national attention, but it was almost two decades before the full extent of the clergy’s sexual abuse of children, primarily boys, and the coverup by church authorities was widely exposed and understood.
Awareness was driven by exposés like The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002, which led to the archbishop’s resignation (the subject of the Oscar-winning 2015 movie “Spotlight”). Investigations by other news organizations and law enforcement agencies later reached into nearly every Catholic diocese in the country.
Mr. Mouton, whose family built one of the grandest churches in Lafayette, Our Lady of Fatima, took on the defense of Gilbert Gauthe, a priest who had been shuffled from parish to parish by the local bishop when anguished parents beginning in the 1970s complained that he was abusing their sons. Church leaders never reported Father Gauthe to the police; at one point, they made him a chaplain for the diocesan Boy Scouts.
Mr. Mouton, who favored white suits and two-toned shoes, lived in a mansion with a seven-acre duck pond. He was no moral crusader, he later conceded. He took the case for two reasons: “vanity and money,” he told The Washington Post in 2002.
“I had a high-visibility client, and I knew the Catholic Church could pay like a damn slot machine,” he said.
“I honestly believed the church was a repository of goodness,” he added in the same interview. “As it turns out, when I decided to take that case, I destroyed my life, my family, my faith. In just two or three years, I lost everything I held dear.”
Mr. Mouton negotiated a plea bargain for his client that threw out an aggravated rape charge in exchange for an admission of guilt to 33 lesser charges and a prison sentence of 20 years.
While defending Mr. Gauthe, who had been defrocked, Mr. Mouton learned of seven other priests who were known to the diocese to be pedophiles. Bishop Gerard Frey, their supervisor, had told the victims’ parents that their sons should go to confession and repent for the role they had played in their abuse.
After the Gauthe case, Mr. Mouton teamed up with two whistle-blowing priests on the East Coast, the Rev. Thomas P. Doyle and the Rev. Michael Peterson, to warn church leaders that sexual abuse by the clergy was a powder keg that could cost as much as $1 billion in damages and undermine believers’ faith.
The 92-page confidential report they wrote in 1985 cited 30 priests or church leaders who had been accused of sexual abuse in news accounts, and warned that this was “probably the single most serious and far-reaching problem facing our church today.”
The report was primarily focused on protecting the finances and reputation of the church rather than uncovering the vast scope of clergy abuse or helping its victims. Still, the report, which was written for American bishops, was largely ignored.
One of Mr. Mouton’s co-authors, Father Doyle, a canon lawyer at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, lost his job there in 1986, as well as his teaching position at Catholic University. His other co-author, Father Peterson, a psychiatrist who treated mentally ill priests, died of AIDS in 1987.
Mr. Mouton had worked feverishly on the Gauthe case and on compiling the confidential report. The church’s failure to take the warning seriously catalyzed a broader crisis in his life. He separated from his wife, shut down his law practice and became “a full-blown alcoholic,” he said in 2013.
“He was a man in a profound moral crisis,” Jason Berry, who reported on the Gauthe case for The Times of Acadiana in Louisiana and wrote “Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children” (1992), said in an interview. “He was the voice in the wilderness trying to raise the consciousness of these bishops at a time when most of them were in abject denial.”
In the 2013 interview, Mr. Mouton said, “I worked, battling the diocese, the American church and the Vatican, until I literally burned myself up spiritually, mentally and physically.”
Mr. Mouton left Louisiana for Europe, where he spent a decade traveling before buying a house in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, France, near the Spanish border. Every year, he went to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, which he found an exhilarating release. He published a guidebook, “Pamplona: Running the Bulls, Bars and Barrios in Fiesta de San Fermin,” in 2002.
He was no longer, however, a practicing Catholic. As he told The Post, “Faith? I have faith in God and fate, and voodoo and dice.”
Francis Ray Mouton Jr. was born on April 1, 1947, in Lafayette, the second of five children of Francis Ray Sr. and Marjorie (Breedlove) Mouton. His father ran a construction company that had long been in the family. (In the early 19th century, an ancestor, Jean Mouton, had laid out the village that would become the city of Lafayette.)
Ray, as he was known, received a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1969 from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and a law degree in 1973 from Louisiana State University.
As a sophomore in college, he married Janis Thiberville, and they settled in Lafayette Parish, where Mr. Mouton became a lawyer specializing in personal injury and criminal defense. The couple, who had three children, built a big home on 15 acres with horse stables and a pool.
After his first marriage ended in divorce, he married Melony Barrios in 2000. In addition to his wife and his son Todd, he is survived by two other children from his first marriage, Chad and Jeanne Mouton; a stepson, Matt Moline; two sisters, Camille Mouton and Anne Bosche; two brothers, Johnny and Henry; and a granddaughter.
In 2012, Mr. Mouton published a novel, “In God’s House,” a fictionalized account of the Gauthe case and his own story. In the book, leaders of a Louisiana diocese ask the protagonist, a lawyer, to represent a pastor who is a pedophile, making it clear that they want the case to disappear before it goes to court or receives coverage in the newspapers.
“No bishop or diocese has ever been drug into court because of the sex crimes of a priest,” a church representative tells the fictional lawyer. “And none of that is going to happen here.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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