CBS News - April 15, 2010
Pedophile Priests and the "Geographical Cure"
Expert Cites "Checker Game" where Child Molesters Are Allowed to Continue Work in Places Where Their Past Is Not Known
At the Vatican Thursday, Pope Benedict made an oblique apparent reference to the worldwide sex abuse scandal enveloping the church. Meanwhile, a new investigation by the Associated Press reveals the church frequently moved pedophile priests from one country to another where some abused children again.
CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reports it's been more than 50 years, but Joe Callander is still haunted by the memory of Father Mario Pezzoti, who sexually abused him when he was 14 years old.
"It left lasting scars by all means," Callander said.
In addition to a financial settlement, he says the church made Callander a promise.
"I was given their word that he would not be around children," Callander recalled.
Callander tried to put the incident behind him. But two years ago, he spotted a picture of Pezzotti surrounded by Amazon Indian children in Brazil.
"If that's not worth 10,000 words, I don't know what is," he said. "The expression on his face is enough to scare the hell out of anybody, knowing what he's capable of."
Father Pezzoti is just one example of what may be a pattern. The Associated Press found 30 cases of priests accused of abuse then transferred overseas. One victim called it the "geographical cure." [see article below]
Former Benedictine monk Richard Sipe says it is very common.
"It's like a checker game," Sipe said. "They are moved from place to place, wherever they can be hidden or given a job where their past is not known."
Father Vijaya Bhaskar Godugunuru is another example. In 2006, he pleaded no contest to assaulting a 15-year-old girl in Florida. Godugunuru was moved to India, then to Italy.
There are similar cases involving an Indian priest who molested a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota then continuing work in his home diocese and another transferred to India after molesting a 12-year-old girl in New York.
At the Vatican Thursday, Pope Benedict made an apparent reference to the scandal, calling on Christians to do penance.
"Under attack from the world, which has been telling us about our sins ... we realize that it's necessary to repent, in other words, recognize what is wrong in our lives," Benedict said.
But "the pope's target is misplaced," Sipe said. "He calls on Christians to do penance. The problem is not Christians; the problem is Catholic priests who are not practicing their celibacy."
Earlier this week the pope called on bishops to report allegations of abuse to police. But as more details emerge on the cover ups of the past, the question is whether this new pressure will force the Vatican to fully answer for the sins of the clergy.
This article was found at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/15/eveningnews/main6400632.shtml
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Associated Press - April 14, 2010
Predator Priests Shuffled Around Globe
AP Investigation Found 30 Cases of Priests Accused of Abuse Who Were Transferred or Moved Abroad
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP)
There he was, five decades later, the priest who had raped Joe Callander in Massachusetts. The photo in the Roman Catholic newsletter showed him with a smile across his wrinkled face, near-naked Amazon Indian children in his arms and at his feet.
The Rev. Mario Pezzotti was working with children and supervising other priests in Brazil.
It's not an isolated example.
In an investigation spanning 21 countries across six continents, The Associated Press found 30 cases of priests accused of abuse who were transferred or moved abroad. Some escaped police investigations. Many had access to children in another country, and some abused again.
A priest who admitted to abuse in Los Angeles went to the Philippines, where U.S. church officials mailed him checks and advised him not to reveal their source. A priest in Canada was convicted of sexual abuse and then moved to France, where he was convicted of abuse again in 2005. Another priest was moved back and forth between Ireland and England, despite being diagnosed as a pederast, a man who commits sodomy with boys.
"The pattern is if a priest gets into trouble and it's close to becoming a scandal or if the law might get involved, they send them to the missions abroad," said Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and critic of what he says is a practice of international transfers of accused and admitted priest child abusers. "Anything to avoid a scandal."
Church officials say that in some cases, the priests themselves moved to another country and the new parish might not have been aware of past allegations. In other cases, church officials said they did not believe the allegations, or that the priest had served his time and reformed.
***
Callander says he was 14 when he was raped three times and abused on other occasions in 1959 at the now-closed Xaverian Missionary Faith High School in Holliston, Mass. The Xaverians settled the case for $175,000 in 1993. At least two other accusations of sexual abuse were leveled against Pezzotti in the Boston area.
In the meantime, from 1970 to 2003, Pezzotti was in Brazil, where he worked with the Kayapo Indians.
In a handwritten note of apology to Callander in January 1993, Pezzotti said he had cured himself in the jungle.
"I asked to leave Holliston and go to Brazil to change my life and begin a new life. Upon arrival in Brazil, confiding in God's mercy, I owned up to the problem," Pezzotti wrote. "With divine help, I overcame it."
There is no evidence that Pezzotti, now 75, abused children in Brazil, which has more Catholics than any other nation. Brazilian law enforcement officials said they were unaware of any complaints about him.
The Rev. Robert Maloney, a former provincial of the Xaverians who worked closely on Callander's settlement, said Pezzotti was allowed to stay in Brazil for another decade and work with children after a psychological evaluation. He added that a Xaverian investigation into Pezzotti and his work in Brazil turned up nothing.
After Pezzotti returned to Italy in 2003, "he was constantly being asked for by Brazil and by the people he worked with," Maloney added.
In 2008, Pezzotti returned to Brazil. A few months later, Callander saw the photos of him on the Internet and complained to the church. The priest was quickly sent back to Italy.
The Xaverian vicar general, Rev. Luigi Menegazzo, said Pezzotti works at Xaverian headquarters in Parma tending to sick and elderly priests. Asked if Pezzotti had any contact with children or public parish work, he said, "Absolutely in no way."
Reached by telephone, Pezzotti said only: "I don't see why I have to talk about it. Everything was resolved and I don't feel like talking."
***
Father Vijay Vhaskr Godugunuru was forced to return to India and then was transferred to Italy after pleading no contest to assaulting a 15-year-old girl while visiting friends in Bonifay, Fla. He now ministers to a parish in a medieval town of about 4,000 in Tuscany, where he hears confessions, celebrates Mass and works with children.
The bishops supervising him said they were aware of the case but believed he was innocent.
"The evidence that has been given does not support the accusation," Monsignor Rodolfo Cetoloni, the bishop of the Montepulciano diocese, told the AP last week.
Cetoloni said he saw no reason for any restrictions. Godugunuru, now 40, "enjoys the esteem of everybody," he said.
