Ex-priest indicted for allegedly raping disabled child while ministering in New Orleans

A man accused of molesting a disabled boy whom he met while working as a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans has been indicted on child rape charges, according to authorities.Grand jurors seated in New Orleans’ state criminal courthouse on Thursday handed up a nine-count indictment against Mark Francis Ford, nearly five months after authorities arrested him and jailed him without bail. The document charges Ford, 64, with aggravated rape of a child; raping a person suffering from a physical disability preventing resistance; two counts of molesting a juvenile; another three of indecent behavior with a minor; and kidnapping.Ford is only the latest figure to come under authorities’ scrutiny during the longstanding clergy molestation scandal within the New Orleans Catholic church. Prosecutors allege that he committed the offenses cited in the indictment between 2006 and 2008, victimizing a boy who was between the ages of 12 and 14.He would face mandatory life imprisonment if convicted as accused in the indictment, through which the office of the New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, filed formal charges against Ford in connection with his earlier arrest.Ford’s attorney, Ralph Whalen, did not immediately comment on Thursday.Court records generated by Ford’s arrest allege that he positioned himself as a mentor to the victim in the case while the boy grieved two family deaths. Ford then allegedly exploited that proximity to abuse the boy, whom he met through a church program for youth who are disabled.The name of that program was God’s Special Children, and it was co-founded by Ford.As police tell it in a sworn statement filed in court, the boy was mourning his grandmother’s and father’s deaths when Ford – who was a Catholic priest from 1992 to 2007 – grew close to him, visited him at home to play video games with him and gave him guitar lessons.Then, police alleged, Ford began showing pornography to the boy, who is on the autism spectrum and has a degenerative spinal condition, which occasionally requires him to use a wheelchair. Ford allegedly ignored the boy’s pleas when the child expressed discomfort with the explicit content, eventually sexually attacked the boy on several occasions and told him his family would never believe him if he reported the abuse.Legally ruled to still be a minor despite having reached the age of majority, the victim came forward to police in November 2024, court documents say. He subsequently underwent two forensic interviews, and police obtained a warrant to arrest Ford in early September.Authorities arrested Ford in Portage, Indiana, where he was residing, later that month. He was transferred to New Orleans’ jail in October and ordered detained there without bail pending the outcome of the case.Williams’s office has previously said the case against Ford is “deeply serious and disturbing”.“He is accused of using his position to commit violent and reprehensible acts against a child with a disability,” a prior statement from Williams’s office said. “These allegations represent an unacceptable breach of trust and a level of vulnerability that should never be taken advantage of.”Ford is among several men who have worked as Catholic clergymen in New Orleans to have been arrested by authorities in connection with child sexual abuse allegations both before and after the city’s archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020.The archdiocese and its insurers in early December agreed to pay $305m collectively to settle with abuse survivors whose claims were ensnared in the bankruptcy case. Almost a year to the day before that agreement, the retired New Orleans Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker pleaded guilty to decades-old rape and kidnapping charges and received a mandatory life sentence. He died in prison at age 93 soon thereafter.Ford belonged to the Catholic religious order known as the Vincentians, and he was assigned to various churches within the archdiocese of New Orleans as well as the dioceses of Dallas and Gallup, New Mexico, during his clerical career. He helped found God’s Special Children while at New Orleans’ St Joseph church, which the Vincentians have run since 1858.The Vincentians say Ford eventually successfully asked the Vatican to remove him from the Catholic priesthood. An online profile of Ford said he worked for Louisiana’s government beginning in 2006 as assistant director of disability affairs, and later, in a separate role, aided efforts by the state’s Native tribes to recover from hurricanes.More recently, Ford was reported to have joined the US hunger relief non-profit Feeding America with positions in Phoenix and Chicago. And he was listed as a board member of the American Indian Center in Chicago.The church watchdog group BishopAccountability.org has previously said the 1994, 1999, 2002 and 2003 editions of the Official Catholic Directory failed to list Ford among active clergy members. Such disappearances can often signal “problems in ministry that are not being managed in a transparent way, and/or periods during which the priest has been sent to a treatment center”, the group said.Yet, as the website noted, only the earliest of those interruptions in ministry was publicly explained. The Dallas Morning News reported in 1997 that Ford had entered a program in New Mexico to be treated for problems managing money while working at two churches in Arizona for the Gallup diocese.