Catholic priest said ‘we are but men’ when challenged over sex with spiritual directee, court hears

A Roman Catholic priest replied “we are but men” when confronted after the son of a woman to whom he was providing spiritual guidance caught the clergyman having sex with his mother, according to court testimony in Texas on Wednesday. That version of events emerged at the second day of the trial of Anthony Odiong, who has been criminally charged with illicitly abusing his status as a clergyman to pursue sex with spiritually vulnerable female congregants. A son of one of those women, now 29, told jurors at the state courthouse in Waco, Texas , that he was about 14 in 2011 when his devoutly Catholic mother – fresh from a tumultuous divorce – hosted a party at the home she shared with her seven children. Among the guests was Anthony Odiong, who was a priest at a Catholic church attended by students and employees of Waco’s Baylor University, where the son’s mother worked. Odiong had been meeting the mother frequently in the aftermath of her divorce, ostensibly to provide her with spiritual direction, in sessions at his office or even her home, according to the son and separate testimony on Wednesday from one of his younger sisters. But the night of the party, he said he was locked in the woman’s bedroom with her, and the son – who had even been an altar server of Odiong – suddenly heard noises coming from behind the door. He burst in, saw a bottomless Odiong was lying on the floor atop his mother, and deduced they had been having sex. …