‘They covered up child rape’: how the New Orleans archdiocese protected a priest who preyed on children

An elderly priest's guilty plea exposes the church's history of shielding predators in its midst for decades

In the case of serial child molester and retired Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker, the cover-up failed.

But it wasn't for lack of trying by a coalition of high-ranking church officials and sympathetic judges, who prioritized the predator's comfort above justice for his innumerable victims until the evidence against him was so overwhelming that - rather than stand the humiliation of a public trial - he pleaded guilty last Tuesday.