A retired Roman Catholic priest facing criminal charges of child sexual abuse molested youths throughout his adult life, beginning in 1960, according to a 1990 psychiatric report.
The report, filed this week in Jefferson Circuit Court, said the Rev. Louis Miller committed assaults as often as every other month during the 1960s and ’70s, usually targeting boys 10 to 15 years old.
When the church learned of incidents, it moved him from one job to another, said the report on an evaluation by a Cincinnati psychiatrist, which was sent to Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly.
Miller, 71, was indicted last month on charges of sexually abusing or committing indecent acts with 23 children in Jefferson and Oldham counties. He has pleaded innocent.
Miller has also been accused of sexual abuse by 63 people in lawsuits filed against the Archdiocese of Louisville, alleging it knew of abuse allegations and covered them up.
“This is a bombshell,” said lawyer William McMurry, who represents most of the plaintiffs.
The archdiocese has contended it has no records of sexual abuse allegations against Miller before 1989, and Kelly has said he never knowingly put children at risk in reassigning a priest.
Kelly barred Miller from working with children in 1990 and eventually assigned him as a chaplain at a nursing home. Spokeswoman Cecelia Price said Tuesday that Kelly made an assignment “that at the time he felt was appropriate.” None of the lawsuits accuse him of abuse after that time.
The psychiatric report by Dr. Richard W. Brush was filed in court Monday.
It said Miller’s first assault came four years after his ordination, when he was associate pastor at Holy Spirit in 1960. He confessed the act to a superior soon afterward and began the first of several psychiatric treatments, the evaluation said.
He was moved from Holy Spirit in 1961, but fondled children over the next two decades, although sometimes as infrequently as once a year, the report said.
“Miller admits to periodically acting out sexual impulses in this manner his entire adult life,” the report said.
In his evaluation, the psychiatrist advised the archbishop that he was “faced with a difficult placement decision, particularly since Father Miller has repeated this behavior in the past.”
Another professional who examined Miller, psychologist Robert G. Tureen, wrote in another 1990 report that Miller had an absence of guilt, showing “this is not an individual who would be expected to respond to (or even seek) psycho-therapeutic help, except under pressure.”
Miller retired in March. He is the only priest in the archdiocese to be criminally charged, though the 156 abuse-related lawsuits filed against it since April name more than 20 clergy members and employees.
In the latest suit, filed Tuesday, Dorothy Marie Richardson claimed that she was abused as a child in the 1950s by the late Rev. H.J. Lammers, who oversaw Catholic Charities. During that period, she lived at two Catholic facilities, St. Thomas-St. Vincent Home and Our Lady’s Home for the Infants, the suit said.
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