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The Catholic Church has upheld the excommunication of a former deacon who committed the crime of… having a son who was sexually abused by another Catholic priest and then walking away from his diocese in response.
It’s a tragic story that’s been developing for years.
In 2012, Scott Peyton was officially ordained as a Catholic deacon—A priest of sorts but one who can get married—in the diocese of Lafayette in Louisiana.
Everything seemed to be going smoothly until 2018, when one of his colleagues, Father Michael Guidry, confessed that he had sexually abused Peyton’s son, who was an altar boy.
When the boy reported the abuse three years later [in 2018], Guidry initially told St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office detectives that he could not recall the fondling. But moments before taking a lie detector test, he admitted rubbing the boy’s genitals.
The molestation continued until the boy stood up to stop it, Guidry wrote in a statement to law enforcement. It had started after they shared “a few drinks,” he wrote, adding that he had recently “replenished” his supply of the boy’s favorite liquor.
Guidry later blamed the boy for the abuse—saying that he requested it. He said he gave the boy alcohol, but only to teach him to drink responsibly. In a legal filing made later, he even blamed the boy’s parents for letting him be alone with Guidry.
In any case, he was subsequently arrested. He pleaded guilty to the crime and received a seven-year prison sentence.
In case you’re curious what kind of church would employ someone like that, St. Peter’s Church in Morrow threw Guidry a going away luncheon before he went to prison. (They eventually apologized for that, as if it was a careless error.)
Guidry was removed from the ministry, but he was still technically a priest. One article noted that he was retired but “continues to receive a pension and health insurance through the diocese.”
A civil lawsuit filed by the Peytons against the diocese of Lafayette was eventually settled for $350,000. The diocese issued a public apology to the family.
Peyton continued to work as a deacon, albeit in a different location. But in December of 2023, long after this whole disturbing saga began, Scott Peyton decided he could no longer serve as deacon in an institution this corrupt. So he quit, saying that his resignation was “a conscientious objection to the way the church has handled cases of sexual abuse.” He was still a committed Christian, he said but this was the only way he could think of to register his frustration.
“Over the past few years, the Catholic Church has been confronted with a series of distressing revelations regarding sexual abuse scandals involving members of the clergy. The magnitude of these revelations has deeply shaken my faith and trust in the institution to which I have dedicated a significant portion of my life,” he wrote in a Dec. 4 email to the bishop and obtained by The Pillar.
“The pain and suffering endured by the victims, our family, and most importantly our son, coupled with what appears to be a systemic failure in addressing and preventing such heinous acts, have left me disillusioned and unable to reconcile my commitment to the Church with my conscience.”
The next month, Peyton’s family joined a different congregation—Trinity Anglican Church. He publicly announced that decision in March of 2024:
And with that, the Catholic Church announced that Peyton would be excommunicated—unable to receive sacraments and therefore doomed to Hell—because he had walked away from the Church.
As it stands under Catholic canon law, child rape and molestation are not ennumerated as excommunicable offenses, as noted by the Pillar, which covers the church’s institutional issues. Abandoning the church, on the other hand, is.
…
“I am aware that your family has suffered a trauma but the answer does not lie in leaving the Most Holy Eucharist,” [bishop J Douglas] Deshotel wrote in his excommunication decree. “We are not Catholics because the church on Earth is perfect but because the Lord has entrusted us to a mystery greater than ourselves, which He has established as the means to our salvation.
“The censures of the church are intended to be medicinal, perhaps as much for those who impose them as for those who are subject to them. It is with this objective that I mournfully must declare them.”
…
“That’s … a fancy way of the bishop … telling me to go to hell,” Peyton said of his excommunication.
If that was supposed to threaten him to return to the Catholic Church, it didn’t work. Peyton didn’t come crawling back. He actually joined a different (non-denominational) church. Still, he challenged the decision with the Catholic Church’s version of an HR department.
That decision, unfortunately, has now been upheld.
“This act of joining a separated faith community by its very nature is an act of refusal of submission to the Roman pontiff and a refusal of communion with the members of the church subject to him,” the [Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith] said in documents shared with the Guardian by canon attorney Dawn Eden Goldstein, who represented Peyton pro bono in his appeal against his excommunication.
“It is for this reason that … excommunication is incurred by the very carrying out of the act itself,” the DDF added.
In a joint statement on Sunday, Goldstein said Peyton intends to appeal the DDF’s verdict.
He added in a statement that he wasn’t surprised:
“Apparently, according to Bishop Deshotel, finding a faith community where my family can worship without reliving the trauma endured is a greater scandal to the Diocese of Lafayette than the sexual abuse of a child. I find that deeply troubling.”
Even if canon law—the rule book for the Catholic Church—says this is the proper punishment for what Peyton did, it’s utterly heartless given everything his family endured. The Catholics who are defending it are more interested in the letter of the law than the spirit of the law, and even their defenses come with caveats: We didn’t want to do this, but we have to because that’s what the rule book says!
The bottom line here is that a deacon’s son was the victim of sexual abuse by another priest, yet the Catholic Church is punishing the former while rewarding the latter. (Guidry, still behind bars, has said he still ministers to other inmates because he considers himself to be a priest. It’s not like the Church disagrees.)
It’s a complete inversion of morality… and perfectly in line with what we’ve come to expect from an institution that never seems to do enough to punish abuse.
Church leaders are more concerned about a deacon’s departure than a priest’s abuse. They want perfect loyalty to the institution even as they have no respect for the people running the church.
That’s as much a part of this story as the people involved. Just as we’ve seen with the Cornell 7, sexual abuse scandals aren’t just about the crimes but about the way the institution chooses to respond. Who do they punish? How do they punish them?
If the Church wants people to believe it’s learned anything from decades of abuse scandals, it can’t keep treating the people who walk away as the greater threat.
Almost every movement and institution starts with dreams of changing the world. Unfortunately, the moment after it starts, the primary goal usually changes from revolution or reform to self-preservation.
I hope he doesn't feel bad about being excommunicated, because he should view it as a badge of honor. The systematic sexual abuse of children has been the church's dirty little secret for centuries. Before these horrors began making their way into the media the church would circle the wagons, protect the priest, and condemn the victims. That mentality still exists. I don't know why membership in that church isn't down to zero.