Judge stays on Catholic bankruptcy despite making donations to church

NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge refused Friday to recuse himself from the New Orleans Roman Catholic bankruptcy after an Associated Press report that he donated tens of thousands of dollars to archdiocese charities and consistently ruled in favor of the church in the contentious case involving nearly 500 clergy sex abuse victims.

U. S. District Judge Greg Guidry told attorneys in the high-profile case that a panel of federal judges he asked to review the possible conflict determined no “reasonable person” would question his impartiality despite his contributions and longstanding ties to the archdiocese.

Guidry read from the opinion of the Washington- based Committee on Codes of Conduct, which noted that none of the charities he donated to “has been or is an actual party” in the bankruptcy and that Guidry’s eight years on the board of the archdiocese’s charitable arm ended more than a decade before the bankruptcy.

“Based upon that advice and based upon my certainty that I can be fair and impartial, I have decided not to recuse myself,” said Guidry, who oversees the bankruptcy in an appellate role.

Guidry’s announcement came hours after AP published its report and more than a week after it confronted him with its findings.

Several ethics experts told AP the 62-year-old jurist should step aside from the case to avoid the appearance of conflict, even if it threatened to send the complex, three- year bankruptcy into disarray with a slew of new hearings and appeals of his decisions.

“It would create a mess and a cloud of suspicion over every ruling he’s made,” said Keith Swisher, a professor of legal ethics at the University of Arizona, describing the judge’s donations as “more like fire than smoke.”

AP’s reporting on Guidry and other judges in the New Orleans bankruptcy underscores how tightly woven the church is in the city’s power structure, a coziness perhaps best exemplified when executives of the NFL’s New Orleans Saints secretly advised the archdiocese on public relations messaging at the height of its clergy abuse crisis.

It also comes at a fraught moment when attorneys in the bankruptcy are seeking to unseal a trove of thousands of secret church documents produced by lawsuits and an ongoing FBI investigation of clergy abuse in New Orleans going back decades. Guidry had rebuffed at least one such request to unseal some of the documents.

AP’s review of campaignfinance records found that Guidry, since being nominated to the federal bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump, has given nearly $ 50,000 to local Catholic charities from leftover contributions he received after serving 10 years as a Louisiana Supreme Court justice.

Most of that giving, $ 36,000 of it, came in the months after the archdiocese sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May 2020 amid a crush of sexual abuse lawsuits. That included a $ 12,000 donation to the archdiocese’s Catholic Community Foundation in September 2020 on the same day of a series of filings in the bankruptcy, and a $14,000 donation to the same charity in July of the following year.

But the advisory opinion Guidry cited Friday noted that his contributions to the Catholic charities amounted to less than 25 percent of the campaign funds he had available to donate. It also said “simply participating as a faithful participant in the life of your parish and the archdiocese of which it is a part cannot amount to a reasonable basis for questioning impartiality in litigation involving the church.”

Guidry’s philanthropy over the years also appears to include private donations. Newsletters issued by Catholic Charities of New Orleans, the charitable arm of the archdiocese, recognized Guidry and his wife among its donors for unspecified contributions, in 2017 listing both the judge and his campaign. The judge previously provided pro bono services and served as a board member for Catholic Charities between 2000 and 2008, a time when the archdiocese was navigating an earlier wave of sex abuse lawsuits. Catholic Charities was involved in at least one multimillion- dollar settlement to victims beaten and sexually abused at two local orphanages.