Godugunuru had been charged with fondling a parishioner in her family's van on June 23, 2006. The priest, visiting from India's diocese of Cuddapah, had been allowed to assist at the Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Bonifay.
The girl, now 19, told police in a sworn statement that Godugunuru "fondled her breasts and penetrated her vagina with his fingers." In his own interview with police, Godugunuru said the girl "had taken his hand and placed it between her legs." He denied intentionally touching her.
The priest was arrested the next month for lewd or lascivious battery on a minor. He faced up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine but in exchange for his no contest plea was required to return to India, undergo counseling, not supervise minors for a year and not return to the United States.
The girl's mother brought the case to the attention of Pope Benedict XVI.
"My family and others have been forced out of our church," she wrote in an Aug. 23, 2006, e-mail obtained by the AP. "Just when our faith and our faith in our church were tested most, our Priest chose the side of silence. ... To make matters worse, it was my daughter who was the one being attacked and he just sat back and watched. ...
"This is the biggest problem my family has ever dealt with," she continued. "Please Father, help us. Remember us in your prayers, especially for the speedy healing of my daughter."
The e-mail also said she had contacted the bishop of Cuddapah, the Most Rev. Doraboina Moses Prakasam, and asked if there had been any past accusations of sexual improprieties against Godugunuru. "I have not heard back from him and I don't expect to," she said.
The pope never answered.
Prakasam told the AP he was under the impression that Godugunuru had been absolved of the charges.
"What I was told by the people looking after that case was that he was cleared and ... he was allowed to come back to India," he said.
He said he told the Italian bishop of the case when Godugunuru moved to Tuscany.
The priest of San Lorenzo parish told the AP by phone last week that Godugunuru works as his deputy. He refused further comment, except to say that Godugunuru "does what all deputy parish priests do" and "helps the parish priest."
Godugunuru declined to be interviewed by the AP.
***
Clodoveo Piazza is an Italian Jesuit who ran a homeless shelter for street children and worked in Brazil for 30 years. In 2005, he was awarded $600,000 from Brazil's national development bank to set up four facilities in the northeastern city of Salvador.
Last August, prosecutors said at least eight boys and young men had come forward to say either that they were abused by Piazza or that he allowed visiting foreigners to sexually abuse boys. Brazilian police are seeking his arrest.
Piazza now works in Mozambique, according to the Catholic nonprofit Organizzazione di Aiuto Fraterno, and the church has come to his defense.
"The Italian Jesuits express their solidarity with the brother and father Piazza," reads one note on the nonprofit's Web site. The group adds that "the slander against missionaries is becoming an increasingly popular game."
Brazilian prosecutors say Piazza, a naturalized Brazilian, has refused to respond to the charges of sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of children.
Interviewed in Maputo, Mozambique, this week, Piazza said the charges were false and part of a campaign to blackmail him by "political circles" in Brazil that he did not identify. He said he had been acquitted of the charges twice in Brazil, and that there is no evidence against him.
A spokeswoman with Bahia state's Public Ministry said there were no records of Piazza ever being tried or acquitted and that the case against him is still open. She spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with department policy.
"This is propaganda in order to earn money," Piazza told the AP, saying people in Brazil had asked him for money, which he could not pay.
He said he has been living in a Jesuit residence in Maputo for about seven months. He said he was working with Italy's Turino University on "economic projects" and was not working with children.
***
Joseph Skelton was a 26-year-old student at St. John Provincial Seminary in Detroit, Mich., in 1988 when he was convicted of sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old boy. He was given three years' probation and dismissed from his seminary.
Two decades later, he lives in the Philippines, where he was ordained a priest and now serves as parochial vicar of the St. Vincent Ferrer parish in the remote town of Calape, according to the diocese directory. He is also a popular gospel singer in the heavily Catholic country.
Reached on his cell phone, Skelton declined comment.
He finished his seminary studies in Manila, the capital, and was ordained in 2001 in the diocese of Tagbilaran in Bohol province.
The bishop who ordained Skelton said he wouldn't have made him a priest if he had known about the criminal conviction.
"I ordained him because, while there was some talk about his effeminate ways, there was no case against him," Bishop Leopoldo S. Tumulak said.
Tumulak, who has since stepped down, said it would be up to his successor to reopen the case.
"The priest is trying to live well," Tumulak said. "If he has really changed, the heart of the church is compassionate - although in America, Europe, they have different ways of looking at it. Not the church, but the government, the people. In the Philippines, it's a little bit different."
The archdiocese of Detroit, after learning Skelton had been ordained, sent a letter about his conviction to the Tagbilaran diocese in early 2003. Tumulak, the former bishop, said he doesn't remember if he received the letter, and in any case it would have been too late.
Informed of the case, current Bishop Leonardo Medroso said he would investigate. But he added:
"The case has been judged already. He was convicted and that means to say he has served already the conviction. So what obstacle can there be if he has already served his punishment or penalty?"
***
The Rev. Enrique Diaz Jimenez of Colombia was punished three times in three different countries.
He pleaded guilty to sexually abusing three boys while a priest at St. Leo's Church and Our Lady of Sorrows Church in New York in the mid-1980s, and was sentenced in April 1991 to five years' probation and four months of an "intermittent sentence."
He was deported and resumed work as a priest in Venezuela, where he was suspended from the priesthood in 1996 for 20 years after 18 boys accused him of molesting them.
Monsignor Francisco de Guruceaga, the bishop who hired Diaz in Venezuela, said it was not clear to him when the priest arrived that he had been charged with abusing children. De Guruceaga said Diaz told him he had problems with relationships with women, not molesting children.
Diaz returned to Colombia in 1996 and again found work as a priest. Colombian prosecutors say Diaz was charged in 2001 with molesting one more boy and pleaded guilty later that year.
***
Transferring abusive priests was called "the geographical cure," according to Terry Carter, a New Zealand victim. Carter won $32,000 in compensation from the Society of Mary, which oversees the Catholic boarding school outside Wellington where he was abused by the Rev. Allan Woodcock.
Woodcock molested at least 11 boys at four church facilities in New Zealand before being sent by the church to Ireland. He was extradited to New Zealand in 2004, pleaded guilty to 21 sexual abuse charges involving 11 victims and was sentenced to seven years in jail. He was paroled in September 2009.
