The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has rejected Scott Peyton's appeal against his excommunication from the Catholic Church. Peyton, a Louisiana deacon ordained in 2012, resigned from the diocese of Lafayette after priest Michael Guidry confessed in 2018 to molesting Peyton's teenage son Oliver while they served together at St Peter's church in Morrow, Louisiana. The DDF ruled that Peyton's decision to temporarily join an Anglican congregation — disclosed on social media — constituted an automatic severance from the Catholic Church, making his excommunication proper under canon law. The technical basis is narrow: joining a "separated faith community" is, per the DDF, an act of refusal of submission to the Roman pontiff. The documents, signed by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández and Archbishop John Joseph Kennedy, acknowledged the circumstances as "tragic" but held the canonical logic was dispositive. Peyton's attorney, canon lawyer Dawn Eden Goldstein, confirmed that a further appeal will be filed. The structural inversion at the center of this case is stark. Guidry, who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing Oliver Peyton — an altar server — received a seven-year prison sentence. He remains, according to Bishop J Douglas Deshotel's own admission during Friday's meeting with Peyton, a member of the Catholic priesthood. He is suspended from public ministry but at a parole hearing spoke of providing spiritual direction while incarcerated and considering himself still a priest. Peyton, the father of the victim, is the one expelled. The timeline compounds the institutional dysfunction. Peyton filed his formal appeal in May 2024. The process is supposed to take roughly three months. The DDF didn't acknowledge receipt until October 2024 — five months later — and didn't issue its rejection until May 22, 2025, a full two years after filing. During this period, Peyton's wife Letitia and their six children were effectively cut off from the sacramental life of a church they had not left, a point Peyton raised explicitly in his appeal: his excommunication "harmed the spiritual lives of eight Catholics." The Lafayette diocese sits at a particular intersection of this crisis. It was within this diocese that priest Gilbert Gauthe pleaded guilty in 1985 to molesting several boys — one of the earliest and most significant public reckonings with Catholic clergy abuse in the United States. In March 2025, another Lafayette priest, Korey LaVergne, was charged with felony indecent behavior with a juvenile; he has pleaded not guilty and the case is unresolved. The diocese has reportedly hired bankruptcy attorney Frank LoCoco, though it has not yet filed for bankruptcy protection — unlike more than 40 other US Catholic institutions that have done so amid litigation from the abuse crisis. The Peyton family secured a $350,000 out-of-court settlement from the Lafayette diocese in 2021 and became advocates for clergy abuse survivors. Peyton has since left the Anglican congregation for a nondenominational one. His statement was direct: "Apparently, according to Bishop Deshotel, finding a faith community where my family can worship without reliving the trauma endured is a greater scandal to the Diocese of Lafayette than the sexual abuse of a child." The DDF said it hopes for eventual reconciliation with Peyton. The institutional signal, however, points the other direction: canonical procedure was applied with precision to the man who left, while the man who committed the crime retains his clerical status. The church's own disciplinary apparatus has produced an outcome where the cost of abuse falls on the family that reported it.
