2 Dec 2010

Investigation uncovers Catholic practice of "geographic cure", shuffling pedophile priests around the globe

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

 

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5 comments:

  1. German bishop, accused of abuse, found to have helped wanted pedophile priests escape to Latin America

    By 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

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  2. A Catholic priest accused of misconduct was suspended in Texas. Why did New Orleans let him preach?

    Anthony 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.

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  3. 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.

    Proponents 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

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  4. Odiong’s work in Louisiana subsequently continued unabated.

    A 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

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  5. 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.

    That 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

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