Rome Excommunicates the Father, Keeps the Molester

Vatican upholds sentence on Louisiana deacon who fled to an Anglican parish after a priest abused his son. The priest remains a priest.

By David W. Virtue, DD www.virtueonline.org  October 20, 2026

The Vatican has spoken, and it has spoken with perfect canonical clarity. Scott Peyton, a former Roman Catholic deacon from Lafayette, Louisiana, stays excommunicated. His offence was walking into an Anglican church. The man who molested his son, Fr. Michael Guidry, was never excommunicated. He sits in a Louisiana prison, suspended from public ministry, and still a Catholic priest.

That is the whole story in two sentences, and no amount of Latin can make it read better.

The Decision

Peyton learned last Friday, October 16, in a meeting with Bishop J. Douglas Deshotel of Lafayette, that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had rejected his appeal. According to documents his canon lawyer, Dawn Eden Goldstein, shared with The Guardian, the ruling was dated May 22, 2026, almost five months before anyone bothered to tell him. It was signed by the dicastery's prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, and its secretary, Archbishop John Joseph Kennedy.

The reasoning was brief and, by Rome's lights, airtight. By joining an Anglican congregation, and announcing it on social media, Peyton had refused submission to the Roman pontiff and communion with the Church subject to him. Under canon 1364 that is schism, and schism carries an automatic, latae sententiae excommunication. The act itself pronounces the sentence. The dicastery allowed that the circumstances were tragic, expressed hope for reconciliation, and upheld the penalty anyway.

Peyton's response, issued Sunday in a joint statement with Goldstein, was disappointed but not surprised. He said the bishop apparently regards his family's search for a place to worship without reliving their trauma as "a greater scandal to the Diocese of Lafayette than the sexual abuse of a child." He intends to challenge the ruling again.

How It Came to This

Peyton was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of Lafayette in 2012. He served at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Morrow alongside the pastor, Fr. Guidry, a family friend of twelve years who gave the sacraments to the Peyton children.

In 2018 Peyton's son Oliver disclosed that three years earlier, at sixteen and serving at the altar, he had been plied with alcohol in the St. Peter's rectory and molested by Guidry. The priest first claimed he could not remember, then blamed the boy. In March 2019 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to seven years. The parish, astonishingly, threw him a farewell lunch, for which the diocese later had to apologize. The family settled a civil suit against the diocese in 2021 for $350,000, and the diocese acknowledged the allegations as credible.

Peyton tried to stay. He took leave, came back, went through the motions. But by December 2023 he had had enough. On December 4 he emailed Bishop Deshotel resigning from the diaconate and announcing that he was leaving the Church, writing that the abuse and what he saw as a systemic failure to address it had left him unable to reconcile his ministry with his conscience. He was explicit that this was not a rejection of God.

The bishop's first reply was pastoral. He was sad, he would pray, he reminded Peyton that sacramentally he was still a deacon. Then silence.

On January 21, 2024, the Peyton family was formally received into Trinity Anglican Church in Lafayette by an Anglican bishop. Peyton says he kept the move quiet and did not tell the diocese. Word got out regardless, and on March 13 Bishop Deshotel issued a decree declaring him irregular for diaconal ministry, stripped of his faculties, and excommunicated. Your family has suffered trauma, the bishop wrote, but "the answer does not lie in leaving the Most Holy Eucharist."

Peyton appealed in May 2024, arguing that no pastoral good was served and that the penalty had "harmed the spiritual lives of eight Catholics," his wife and six children among them. An appeal that ordinarily takes about three months took two years.

Which Anglicans?

Trinity Anglican Church in Lafayette is a parish of the Anglican Church in North America. Its founding rector, the Ven. Dr. Peter Johnston, is also president of Anglican Compass and has served as a dean in the ACNA's Diocese of the Western Gulf Coast and, more recently, as an archdeacon in the Diocese of All Nations. Johnston confirmed to OSV News in 2024 that the family had been received by "our Bishop."

There is a coda that Anglicans should not skip past. In Sunday's statement Peyton disclosed that the family has since left Trinity for a nondenominational congregation. Rome has excommunicated him for becoming an Anglican, and he is no longer one.

The Law and the Scandal

Let me give Rome its due. Canon law is consistent here. Schism is a crime against the unity of the Church, and the Catholic Church has never pretended otherwise. Since Leo XIII's Apostolicae Curae in 1896 declared Anglican orders null and void, no one should be surprised that Rome treats reception into an Anglican parish as a formal act of separation. A canonist would say Peyton excommunicated himself. Nicholas Cafardi, the canon lawyer and former dean of Duquesne law school, said exactly that.

But law that is internally consistent can still be morally grotesque in its outcomes, and this is such a case.

Child sexual abuse by a cleric is a grave canonical crime, punishable by deprivation of office and, at the extreme, dismissal from the clerical state. But it does not carry automatic excommunication. Schism does. So, a father who walks across town to an Anglican altar is cut off from the sacraments by operation of law, while the priest who abused his son in a rectory remains, by the bishop's own admission last Friday, a priest. Guidry, now 83, told a parole board he still considers himself one and has been offering spiritual direction behind bars.

Rome sees the act of a wounded father seeking refuge as a refusal of the pope. It took two years to say so and five months to deliver the letter. It still has not told Oliver Peyton, despite Goldstein's request, what canonical penalty, if any, has been imposed on the man who abused him.

The Diocese of Lafayette carries a particular history here. It was in Lafayette that Fr. Gilbert Gauthe's 1985 guilty plea first forced the American Church to confront clerical abuse. Forty years on, the same diocese is the one handing out the excommunication.

The Wider Lesson

Orthodox Anglicans have their own sins to confess on abuse, and VirtueOnline has reported on plenty of them in the Episcopal Church and in the ACNA. No one here is in a position to throw stones. But the Peyton case lays bare something about authority. When a church's machinery moves faster and more severely against those who leave than against those who prey, it has confused the protection of the institution with the protection of the flock.

Bishop Deshotel told Peyton that censures are medicinal. Perhaps. But medicine that heals the shepherd's reputation and wounds the sheep is not medicine. It is something else.

Peyton has not left Christ. He has left Rome, and then the Anglicans too, looking for somewhere he and his family can kneel without flinching. His bishop and now the Vatican have both said the door is closed behind him. The man who caused all this is still wearing the collar.

Sources: The Guardian (Oct. 19 and Mar. 22, 2026); OSV News via National Catholic Reporter (Mar. 25, 2024; Apr. 23, 2026); The Pillar; Anglican Compass.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com