"They whipped him out of the country to Ireland," Carter said. "They took him out of New Zealand after years of offending in different locations."
Society of Mary spokeswoman Lyndsay Freer told the AP that some families of Woodcock's victims asked that he be sent offshore.
"He was sent to Ireland for intensive psychotherapy. He had no permission to exercise his ministry or to be involved with youth," she said.
Woodcock was suspended from his ministry in the New Zealand branch of the Society of Mary in 1987, according to Freer. He was removed from the priesthood in 2001, she said.
Freer noted that even 20 years ago, it was accepted belief that "pedophilia could be cured," often with intensive psychotherapy. "Pedophilia is now seen as recidivist," she said.
Woodcock is believed to be living in New Zealand's North Island coastal city of Wanganui. A woman who gave her name as Catherine Woodcock and described herself as "a relative" said she didn't think he would want to make any comment to the media. Asked why, she replied: "It is not appropriate at this stage."
***
Back in Windsor, Vermont, Callander lives a quiet life with Sandi, his wife of 35 years. It was only last week that he told his siblings about the abuse.
Callander says he is coming forward now because the Xaverians failed to keep their promise that Pezzotti would not be around children. He wants the church to change by defrocking or isolating priests who admit abuse so they cannot work in the same positions again - anywhere in the world.
"All I want is for the church to do what is right for once," Callander said. "To end the facade that a man like that should have the right to call himself a Catholic priest."
This article was found at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/04/14/world/main6397279.shtml
Bishops were warned of abusive priests as early as the mid-1950s
1963
letter by church expert on pedophile priests shows Pope Paul VI and
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Jesuit leaders concealed 40 years of warnings about pedophile priest who became spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa
New Vatican rules rely on Bishops to deal with clergy crimes before reporting to police, still don't protect children
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US bishop's report on clergy abuse puts focus on sociological factors instead of church leaders who covered up crimes
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Catholic theologian says secrecy, misogyny and resistance to reform in wake of clergy sex scandals will doom the church
Retired Archbishop blames protective church hierarchy for clergy abuse scandal
Australian Archbishop says church culture responsible for deep-rooted child abuse crimes and cover-ups
Former Benedictine monk says church has not yet addressed child abuse crisis, most bishops still mired in obfuscation and deceit
Is the Catholic church in state of denial over clergy abuse, or is it honest and transparent?
Hundreds of admitted or credibly accused pedophile priests who escaped justice are unsupervised by church or police
Dublin Archbishop admits frustration over failed effort to promote major reforms in Catholic Church
German bishop, accused of abuse, found to have helped wanted pedophile priests escape to Latin America
ReplyDeleteBy AC Wimmer, Catholic News Agency, August 8, 2022
A German prelate who served as bishop in Ecuador is not only accused of having sexually abused minors in several countries. As director of a German aid organization he also helped pedophile priests wanted by authorities escape prosecution, according to an independent investigation published Monday.
The late Bishop Emil Stehle (1926-2017) — known in Latin America as Emilio Lorenzo Stehle — has been accused of sexual abuse in 16 cases, a statement by the German Bishops' Conference said on Aug. 8.
Furthermore, Stehle, the head of Adveniat, the Church in Germany's aid organization for Latin America, was found to have helped priests evade authorities by facilitating their escape to Latin American countries. The investigation found that he also provided the alleged perpetrators with financial support, using money from the German Bishops' Conference.
Lawyer and mediator Bettina Janssen prepared the 148-page-report on behalf of the Association of German Dioceses, reported CNA Deutsch, CNA's German-language news partner.
The report lists 16 allegations and indications of sexual abuse against Stehle.
"The described offenses spanned his time as a priest in Bogotá (Colombia) [in the 1950s], as Adveniat managing director in Essen [1972-1984], and later as auxiliary bishop of Quito [1983-1986] and as bishop of Santo Domingo [1987-2002] in Ecuador," the bishops' conference statement said.
Allegations against Stehle are not new. CNA Deutsch reported on abuse accusations against Stehle and his purported assistance in helping pedophile priests from Germany and other countries escape to Latin America in September 2021 and June 2022.
In addition to the abuse cases so far documented, the new report's author said there could be more. Janssen called for further "efforts, together with the relevant Latin American dioceses, to reach out to possible victims. To obtain a complete picture, investigators should further analyze to what extent Stehle's abuses were known to church authorities — and what consequences they took against them."
Stehle ensured that several priests accused of abuse could remain undercover in Latin America, the German Bishops' Conference said on Aug. 8.
The German bishops also said the investigation was ongoing. There would "not be a conclusion," they noted; instead, there would be "consequences, the details of which still need to be clarified."
Father Martin Maier, S.J., the current chief executive of Adveniat, said, "We are grateful that this investigation has been carried out. It is part of the truth we must face as a church in Germany and worldwide. We owe that to the victims of sexualized violence and those who support our work."
Adveniat was committed to a "position of absolutely zero tolerance towards the crime of sexual abuse" and stood "on the side of those affected in Germany and Latin America."
Stehle died in 2017 at the age of 80, having spent his retirement years in Germany.
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/251991/german-bishop-accused-of-abuse-helped-pedophile-priests-escape
A Catholic priest accused of misconduct was suspended in Texas. Why did New Orleans let him preach?
ReplyDeleteAnthony Odiong was removed in 2019 over allegations of inappropriate behavior, but he continued to minister in New Orleans despite the archdiocese knowing about the complaints
by Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian February 22, 2024
A Catholic priest removed from his role at a New Orleans-area church in December over allegations of misconduct with multiple women was prohibited from working in and around Texas’s capital for identical reasons in 2019, a diocesan official revealed in a privately sent letter obtained by the Guardian.
It is unclear why Anthony Odiong was permitted to continue ministering to parishioners who had no idea about his past. The Austin diocese, the first to suspend Odiong, said it notified the New Orleans archdiocese. The New Orleans archdiocese said it “acted in accord with civil, criminal and canon law” in its handling of Odiong but didn’t elaborate.
Nonetheless, Odiong’s removal from New Orleans constituted another scandal for the US’s second-oldest Catholic diocese, which declared bankruptcy in 2020 while attempting to dispense with litigation stemming from the worldwide church’s clerical molestation crisis. The Guardian has previously reported a series of controversies enveloping the organization, which has gone to unusual lengths to keep the abusive conduct of some of its priests and deacons from being publicized.
