New Orleans Saints’ role in priest cover-up revealed in shocking emails team tried to keep secret

NEW ORLEANS — As New Orleans church leaders braced for the fallout from publishing a list of predatory Catholic priests, they turned to an unlikely ally: the front office of the city’s NFL franchise.

What followed was a months-long, crisis-communications blitz orchestrated by the New Orleans Saints’ president and other top team officials, according to hundreds of internal emails obtained by the Associated Press.

The records, which the Saints and church had long sought to keep out of public view, reveal team executives played a more extensive role than previously known in a public relations campaign to mitigate fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The emails shed new light on the Saints’ foray into a fraught topic far from the gridiron, a behind-the-scenes effort driven by the team’s devoutly Catholic owner who has long enjoyed a close relationship with the city’s embattled archbishop.

They also showed how various New Orleans institutions — from a sitting federal judge to the local media — rallied around church leaders at a critical moment.

Among the key moments, as revealed in the Saints’ own emails:

— Saints executives were so involved in the church’s damage control that a team spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city’s top prosecutor hours before the church released a list of clergymen accused of abuse. The call, the spokesman said, “allowed us to take certain people off” the list.