NEW ORLEANS — A recently dismissed New Orleans-area Catholic priest is under law enforcement investigation after facing allegations of sexually abusive misconduct with multiple women as well as claims of financial improprieties, according to officials.
The archdiocese of New Orleans on Wednesday reported Anthony Odiong in connection with at least one of those complaints to the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office, the agency confirmed to the Guardian.
That complaint came from a woman who first contacted authorities in 2019 and accused Odiong of sexual and financial abuse while serving as her spiritual adviser for years.
Later Friday, the sheriff’s office issued a statement saying the report from the archdiocese echoed the 2019 complaint and that investigators could not determine then or this week that a crime had taken place. In fact, the sheriff’s office said if “the events she described to our detective … occurred, (they) appeared to be consensual.”
Sheriff’s officials told the Guardian that they immediately contacted an attorney for the woman and requested an interview. The woman’s attorney, Kristi Schubert, said her client wasn’t immediately available to speak with investigators after her initial report produced little action, but she would consider talking with them in the near future.
However, a source familiar with the matter told WWL Louisiana on Thursday that the 2019 complaint is not the only set of allegations for which the archdiocese removed Odiong as pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in Luling. The source said Odiong had been accused of financial improprieties as well as misconduct by other women, all of which factored into his removal.
Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy which Odiong now is accused of breaking by Schubert’s client. She also alleges in a sworn claim in the archdiocese’s unresolved bankruptcy case that Odiong coerced her into sexual acts with him because of his position as a priest and her spiritual advisor.
An attorney for Odiong, Stephen Haedicke, dismissed the allegations from Schubert’s client as “categorically … false”.
“The accusations are on their face outlandish, internally inconsistent and unworthy of belief,” Haedicke said in a statement.
More problems for Archdiocese's finances
The emerging information about Odiong constituted another crisis for the second-oldest Catholic archdiocese in the U.S., which declared bankruptcy in 2020 when confronted with a mound of local litigation related to the global church’s decades-old clerical molestation crisis.
Serving a region with about a half-million Catholics, the archdiocese has run up a tab of nearly $34 million in legal and other professional services since its bankruptcy filing – and to cope with the expenses, it recently announced a plan to close several of its churches.
Odiong underwent his formation as a priest in his native Nigeria and reports to the bishop of the diocese of the Nigerian city of Uyo.
When New Orleans Archbishop Gregory Aymond was the bishop of Austin, Texas, in 2006, he invited Odiong to minister there. Odiong eventually became pastor at St. Anthony of Padua in Luling after Aymond became New Orleans’s archbishop.
Healing masses which Odiong celebrated at St. Anthony helped improve church attendance. The masses proved so popular they facilitated the construction of a new healing chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which opened in 2020.
But by then, he had drawn at least some unwanted attention from the archdiocese when Aymond heard from a woman who met Odiong while he studied for a master’s degree in theology from the Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.
The woman said Odiong positioned himself as her personal spiritual counselor and began fostering a sexual relationship with her. He convinced her performing sexual acts on him during confession, at private masses in her home and in at least one motel room was her path to salvation.
In an interview with these reporters, the woman gave one example from 2008. She said she went to Odiong for the sacrament of reconciliation and confessed to having premarital sex with an ex-boyfriend.
“That's when he said because of what you did, you have to make reparation for your sin,” the woman recounted. “And so he lifted his vestments and he … already had his pants, like, undone. And … he forced me to do oral sex because … I had to undo what I had done, is what he said.”
She also accused him of stealing thousands of dollars from her, along with other money. If she ever refused him, she said, he would insinuate that she was “troubled” mentally.
The woman said she mostly stopped engaging with Odiong in late 2018. The following year, she called the New Orleans archdiocese’s contact for abuse claimants to report Odiong.
She said the victims assistance coordinator told her: “I do not think you are remembering things correctly.” Later, she said she spoke about Odiong directly to Aymond but did not feel as if the archbishop took her concerns seriously.
Audio recordings and phone logs establish that the woman indeed spoke with both Aymond and the victims assistance coordinator. The St. Charles sheriff’s office added that the woman also spoke with one of the agency’s detectives about Odiong. But the detective recalled that the woman described a relationship across several states, and he referred her to the police department in her hometown of Pennsylvania, the sheriff’s office said.
After the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, the woman filed a claim seeking damages over the treatment she alleges to have received from Odiong. The claim – filed under oath – argues that she is owed for at least $150,000 in lost wages, among other damages, after the abuse inflicted on her by Odiong interrupted her ability to work as a licensed clinical social worker.
It wasn’t until a mass in the middle of November at St. Anthony of Padua that Odiong told his congregation that his stint at the church was ending. He said he planned to move to Florida by January, and there he would build a chapel like one whose construction he was involved with in Texas.
Pastor's comments compared LGBTQ to animals
Days later, Odiong offered a reason for his departure to his parishioners – but he did not mention accusations by multiple women. He instead said he was vehemently opposed to Pope Francis’s attempts to make the Catholic church more welcoming to the LGBTQ+ community.
“The gays … have a stranglehold on the church now,” Odiong said. “We’re going to begin to bless all kinds of monkeys and animals and chimpanzees, and priests who will not do it will be persecuted.”
Those remarks may have precipitated the timeline of his departure. At the beginning of December, one of Aymond’s top aides – Vicar General Pat Williams – went to St. Anthony of Padua and informed the congregation Odiong would be moving within days rather than in January.
The statement Williams read cited unspecified “concerns about Fr. Anthony’s ministry prior” to his arrival in the New Orleans area – “and quite possibly during his time” in the archdiocese. As a result, Aymond had told Odiong’s bishop in Nigeria to recall him to his home diocese.
The archdiocese shared that statement with the Guardian when the newspaper first reported some of the circumstances of Odiong’s ouster Thursday. But the organization did not address whether Odiong was faced with more than one accuser.
Odiong was reported to the local sheriff’s office only after that statement had been provided to the Guardian, the agency said.
When contacted for comment by the Guardian, Odiong said little but maintained he was being let go for speaking out against the pope.
“What is going on is spiritual,” Odiong said. “I was told by the blessed mother that it was coming, and that is why I planned to move.”
Thursday’s statement from Odiong’s attorney suggested Schubert’s client had “a personal vendetta coupled with a desire to cash in on the archdiocese’s bankruptcy process.” Haedicke also argued that his client’s removal “has more to do with internal political disagreements with church leadership concerning pastoral direction than any alleged and unbelievable misconduct by Father Odiong.”