Officials in Austin said they were publicly clarifying that Odiong has for years lacked permission to minister there as he defies administrative orders to return to the Nigerian diocese that ordained him, which, under Catholic church policy, retains the sole authority to substantially discipline him.
Odiong recently hosted a meeting with a large group of supporters near Austin, outlining a plan to run chapels at a Catholic university in Florida as well as asking for financial assistance.
According to audio of the meeting provided to the Guardian, that job at Ave Maria University would technically be a lay position, though Odiong said that nothing would prevent him from using the knowledge he had acquired from his clerical career. An official at the university said Odiong “is not now – nor will be – working at Ave Maria University in any capacity, neither as a priest nor as a layperson”.
In a letter to one woman who alleged misconduct by Odiong, the Austin diocese said: “We have asked our priests … to inform parishioners that they not attend any event at which [Odiong] will be present or will lead.
“We encourage anyone providing funds to [him] for any purpose to exercise caution and to verify whether he has the permission to complete his stated intentions for those funds.”
Questions about Odiong’s handling by Louisiana and Texas diocesan officials have increased after three women shared with the Guardian details of complaints against him. They said Odiong tried to use his influence as a priest to pursue sexual contact they either did not welcome or could not consent to participate in. Neither church leaders nor civil authorities were meaningfully moved when they reported him, they said.
The women say their experiences with Odiong illustrate the US Catholic church’s reluctance to acknowledge that there is a disparity of power between parishioners and priests who position themselves as spiritual caretakers – then try to leverage physical relationships, despite the standard clerical promise to be celibate.
Though Vatican policy clearly defines sexual misconduct with children and vulnerable adults as punishable clerical abuse, some have pushed the global Catholic church to broaden its definition of the latter category.
At present, a vulnerable adult is someone older than 18 who has “severe intellectual, developmental or psychological disabilities”, the Pillar, a Catholic news outlet, reports.
continued below
According to the Pillar, a growing number in the church would like the label to apply to adults targeted by priests who hold a spiritual authority over them that could affect sexual consent, especially after Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s 2019 expulsion from the priesthood for, among other things, sexually preying on young men under his clerical authority.
ReplyDeleteProponents of that movement point to how teachers, healthcare providers and corrections officers generally risk professional sanctions and even criminal prosecution if they seek sex with adult students, patients or incarcerated people, respectively, given the imbalanced power dynamics at play.
In fact, Texas is one of several states with a law that says it is impossible for there to be a consensual relationship between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice, though criminal indictments in such cases have been rare.
One woman said her dealings with Odiong were “not a situation of two adults on equal footing”.
The woman, who asked that she not be named, said: “The Catholic church conveniently seemed to not lend a whole lot of weight to that notion.”
‘The only woman’
Ordained in Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993, Odiong became a pastor at St Anthony of Padua in Luling, Louisiana, in about 2015. Claiming to have a special understanding with the Virgin Mary through prayer, the clergyman held healing masses that improved church attendance.
Some congregants would report recovering from major medical ailments after attending the charismatic Odiong’s healing masses, earning him popularity. He then raised enough money to build a healing chapel at St Anthony, opening it in 2020.
He also drew attention from diocesan officials in Austin and New Orleans concerning his conduct with women.
Odiong, 55, was stationed in Austin in 2006 at the invitation of the bishop, Gregory Aymond, who later became archbishop of New Orleans. One of Odiong’s assignments led him to work with Baylor University students, including a woman who described an unwanted sexual advance after she underwent confession.
In a written report, the woman recounted how Odiong – who was also pastor of St Mary’s Church of the Assumption in West, Texas – embraced her tightly as she tried to leave his office, gazing into her pupils and saying “inappropriate romantic things about how my eyes had a ‘wild beauty’ and how I was the ‘only woman who could ever touch his heart’”.
Odiong was visibly aroused, grabbed the student’s hand and “slowly and sensually kissed the top of [it] several times”, the woman wrote. He then took “deep whiffs” of the woman’s hand as he rubbed it around his face before allowing the woman to leave.
Soon, Odiong relocated to Rome “for more education”, the woman wrote. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, she filed a complaint with law enforcement in her Missouri hometown and in Texas, and she alerted Austin and New Orleans church officials.
Discussions with law enforcement convinced the woman a criminal case would be difficult to prosecute. But there was one result: she learned the Austin bishop, Joe Vasquez, had told Odiong he was no longer permitted to minister there. And New Orleans’ archdiocese was told that Odiong had been notified of his suspension from ministry, a spokesperson for Vasquez told the Guardian.
Yet that information apparently was not shared with the public despite Catholic officials’ promises to handle clerical misconduct cases transparently.
Meanwhile, when approached by Odiong’s accuser, a top aide to Aymond in New Orleans promised to “carefully” review the allegation, to follow up accordingly and to help however he could.
continued below
Odiong’s work in Louisiana subsequently continued unabated.
ReplyDeleteA separate complaint – previously reported in the media and taken to church officials in both New Orleans and Austin around the time Odiong was suspended in Texas – ultimately led to his removal in Louisiana. Media coverage of that Louisiana removal in turn prompted at least a third complaint to come to light.
‘A spiritual marriage’
The allegations that set the stage for Odiong’s Louisiana ouster came from a Pennsylvania woman who contacted authorities in 2019, alleging a years-long sexual relationship and financial abuse. The woman alleged she could not consent to sex with Odiong – or willingly give him money – because he was her spiritual adviser.
The woman contacted the sheriff’s office, which patrols Luling, but investigators said they could not establish that a crime had occurred. She also called an archdiocese of New Orleans number for abuse claimants but said she was ultimately brushed off.
The woman again reported her allegations to the archdiocese by filing a claim for damages in the church bankruptcy. In December, the archdiocese forwarded her complaint to the sheriff’s office in Luling.
Deputies once more concluded there was not enough evidence of a crime. But the archdiocese cited the complaint as justification to finally follow the Austin diocese and bar Odiong from ministering in the New Orleans area.
New Orleans’ archdiocese also announced that Uyo’s bishop had recalled Odiong.
