A man working as a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans positioned himself as a mentor to a young disabled boy grieving two family deaths – and then exploited the proximity to abuse him for years, police allege.
Those details are contained in criminal court records generated by the arrest of Mark Francis Ford in Indiana in September as well as his subsequent transfer to New Orleans’s jail, a process which was completed late on Tuesday.
Ford, 64, made an initial court appearance on Wednesday as he became the latest figure to come under scrutiny during the New Orleans Catholic church’s longstanding clergy molestation scandal.
A magistrate commissioner temporarily ordered Ford held without bail.
Ford is one of 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. That bankruptcy filing was designed to limit the archdiocese’s financial liability with respect to hundreds of claims of clergy molestation, mostly victimizing children, over several decades.
The New Orleans archdiocese has agreed to pay at least $230m to collectively settle with abuse survivors whose claims are tied up in the bankruptcy. Those survivors have until 29 October to vote on whether or not to approve the settlement.
According to a sworn statement from one of the city’s sex crimes detectives, the accuser at the center of Ford’s case reported being about 10 when he met the man known to him as “Father Mark” in 2004. It was through a program for disabled youth named God’s Special Children, which Ford co-founded, the police statement recounted.
The boy was mourning the deaths of his grandmother and father when Ford – who was a Catholic priest from 1992 to 2007 – grew close to him, making it a point to visit the child at home to play video games with him and give him guitar lessons, the police statement said.
Then, police alleged, Ford began displaying pornography to the boy, who has a degenerative spinal condition which occasionally requires him to use a wheelchair and is on the autism spectrum. Ford was said to have ignored the boy when he expressed discomfort with the explicit content and allegedly instructed the child to keep it secret from his mother.
On several occasions after that, Ford allegedly sexually attacked the boy at the child’s home, telling him his family would not believe him if he ever spoke out.
An aunt of the boy walked in shortly after one of the attacks, prompting the child to try to signal distress through body language and eye contact – though the relative did not realize anything was wrong, according to police.
The accuser, legally ruled to be a minor despite having reached the age of majority, came forward to police in November 2024. He subsequently underwent two forensic interviews, and on 9 September, police obtained a warrant to arrest Ford on four counts of first-degree rape.
The warrant also accused Ford of two counts each of sexual battery, indecent behavior with a juvenile and second-degree kidnapping. The offenses Ford is alleged to have committed in the case occurred between 2004 and 2014, the warrant for his arrest said.
On 25 September, police arrested Ford in Portage, Indiana, where he was residing, holding him without bail pending his extradition to New Orleans. Ford waived his right to challenge the extradition at a 1 October court hearing. And he was booked into New Orleans’s lockup late on Tuesday.
Ford in court on Wednesday was ordered held without bail until at least another hearing that was tentatively set for Friday.
He would face mandatory life imprisonment if eventually convicted as accused.
Ford belonged to the Catholic religious order known as the Vincentians, and he ministered at 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 launch God’s Special Children while at New Orleans’s St Joseph church, which the Vincentians have run since 1858.
The Vincentians say Ford eventually successfully asked the Vatican to laicize him, or 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 says Ford was not listed among active clergy members in the 1994, 1999, 2002 and 2003 editions of the Official Catholic Directory (OCD) – disappearances that often correlate with “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”.
Only the earliest of those interruptions in ministry was ostensibly explained in the news media, as BishopAccountability.org noted.
The Dallas Morning News reported in 1997 that Ford had previously entered a program in Albuquerque, New Mexico, run by the Servants of the Paraclete.
The reason provided was that Ford had problems managing money while working at two churches in Arizona for the diocese of Gallup.
The Servants of the Paraclete’s program at the time was arguably better known for treating other issues – ranging from substance abuse to child sexual abuse.
As a gesture of transparency and reconciliation amid the fallout of the worldwide Catholic church’s clergy molestation scandal, the Vincentians, the New Orleans archdiocese and the dioceses of Gallup and Dallas have published lists of clergymen with credible allegations of child molestation.
Ford had not immediately been added to those lists after his arrest in Portage, according to information on BishopAccountability.org.
