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A Louisiana man who resigned as a Roman Catholic deacon after a priest molested his son and then was excommunicated from the church entirely by his local bishop is asking global church leaders to inform him of the fate of his appeal against the prelate’s decision, something that was supposed to be resolved more than a year earlier.
In a letter to the Vatican entity in charge of clerical discipline, a canon – or church – law attorney representing Scott Peyton asserts that his case is “nuanced and requires careful consideration”. “To the extent that the delay reflects such diligence, he is grateful,” said the letter to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), prepared by Dawn Eden Goldstein on 3 February and obtained recently by the Guardian.
Nonetheless, the letter continued, Peyton “wishes that I convey to you that, from his perspective, the unduly long span of time with no communication from your office only compounds the injustices that he and his family have suffered from the church”.
Word of Peyton’s plight earned international news headlines in March 2024, with many outlets characterizing his excommunication as a remarkably harsh consequence that his child’s molester does not appear to have ever faced because the church, in sum, does not consider the abuser’s offense on its own excommunicable.
Peyton was ordained into Louisiana’s diocese of Lafayette – about 135 miles (217km) west of New Orleans – as a deacon in 2012. Deacons are largely similar to priests, though they can join the clergy despite being married.
About six years after his ordination, a priest with whom Peyton ministered at St Peter’s church in Morrow, Louisiana, confessed to molesting the deacon’s teenage son, Oliver, and was arrested by authorities.
Michael Guidry, now 83, later pleaded guilty to abusing Oliver Peyton, who was an altar server. He received a seven-year prison sentence after his church feted him with a farewell lunch for which the diocese was forced to apologize.
In 2021, Peyton said he, his wife, Letitia, and Oliver secured a $350,000 settlement from Lafayette’s diocese to settle a civil lawsuit without a trial. The Peytons, meanwhile, have become advocates for clergy abuse survivors. And in December 2023, Scott Peyton decided he was no longer a good fit to serve as a deacon in the diocese, quit and went on to join an Anglican church’s congregation.
Lafayette bishop J Douglas Deshotel responded to those developments by issuing a 13 March 2024 decree informing Peyton he had been excommunicated, effective immediately, basically because the deacon had severed ties with the Catholic church.
“I am aware that your family has suffered a trauma but the answer does not lie in leaving the Most Holy Eucharist,” Deshotel wrote, adding that “we are not Catholics because the church … is perfect”.
For pious Catholics, excommunication is as severe a punishment as there is, preventing recipients of it from engaging in certain sacraments as a way to essentially shock them into rethinking their sinful behavior before death condemns them to damnation. Among the most famous Catholic excommunicates are Henry VIII (over a divorce and remarriage), Napoleon Bonaparte (for annexing the Papal States within Italy to France) and Martin Luther (for igniting the Reformation).
Peyton formally appealed his excommunication to the DDF in May 2024, arguing in part that “there was no pastoral good to be accomplished” by his censure. He also contended that his wife and six children feel unwelcome in the Catholic church because of his excommunication, meaning the punishment has “harmed the spiritual lives of eight Catholics”.
That appeal ostensibly initiated an adjudication process that generally should be completed in three months.
Deshotel wrote to Peyton in October 2024 – five months later – notifying him that his appeal “material … has been received and is currently being evaluated” by the DDF. The bishop said he sent that letter at the behest of the DDF’s secretary, Archbishop John Joseph Kennedy.
It had been well over a year since that missive when Goldstein herself wrote to Kennedy in early February asking for at least an update concerning the status of her client’s appeal. She argued that the “harm” raised in Peyton’s appeal “continues every day that [it] goes unanswered”.
Goldstein also wrote to Kennedy asking him to inform Oliver Peyton of Guidry’s “current canonical status and any penalties that may have been imposed upon him” after the latter’s guilty plea.
Neither inquiry had gotten a reply as of Saturday.
Furthermore, neither a Lafayette diocese spokesperson nor Guidry’s criminal defense attorney immediately responded when sent a message asking whether he had been laicized, or removed from the priesthood.
Many Catholic clergymen convicted of child molestation over the years have been allowed to remain in the priesthood. Some abusers who have left the priesthood have done so voluntarily.
The late Francis was the pope when Peyton first filed his excommunication appeal. The pope now is Leo XIV, who was elected to succeed Francis in May 2025 and became history’s first US-born pontiff.
Another abusive Lafayette diocese priest named Gilbert Gauthe all but brought the worldwide, decades-old Catholic clergy abuse crisis to the US’s collective conscience by pleading guilty in 1985 to molesting several boys he met through his ministry.
More recently, Lafayette’s diocese unsuccessfully asked Louisiana’s supreme court to strike down a state law passed in 2021 which eliminated filing deadlines for lawsuits seeking damages over child molestation that occurred long ago.