Local and national news coverage of Odiong’s dismissal by the archdiocese of New Orleans encouraged a third known accuser to reveal herself.
That woman said she met Odiong in Texas in 2010 while he worked at Baylor, counseling her on her troubled marriage. Their discussions often centered on her sex life, she said, and she alleged he encouraged her to engage in forms of intercourse with which she was not comfortable, demanding she “report back to him on the result of having submitted to these … activities”.
Eventually, Odiong told the woman he had fallen in love with her and her marriage was not a “true” one. He proposed she enter into a “spiritual marriage” with him, courting her by serenading her over the phone with ballads, including Annie’s Song by John Denver.
Odiong convinced her to see him in his office on the night she flew back from her grandfather’s out-of-town funeral, the woman alleged. He closed the door, forcefully kissed her on the mouth, made her straddle his lap and groped her while he was palpably aroused.
The woman said she initially did not report Odiong because she wondered whether she was at fault. Yet when she learned that someone else had made similar allegations, she wrote to the Austin diocese.
On 7 February, a top aide to the Austin bishop issued a letter that assured the woman Odiong had not been welcome to minister locally for years. That was news to the woman, who had never known Odiong to be disciplined.
The letter also said Odiong had not been convicted of wrongdoing in either the criminal justice system or under church law. Nonetheless, the letter made clear Odiong was disobeying orders to return to Uyo, so the diocese was asking congregants to avoid him and to be careful about giving him money.
continued below
The woman who unsuccessfully reported Odiong to deputies in Luling, Louisiana, at one point received a letter from the Austin diocese expressing an “interest in assisting” her in connection with her allegations.
ReplyDeleteThat letter stopped short of saying that Odiong had ever been suspended from ministering within the Austin diocese. The woman’s attorney, Kristi Schubert, said she is not aware of any other correspondence between her client and the Austin diocese.
‘Always a priest’
Several people in Texas are not heeding the Austin diocese’s warning.
In early February, Odiong and three couples invited residents of West, Texas, where he previously worked, to a potluck at a community center in Birome, just outside the Austin diocese.
There, Odiong said, as he has before, that he had been run out of Louisiana over his opposition to Pope Francis’s attempts to be more welcoming to LGBTQ+ people, who aren’t allowed to marry within the Catholic church.
Odiong suggested he would take a sabbatical before he hoped to begin work overseeing chapels at Florida’s Ave Maria University – as a layperson, technically, if necessary.
A university spokesperson denied Odiong had an employment opportunity there, saying all priests working for the school must be in good standing with their local diocese as well as have permission from the bishop of Venice, Florida, Frank Dewane. The spokesperson also said that the university had asked Odiong to “not make statements that he is coming to Ave Maria”.
In Birome, Odiong said US bishops could refuse to hire him as a clergyman but “cannot stop” his healing mission because he has not been ousted from the priesthood.
He also argued no one can make him return to Nigeria – where there has been violence against Christians – because he is an American citizen. And anyway, his bishop fully backed his presence in the US, he claimed, contradicting what the Austin diocese had said.
“A priest is always a priest,” Odiong said in an hour-long talk that intermittently drew laughter and applause. He added that he didn’t believe any bishop should be able to “take the priesthood away from you”.
A spokesperson for the diocese of Fort Worth, which includes Birome, said Odiong was not welcome to minister there either. But one potluck organizer said on Facebook that Odiong was “welcome to bless us with his presence any time he wishes”.
“I still can’t believe our bishop … [is] openly asking us to turn our backs on him, going directly against the teachings of Jesus!” the woman wrote.
Another user said: “Father Anthony is not guilty of anything but speaking the truth.”
The woman who accused Odiong of forcefully kissing and groping her after her grandfather’s funeral said she and his other accusers were the truthful ones. She said two of the women who had come forward against Odiong weren’t seeking damages but simply wanted to persuade officials to believe his accusers.
“This is a pattern of behavior affecting multiple people,” she said. “And these allegations are credible.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/22/catholic-priest-texas-anthony-odiong-new-orleans
‘It wasn’t a big deal’: secret deposition reveals how a child molester priest was shielded by his church
ReplyDeleteby Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian in New Orleans and David Hammer of WWL Louisiana May 9, 2024
Longtime New Orleans Catholic priest Lawrence Hecker received a special honor from the Vatican in 2000 despite having confessed to molesting children. Then, for another two decades, church leaders in the city strategically shielded him from law enforcement and media exposure – while also providing him with financial support ranging from paid limousine rides and therapeutic massages to full retirement benefits, according to his own, previously unreported testimony.
A sworn deposition Hecker gave in private in 2020 shows exactly how high-placed Catholic church officials in New Orleans let him keep his elevated position for years, even after they had been advised to oust him from the clergy and – much later – publicly acknowledged that he was a child predator.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker said at the deposition about how his archdiocese coddled him despite his acknowledged abuse of children.
The scale of the cover-up shocks the conscience. As Hecker walked into New Orleans’ historic St Louis Cathedral in early January 2000 to be handed the honorary, Vatican-bestowed title of monsignor, he had already admitted molesting children he met through his ministry.
Hecker by then had been flown out of town and driven by limousine to a psychiatric facility, which diagnosed him as an inveterate pedophile. He had been forced to take a months-long sabbatical – which was to begin the week after his promotional ceremony, at a cost to the archdiocese of $6,000. And he had already spoken to the archbishop of New Orleans at the time and his predecessor about the allegations against him.
Hecker admitted that the archbishop who presided over his 2000 promotion – the late Francis Bible Schulte – told him he regretted sending his name to his superiors in Rome to be exalted, shortly before the priest confessed to being a serial child abuser.
“Archbishop Schulte told me – he said – ‘If I had known of this, I would not have sent in for your promotion,’” Hecker testified. “‘I would not have asked for you to be a monsignor.’”
But nothing was done.
To borrow one of Hecker’s favorite words when discussing his past, Schulte and his colleagues “evidently” got over it.
First, they went through with conferring the distinction of monsignor upon Hecker, with approval from the then pope, John Paul II. And then Schulte’s successors as archbishop – Alfred Hughes and the present incumbent, Gregory Aymond – ignored a previously hidden recommendation from an official review board calling on them to laicize Hecker, which would have expelled him from the priesthood.
