NCR exposed Catholic Church
Title: NCR first exposed Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal 40 years ago this month
Author: Ryan Di Corpo
Publisher: National Catholic Reporter (NCROnline)
Date: 19JUN2025
Forty years ago this month, readers of the National Catholic Reporter first learned through a series of three articles about a dark secret in the Catholic Church that would ultimately expand into an international sexual-abuse crisis.
Ultimately, the bombshell stories in NCR would mushroom into a controversy that would shake the very foundations of the worldwide Catholic Church and raise questions about the management of the institution, impact the election of popes, spark a crisis of confidence among billions of Catholics and foreshadow a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation in The Boston Globe.
Yet it would be decades before the scandal reached those proportions.
The coverage began in June 1985 on NCR’s front page with an overview of abuse cases in several U.S. dioceses. That edition also included at its center a shocking example, the results of a monthslong investigation by freelance journalist Jason Berry into Gilbert “Gil” Gauthe.
A popular horseback-riding, duck-hunting Louisiana priest, Gauthe was exposed as a serial predator who had failed his ethics class in seminary, improved his marks enough for ordination in late 1971 and began molesting boys during his first parish assignment the following year, Berry discovered.
“This was the first case of a pedophile priest to gain national attention,” reported the New York Times in 2002.
The investigation was the result of the indefatigable efforts of Berry and the courage of the Times of Acadiana, a Louisiana paper, which co-published the groundbreaking investigation with NCR.
Prior to publication of the investigation, the case was a relatively small local crime news story that eluded major national attention. In October 1984, the 39-year-old Gauthe was indicted in Lafayette, Louisiana, on 34 counts of sex crimes involving minors. Before his trial, the Diocese of Lafayette and its insurers agreed to pay at least $4.2 million in settlement costs to nine families. Eleven additional civil suits were filed.
Later, after the NCR and Times series, in October 1985, Gauthe abandoned an insanity defense, pled guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison “at hard labor” and with no possibility of parole.