Ex-Catholic priest exploited family deaths to abuse disabled boy, police allege | New Orleans clergy abuse

A man working as a Roman Catholic priest in New Orleans positioned himself as a mentor to a disabled young boy suffering from two family deaths and then exploited that proximity to harass him for years, police allege.

Those details are contained in criminal court records created when Mark Francis Ford was arrested in Indiana in September and subsequently transferred to a New Orleans jail, a process completed late Tuesday.

Ford, 64, appeared in court for the first time Wednesday as he became the latest person to come under scrutiny during the New Orleans Catholic church’s long-running clergy abuse scandal.

A magistrate judge ordered Ford temporarily held without bail.

Ford is one of several men who worked as Catholic clergy in New Orleans and were arrested by authorities in connection with allegations of child sex abuse before and after the city’s archdiocese filed for federal bankruptcy protection in 2020. This bankruptcy filing was designed to limit the archdiocese’s financial liability for hundreds of allegations of clergy abuse, mostly victimizing children, over several decades.

The archdiocese of New Orleans has agreed to pay at least $230 million in a collective settlement with abuse victims whose claims are tied to bankruptcy. Survivors have until October 29 to vote on whether to approve the agreement.

The accuser at the center of the Ford case reported being about 10 years old when she met the man known to her as “Daddy Mark” in 2004, according to an affidavit from one of the city’s sex crimes detectives. This happened through a program for disabled youth called God’s Special Children, which Ford co-founded, according to the police statement.

The police statement said Ford, a Catholic priest from 1992 to 2007, became close to the boy as he mourned the deaths of his grandmother and father and visited the boy at his home, playing video games with him and giving him guitar lessons.

Police then allege Ford began showing pornography to the boy, who has a degenerative spine condition that requires him to occasionally use a wheelchair and is on the autism spectrum. Ford was said to have ignored the boy when he expressed discomfort with the sexually explicit content and allegedly instructed the boy to keep it secret from his mother.

Ford allegedly sexually assaulted the boy on multiple occasions after that, at the boy’s home, and told him that his family wouldn’t believe him if he talked.

Shortly after one of the attacks, the child’s aunt entered, causing the child to attempt to indicate distress through body language and eye contact; But according to police, the relative was unaware there was a problem.

The accuser, who was determined to be a legal minor despite reaching the age of majority, contacted the police in November 2024. He was later subjected to two forensic interviews, and on September 9, police obtained a warrant to arrest Ford on four counts of first-degree rape.

The arrest warrant also charged Ford with two counts each of sexual assault, disorderly conduct and child abduction, and second-degree kidnapping. The arrest warrant stated that the crimes Ford allegedly committed in the case that occurred between 2004 and 2014 were included.

On September 25, police arrested Ford in Portage, Indiana, where he resides, and held him without bail until his extradition to New Orleans. Ford waived his right to object to extradition at an Oct. 1 hearing. And he was taken into custody in New Orleans late Tuesday.

Ford was ordered held without bail in court Wednesday, provisionally until at least another hearing, set for Friday.

He faces a mandatory life sentence if ultimately convicted.

Ford belonged to the Catholic religious order known as the Vincentians, and throughout his religious career served various churches in the archdiocese of New Orleans as well as the dioceses of Dallas and Gallup, New Mexico. While at St Joseph’s church in New Orleans, which the Vincentians had run since 1858, he helped found the Special Children of God.

Vincentians say Ford eventually successfully asked the Vatican to secularize him or distance him from the Catholic priesthood. An online profile of Ford said he worked for the Louisiana government as deputy director of disability affairs starting in 2006 and later, in a separate role, helped Native tribes in the state recover from hurricanes.

More recently, Ford has reportedly joined US hunger relief nonprofit Feeding America, with positions in Phoenix and Chicago. And he is listed as a board member of the American Indian Center in Chicago.

church watchman group BishopAccountability.org It says Ford was not listed among active clergy in the 1994, 1999, 2002 and 2003 editions of the Official Catholic Directory (OKB); Disappearances are often linked to “issues that were not managed transparently within the ministry and/or periods when the priest was sent to a treatment facility.”

Only the first of these departmental cuts was apparently announced in the news media. BishopAccountability.org noted.

The Dallas Morning News reported in 1997 that Ford had previously attended a program run by the Servants of the Paraclete in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The reason given was that Ford had trouble managing money while working for the Gallup diocese at two churches in Arizona.

At the time, the Servants of the Paraclete program was better known for treating other problems ranging from substance abuse to child sexual abuse.

In a gesture of transparency and reconciliation amid the fallout from the worldwide Catholic church clergy abuse scandal, the Vincentians, the archdiocese of New Orleans, and the dioceses of Gallup and Dallas have released lists of clergy with credible allegations of child abuse.

According to information on BishopAccountability.org, Ford was not immediately added to those lists after his arrest in Portage.