As a result, Hecker avoided being publicly exposed as a predator for nearly two decades. He was also able to collect tens of thousands of dollars in assistance from the second-oldest US archdiocese before at last facing a meaningful consequence: a grand jury indictment in September of last year that charged him with child rape, kidnapping and other crimes.
According to a bombshell search warrant Louisiana state police troopers served on the church in late April, the investigation which produced those charges has evolved into an inquiry over whether members of the archdiocese – in Hecker’s case and others – operated as a child sex-trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
During the 2020 deposition, an attorney for a number of Hecker’s abuse accusers asked the priest if he felt fortunate that he had managed to elude being criminally charged for so long after the truth had started to trickle out. Hecker replied: “I don’t think that was even thought about at the time.”
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The eight-and-a-half-hour deposition offers the most complete accounting yet of the lengths to which an organization serving a region with about a half-million Catholics went to shelter Hecker. He gave the testimony for a civil lawsuit seeking damages from him and the archdiocese.
ReplyDeleteThe plaintiff, Aaron Hebert, has publicly alleged he was an underage altar boy at a church in Gretna, Louisiana, in the late 1960s when Hecker lined him and other children up against a wall, ordered them to drop their pants and fondled their genitals. A May 2020 bankruptcy protection filing by the archdiocese put a halt to a wave of abuse-related lawsuits including Hebert’s, but his legal team, led by Richard Trahant, received special permission to privately question Hecker under oath.
Lawyers for the archdiocese have repeatedly gone to court to oppose public access to that deposition. But the Guardian and New Orleans’s CBS affiliate, WWL Louisiana, collaborated to obtain video of Hecker’s testimony and hundreds of pages of evidentiary exhibits.
The session, carried out over two days in December 2020, provides an unprecedented look at how Hecker, now 92, evaded accountability for so long. It comes as he and his accusers wait to see whether a judge agrees with a psychiatric opinion that Hecker is not mentally competent to stand trial.
Hecker’s testimony was enlightening even as he avoided answering many questions by invoking his rights against self-incrimination under the constitution’s fifth amendment. He did so a staggering 117 times – or about once every four minutes – in a sign of concern that eventually law enforcement could use his answers against him.
Neither the attorneys for Hecker nor the plaintiff commented on the deposition.
In written answers to detailed questions, an archdiocesan spokesperson said the church stood by how Aymond handled complaints against Hecker and referred questions about his predecessors to living members of their former administrations.
The church also maintained that it properly reported Hecker to law enforcement and district attorneys across south-east Louisiana, despite the fact that a 2002 letter that notified New Orleans police about him failed to mention his confession three years earlier, among other omissions.
A long history of molestation allegations
The deposition covered allegations dating back to the 1960s, from more than a dozen accusers. Yet it is unclear how many more people have claims against Hecker, including in the archdiocesan bankruptcy case. When Trahant asked “You have committed so many sexual felonies against children that you can’t remember them all, correct?”, Hecker pleaded the fifth amendment.
For decades, Hecker testified, his superiors did not take victims or their advocates seriously, even in the rare instances when they promised a vigorous investigation.
He said the then archbishop of New Orleans, Philip Hannan, confronted Hecker in 1988 with allegations from the parents of a boy who said he was molested in the late 1970s. Hannan then flew Hecker to a paid sabbatical in New York City, church documents show. There, Hecker took classes at Fordham University while he lived and worked at a Bronx church, St Mary’s.
Church records presented at the deposition show that a high-ranking New York archdiocese official wrote to Hannan asking him to vouch for Hecker.
Hannan wrote back that Hecker had permission to be in New York – without mentioning allegations of child sexual abuse.
“It wasn’t a big deal in those days,” Hecker testified.
That comment prompted his criminal defense attorney, Eugene Redmann, to exclaim: “Wow!”
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Another complaint in 1996 by the mother of three boys prompted then archbishop Schulte’s top aide to confront Hecker, who admitted taking showers, swimming in the nude and sleeping in the same bed as the woman’s sons, according to documents referenced in the deposition. Yet Hecker insisted he stopped short of inappropriate contact with any of those children, and the archdiocese dismissed the complaint as unsubstantiated.
ReplyDelete‘I did a good job’
A fresh complaint was filed against Hecker in October 1999, about a month after Schulte announced that Hecker would be promoted to monsignor the following year. On 4 November, Hecker provided a typed statement to the archdiocese in which he acknowledged “overtly sexual acts” with, or harassment of, multiple children.
Soon after, Hecker said a limousine driver who picked him up from the airport delivered him to a psychiatric clinic near Philadelphia, where he was evaluated over the course of a few days. The clinic concluded that Hecker was a pedophile who “takes little responsibility for his behavior” and recommended he refrain from ministering to “children, adolescents or other vulnerable individuals”.
In the deposition, Hecker took pains to avoid admitting his official diagnosis. Trahant established that the archdiocese withheld Hecker’s treatment records for the session. But Trahant had medical insurance coding records – and he directed Hecker to read the code for his diagnosis as well as to say what it meant.
Hecker balked. He told his attorney, “This seems like a trap,” before finally acknowledging the numerical code referred to pedophilia.
He returned from receiving his diagnosis, accepted his promotion to monsignor, then went on another forced sabbatical – this time to San Antonio, Texas. To do so, he had to resign his position as pastor from a church in Terrytown, Louisiana.
In a letter to congregants, he attributed the break to physical fatigue and “aging”.
Thomas Rodi – now the archbishop of Mobile, Alabama, at the time an aide to Schulte – signed an invoice authorizing a $6,000 payment to cover the sabbatical. Deposition records suggest at least some of that money went to cover $35-an-hour therapeutic massages, although Hecker denied getting more than one.
When Hecker returned, Schulte assigned him to St Charles Borromeo church in Destrehan, Louisiana, which has a grammar school attached. Copied on the letter informing Hecker of his new assignment are Rodi and Aymond, then senior Schulte lieutenants, now among the highest-ranking Catholic church officials along the US’s Gulf coast.
Rodi didn’t respond to a request for comment. An archdiocesan spokesperson said Aymond, then a vicar general and auxiliary bishop, had no administrative role overseeing Hecker at the time.
