As New Orleans church leaders braced for the fallout from publishing a list of predatory Catholic priests, they turned to an unlikely ally: the front office of the city’s NFL franchise. What followed was a months-long, crisis-communications blitz orchestrated by the New Orleans Saints’ president and other top team officials, according to hundreds of internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.

The records, which the Saints and church had long sought to keep out of public view, reveal team executives played a more extensive role than previously known in a public relations campaign to mitigate fallout from the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The emails shed new light on the Saints' foray into a fraught topic far from the gridiron, a behind-the-scenes effort driven by the team's devoutly Catholic owner who has long enjoyed a close relationship with the city's embattled archbishop.

They also showed how various New Orleans institutions — from a sitting federal judge to the local media — rallied around church leaders at a critical moment. Among the key moments, as revealed in the Saints’ own emails:. — Saints executives were so involved in the church’s damage control that a team spokesman briefed his boss on a 2018 call with the city’s top prosecutor hours before the church released a list of clergymen accused of abuse. The call, the spokesman said, “allowed us to take certain people off” the list.

— Team officials were among the first people outside the church to view that list, a carefully curated, yet undercounted roster of suspected pedophiles. The disclosure of those names invited civil claims against the church and drew attention from federal and state law enforcement. — The team’s president, Dennis Lauscha, drafted more than a dozen questions that Archbishop Gregory Aymond should be prepared to answer as he faced reporters.

— The Saints’ senior vice president of communications, Greg Bensel, provided fly-on-the-wall updates to Lauscha about local media interviews, suggesting church and team leaders were all on the same team. “He is doing well,” Bensel wrote as the archbishop told reporters the church was committed to addressing the crisis. “That is our message,” Bensel added, “that we will not stop here today.”.

The emails obtained by AP sharply undercut assurances the Saints gave fans about the public relations guidance five years ago when they asserted they had provided only “minimal” assistance to the church. The team went to court to keep its internal emails secret. “This is disgusting,” said state Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans. “As a New Orleans resident, taxpayer and Catholic, it doesn’t make any sense to me why the Saints would go to these lengths to protect grown men who raped children. All of them should have been just as horrified at the allegations.”.

The Saints told AP last week that the partnership is a thing of the past. The emails cover a yearlong period ending in July 2019, when they were subpoenaed by attorneys for victims of a priest later charged with raping an 8-year-old boy. In a lengthy statement, the team criticized the media for using “leaked emails for the purpose of misconstruing a well-intended effort.”. “No member of the Saints organization condones or wants to cover up the abuse that occurred in the Archdiocese of New Orleans," the team said. "That abuse occurred is a terrible fact.”.

The team's response did little to quell the anger of survivors of clergy sexual abuse. “We felt betrayed by the organization,” said Kevin Bourgeois, a former Saints season ticket holder who was abused by a priest in the 1980s. “It forces me to question what other secrets are being withheld. I’m angry, hurt and re-traumatized again.”. Emails reveal extent of help. After the AP first reported on the alliance in early 2020, Saints owner Gayle Benson denied that anyone “associated with our organizations made recommendations or had input” on the list of pedophile priests.

The Saints reiterated that denial in its statement Saturday, saying no Saints employees “had any responsibility for adding or removing any names from that list.” The team said that no employees offered "any input, suggestions or opinions as to who should be included or omitted from” the list. Leon Cannizzaro, the district attorney at the time, last week denied any role in shaping the credibly accused clergy list, echoing statements he made in 2020. He told AP he “absolutely had no involvement in removing any names from any list." Cannizzaro said he did not know why the Saints' spokesman would have reported he had been on a call related to the list.