Texas jury considers sentence for Catholic priest convicted of 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. …