Hecker at his deposition said they didn’t limit his authority at St Charles Borromeo, but the pastor there was supposed to keep an eye on him. Pressed on whether the pastor could effectively do that, Hecker said: “Frankly, obviously he couldn’t watch me … every moment. No.”
Hecker defended the archdiocese’s decision to let him resume his clerical career despite his confession and two abuse-related sabbaticals.
“You know, like, I did a good job,” Hecker said. “Any time I was asked to do something, you know, I cooperated and so on.”
Keeping it quiet
Hecker retired with full benefits – providing him everything from housing and insurance to retirement income – in 2002, just when a clerical abuse and cover-up scandal in Boston hit fever pitch.
New Orleans’s archbishop at the time, Alfred Hughes, had come from Boston – an attorney general’s report published later said he helped “perpetuate a practice of utmost secrecy and confidentiality with respect to the problem” of clerical abuse there.
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A New Orleans review board advising Hughes on managing fallout from the Boston crisis urged him to laicize Hecker, according to documents provided for the priest’s deposition.
ReplyDeleteLaicization would have ejected Hecker from the clergy and demoted him to a member of the laity. At his deposition, he admitted he would probably have forfeited lucrative retirement benefits if Hughes had followed that recommendation, which has never before been reported and which Hecker said he only learned about from Trahant’s questioning.
But Hughes ignored that recommendation. Instead he wrote to Hecker to order him not to dress as a priest or celebrate masses in public. Hecker showed his displeasure in a letter of his own.
“If I never dress as a priest, fellow priests and family members will almost certainly talk about it and before long the word would be out,” Hecker wrote.
The archbishop said he would be “happy” for Hecker to work as a volunteer at the archdiocesan archives, where workers could “dress informally”. That way, no one would find it odd Hecker was not dressing as a priest any more.
The late monsignor Raymond Hebert, who once served as the archdiocese’s director of clergy, put it even more pointedly.
“Our only concern is that someone in [Hecker’s] past might decide to go public,” Hebert wrote to another top Hughes aide in 2000.
Hecker confirmed to Trahant that the archdiocese by then was invested in keeping his misdeeds – whether acknowledged or alleged – under wraps.
“We all, you know, didn’t want big publicity or anything,” Hecker said. “Oh, yes.”
As an example, Trahant called attention to a 2002 letter that attorneys for the archdiocese – who reviewed personnel files – wrote to New Orleans police, ostensibly to notify officers of accusations against Hecker.
But that letter only mentioned a single person’s allegations, including a purported, out-of-state crime that happened outside the agency’s jurisdiction. The letter made no mention of Hecker confessing to several abusive acts. Police made no move against him.
An archdiocesan spokesperson said: “Archbishop Hughes is responsible for reporting Mr Hecker to law enforcement,” and referred questions to the retired archbishop emeritus. Hughes did not respond to requests for comment.
What Aymond knew
Aymond succeeded Hughes as archbishop in 2009. Though the church continued to suppress the reason for Hecker’s retirement seven years earlier, allegations flowed in.
A 2011 memo written by a nun serving as Aymond’s abuse victims assistance coordinator informed the archbishop that “Larry” – Hecker’s nickname – “was known among … boys as a predator.” The memo told Aymond that Hecker spoke of wanting “to put the past behind him” in a conversation with Hebert in 1996, but he “nevertheless continued to perpetrate through 1997”.
No additional details are available in the deposition exhibits. And the archdiocese said it had no further details about those allegations.
But the memo contradicts repeated claims that Hecker had stopped abusing in the 1980s – assertions he made to the archdiocese and to the psychiatric facility that diagnosed him with pedophilia.
At Hecker’s deposition, Trahant asked if he knew the archdiocese had paid more than $30,000 for his treatment from a local social worker, many of the payments approved by a top Aymond aide, the vicar general Patrick Williams. Hecker said he didn’t.
Hecker also said he was mostly unaware of abuse complaints that came in under Aymond’s watch, costing the archdiocese at least $332,500 in out-of-court settlements over 10 years beginning in 2010.
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Those agreements were among more than 130 abuse-related settlements the archdiocese paid out in the decade before it declared bankruptcy. Many were negotiated by the archdiocese’s general counsel from 2012 to 2019, Wendy Vitter. The US Senate confirmed Vitter as a federal judge in 2019, after she was nominated by then president Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteIn a strange moment during his deposition, Hecker described receiving an instruction – from someone he swore he could no longer remember – to never contact Vitter under any circumstances.
He didn’t elaborate on why he thought that was, but in addition to her legal career, Vitter is married to David Vitter, a former US senator.
A federal judiciary spokesperson said Vitter was unsure who had instructed Hecker not to speak with her – or why.
Ultimately, acting in part on advice from Wendy Vitter, Aymond decided to include Hecker on the first version of a list of 57 clergy credibly accused of molesting children or vulnerable adults. That list has grown to include nearly 80 names. But Hecker’s deposition revealed how reluctantly the archdiocese acted against him.
Just 11 days before that list came out in November 2018, the archdiocese fielded a new complaint accusing Hecker of spending a weekend in the early 1970s molesting a boy he met at a high school, records mentioned at the deposition show. The accuser said he had tried to report Hecker to a well-known priest named William Maestri, who at various points has been the archdiocese’s spokesperson and superintendent of parochial schools.
The complainant “was not impressed” with the response from Maestri, whose name is misspelled as Maestre in deposition records.
“Yes, we heard stories about things like this,” Maestri reportedly said, according to a written document provided for the deposition. “We did move him around but eventually had to retire him.”
The complainant reportedly said he wanted to see Hecker’s name on the credibly accused list, which the church had announced would be released soon. But before that, Aymond spoke openly about how difficult it would be to determine exactly who would merit inclusion.
In an email to Aymond, a top aide said he told the complainant it “might not be possible” to include Hecker on the list.
When asked about that comment, the archdiocese said that the aide – victims assistance coordinator Stephen Synan – was not involved in creating the list.
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Hecker charged with rape
ReplyDeleteHecker’s entry on the 2018 credibly accused disclosure makes no mention of how many separate accusations of child molestation he has faced. It says the first allegation reported against Hecker arrived in 1996, apparently ignoring the one Hannan addressed with him in 1988.
“That is not true, is it?” Trahant asked Hecker at the deposition. After resisting answering the question, Hecker said: “Yeah. Evidently, that must be an error.”
