Texas jury considers sentence for Catholic priest convicted of sexual assault

Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida in July 2024. Photograph: Waco Police View image in fullscreen Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida in July 2024. Photograph: Waco Police Texas jury considers sentence for Catholic priest convicted of sexual assault Anthony Odiong faces up to life in prison after being found guilty of first- and second-degree sexual assault A Texas jury on Tuesday began deliberating the sentence of a Roman Catholic priest who was convicted days earlier of criminal clergy sexual assault. Anthony Odiong , 57, faces between five years and life imprisonment in connection with a first-degree sexual assault charge that he was found guilty of. He was also found guilty of second-degree sexual assault, which can carry between two and 20 years in prison. Odiong ’s sentencing phase began on Monday, with a series of witnesses describing sexual misconduct by him going back more than a decade. The defense, meanwhile, called witnesses who said Odiong would follow the rules of probation, even though he broke his priestly vows of chastity. At the end of a four-day trial on Friday, the same jury in charge of Odiong’s sentencing determined he was guilty of first- and second-degree sexual assault by illegally exploiting his spiritual authority as a clergyman for sex with two devout female parishioners, whether directly or by proxy. Odiong spent much of a roughly 17-year period beginning in 2006 ministering in a region including Waco and serving as the pastor of a Catholic church in the New Orleans suburb of Luling, Louisiana. In late 2023, leaders of New Orleans’s Catholic archdiocese confirmed to the Guardian and local reporting partner WWL Louisiana that they had removed Odiong from his role as pastor of Luling’s St Anthony of Padua church over clerical misconduct with multiple women. The Guardian later published a February 2024 investigative report on a group of women who had accused Odiong of sexual coercion, unwanted touching and abusive financial control while – in his capacity as a priest – he provided them with what is known as spiritual direction. That article prompted a woman whom the Guardian did not interview, eventually identified in court as Mary Doe, to bring a copy of the outlet’s reporting to Waco police and told them Odiong in their jurisdiction had also fostered a sexual relationship with her from 2008 to 2011 while providing her with spiritual direction. Texas considers such conduct by a religious cleric in particular to be felony sexual assault. And Mary Doe’s police complaint induced an investigation which led authorities to arrest, charge and successfully try Odiong in connection with her as well as one of the Guardian’s interviewees, who would later be identified in legal proceedings as Jane Doe. Accusers, defenders testify Jane Doe maintained that the clergyman in Waco in 2010 compelled her to permit her then husband to engage in a form of intercourse she found overly painful as a desperate measure to save her