A man who once served in the administrations of two Louisiana governors has been arrested on allegations that he molested a child whom he met while ministering to disabled children in New Orleans as a Roman Catholic priest during a previous career, according to authorities and an attorney representing the accuser.
Mark Francis Ford, 64, faces charges of first-degree rape, second-degree kidnapping, sexual battery and indecent behavior with a juvenile after federal agents arrested him on Thursday in Portage, Indiana, on a warrant obtained by police in New Orleans, Brian Fair of the US Marshals Service said.
Ford remained in custody on Friday at the jail in Portage – the city where he resides – with no bail set, awaiting extradition to New Orleans, whose local Catholic church has spent years being roiled by a clergy sexual abuse scandal. It was unclear whether he had an attorney representing him.
Precise details from law enforcement about the circumstances surrounding the charges against Ford weren’t immediately available. But civil attorney Kristi Schubert is representing Ford’s accuser, and she alleged her client met him while participating in a program for children with disabilities that was run by Ford, then a Vincentian priest.
Schubert’s client alleges that Ford began abusing him when was about 10, in 2004. She said her client, now 31, has a degenerative spinal cord condition which occasionally requires him to get around in a wheelchair. He is also on the autism spectrum, has been legally determined to be a minor despite reaching the age of majority and is under his mother’s continuing, permanent tutorship, Schubert said.
The accuser alleges that Ford molested him in about 2022 or 2023, which was after Ford had evidently left the priesthood, Schubert said.
The alleged victim reported Ford to New Orleans police in November, said the executive director of TentMakers of Louisiana, Letitia Peyton, whose non-profit organization is dedicated to supporting clergy molestation survivors and who has been in constant contact with the family of Schubert’s client.
Schubert and Peyton said the accuser underwent a series of forensic interviews before police then obtained a warrant to arrest Ford. US Marshals in New Orleans as well as in the region surrounding Portage collaborated to take Ford into custody by Thursday, Fair said.
Ford is not expected to appear in court with respect to the allegations against him in New Orleans until after he is extradited from Indiana.
According to an online biography of him, Ford spent 16 years in the Catholic priesthood, ministering on Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona as well as two New Orleans churches. The biography said he co-founded “a ministry for children with disabilities and their families” while in New Orleans – work which generated coverage in the city’s media.
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Those media reports said Ford was assigned then to the New Orleans churches of St John the Baptist and St Joseph. The latter church is on New Orleans’ Tulane Avenue, which the Vincentian order has run since 1858, according to the institution’s website.
Ford’s biography did not say why he left the priesthood. It said he became the Louisiana state government’s assistant director of disability affairs in 2006, the year after federal levee failures during Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.
The biography said he was appointed to the job by then governor Kathleen Blanco, and he was tasked with helping people with disabilities access resources and services after Katrina.
Blanco’s gubernatorial successor, Bobby Jindal, then appointed Ford to direct Louisiana’s office of Indian affairs, a role in which he was meant to assist efforts by the state’s Native tribes to recover from Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008. Ford’s biography, published by the American Indian Center, described him as being of Chiricahua Apache descent.
A page on the professional networking site LinkedIn under Ford’s name and likeness said he more recently had been working as the director of community engagement for Native/tribal communities for the US hunger relief organization Feeding America.
Neither the Vincentian order nor Feeding America immediately responded to requests for comment.
Ford would receive mandatory life imprisonment if ultimately convicted of first-degree rape. The rest of the charges against him could carry lengthy sentences, too.
He is among at least five men who have worked as Catholic clergymen in New Orleans to have been arrested in connection with allegations of child sexual abuse after the city’s archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020. The church’s bankruptcy filing was meant to limit its financial liability with respect to hundreds of claims of clergy abuse, mostly victimizing children, over the course of decades.
Three of those men have pleaded guilty, with two since dying and one serving prison time as of Friday. A fourth was awaiting trial.
The New Orleans archdiocese has agreed to pay $230m to collectively settle with abuse survivors involved in the bankruptcy. Those survivors have until late October to vote on whether or not to approve the settlement.
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday named the eventual successor to New Orleans’ archbishop, Gregory Aymond, who has been in office since 2009. James Checchio – the bishop in Metuchen, New Jersey, since 2016 – is expected to administer alongside Aymond and then succeed him when he retires in the coming months, according to Leo, the first US-born pope in history.