The archdiocese said it had no record of any complaint to Hannan in 1988, despite Hecker’s written confession and testimony that it existed.
After the list’s release, archdiocesan officials sought to assure parishioners that Hecker for years had been restricted from presenting himself as a priest – much less saying mass. But at his deposition, Hecker recounted how during the last 18 years he had presided over masses for residents at a priests’ retirement home where he had lived.
He even detailed how Aymond himself went to a mass and brunch there in July 2019, breaking bread with Hecker and at least two other priests on the credibly accused list, confirming a long-held rumor that offended clergy molestation survivors and their advocates.
“Yes, I’ve been celebrating the mass there,” Hecker said, of the retirement home. Asked if archdiocesan officials were aware, Hecker said: “Yeah, they knew.”
An archdiocesan spokesperson said that church law allows priests to continue saying mass in private without a “congregation”. But church law expert Tom Doyle – who used to serve as the staff canon lawyer at the Vatican embassy in Washington DC – said that in cases like Hecker’s, private mass cannot involve anyone other than the priest and perhaps an altar server.
Eventually, Hecker’s inclusion on the 2018 roster produced the most serious ramification for him. A member of the US military went to law enforcement and reported that he was a teenager in 1975 when Hecker, then a staff member at his high school, strangled him unconscious in a church bell tower – pretending to teach him a wrestling move – then sodomized him.
The archdiocese of New Orleans waited to turn over Hecker’s complete personnel file until June 2023, when it received a subpoena from the local district attorney. Three months later, a grand jury empaneled by the DA charged Hecker with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated crime against nature and theft.
He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted as charged, he would receive mandatory life imprisonment.
In August 2023, the Guardian and WWL asked Hecker about those allegations. He flatly denied choking and raping anyone.
But he had already been asked the question. At his 2020 deposition, Trahant asked Hecker if he raped the victim at the center of the only criminal case ever opened against him.
Under oath, he invoked his fifth amendment rights.
see the links, photos and video embedded in this article at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/may/09/new-orleans-catholic-church-abuse
Roman Catholic priest jailed for child abuse images charged in Texas with sexual assault
ReplyDeleteNew charges filed against Anthony Odiong after eight accusers came forward alleging unwelcome sexual conduct
by Ramon Antonio Vargas, The Guardian July 19, 2024
Days after being jailed in Florida on counts of possessing child abuse imagery, a Roman Catholic priest with ties to south-east Louisiana and Texas has been charged with two counts of sexual assault.
Police in Waco, Texas, announced the new charges against Anthony Odiong late on Thursday in a statement. It said a total of eight victims had come forward alleging Odiong, 55, tried to use his influence as a priest to pursue sexual contact they either did not welcome or to which they could not consent.
Texas is one of about a dozen states with a law that criminalizes sexual activity between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice. Furthermore, Texas deems statutes of limitation – or filing deadlines – irrelevant if a “defendant has committed the same or similar sex offense against five or more victims”, according to officials.
The investigation which led to Odiong’s arrest began after the Guardian published a report in February detailing prior allegations that ranged from sexual coercion and unwelcome touching to financial abuse. That report prompted an unidentified person to walk into the Waco police department and accuse Odiong of sexually assaulting her in 2012.
A judge subsequently granted permission for police to access an email account belonging to Odiong and found messages from another woman who had not come forward, but explicitly detailed sexual encounters with the priest, including one which wounded her colon.
Bradley DeLange, a Waco detective, later spoke with the woman, who allegedly confirmed that Odiong had subjected her to some of the behavior his prior accusers had described.
A judge then permitted police to search Odiong’s iCloud data storage account. DeLange later wrote under oath he “discovered images depicting a clearly prepubescent [disrobed] child”, which had been saved to the account in September 2020.
DeLange said there were two more images of who is believed to be another child with someone who appears to be an adult touching an unclothed body part.
Waco police secured a warrant to arrest Odiong, and authorities took him into custody at his home in Ave Maria, Florida, on Tuesday. That day, DeLange issued a statement through his department asking anyone else “victimized by Anthony Odiong anywhere in the United States” to cooperate with his investigation.
Several new accusers had apparently come forward between Tuesday and Thursday, clearing the way for the new sexual assault charges against Odiong.
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Odiong was ordained in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993. He was invited to work within the diocese of Austin, Texas, in 2006 by the then bishop Gregory Aymond. Odiong was then invited to work in Luling, Louisiana, in 2015, about six years after Aymond became the archbishop of nearby New Orleans.
ReplyDeletePlaces to which his assignments brought him over the years included the St Peter Catholic student center on the outskirts of Baylor University’s campus in Waco as well as St Anthony of Padua in Luling.
Odiong was able to build a loyal following in Texas and Louisiana largely by claiming to have a special understanding with the Virgin Mary through prayer. The charismatic clergyman would hold so-called healing masses after which some parishioners reported recovering from major medical ailments, improving church attendance as well as boosting his popularity with both congregants and diocesan officials.
But Odiong came under scrutiny after his various accusers spoke out against him – including a Pennsylvania native who reported him to the sheriff’s office in Luling, which said it could not determine if the clergyman had committed a crime.
The Austin diocese decided to prohibit Odiong from being able to minister in its region in 2019. Its counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same.
In a statement after Tuesday’s arrest in Ave Maria, the New Orleans archdiocese made it a point to say the charges against Odiong “stemmed from allegations reported in Waco”. But on Thursday, a source with direct knowledge of the investigation told the Guardian that at least one of the new accusers who made possible Thursday’s sexual assault charges against Odiong resided in the community of Luling, about 22 miles (35km) from the archdiocese of New Orleans.
Odiong remained in custody in Florida late on Thursday, jail records show. He had been ordered held without bail. It was not immediately clear when he may be transferred to Waco.
Attempts to contact an attorney who has previously represented Odiong have been unsuccessful since Tuesday. Before his arrest, Odiong had posted an open letter on social media dismissing the allegations against him as “a false, salacious, one-sided smear campaign”.
It remained to be seen on Thursday whether Odiong’s arrest would attract the attention of Louisiana state police troopers who served a search warrant on the archdiocese in April as part of an investigation into whether the church and its local leadership had operated as a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was then “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/catholic-priest-jailed