This week a Louisiana parish published a weekly bulletin that placed a convicted sexual predator’s name in the “intentions” column — Anthony Odiong, sentenced on June 2 to life in prison for exploiting his clerical authority to sexually assault two women. Only after the Guardian asked the archdiocese about it did the parish quietly edit the document, swapping the predator’s name for a sanitized line: “Special Intention & Victims of Clergy Abuse.” The archdiocese called the original bulletin a parishioner’s initiative. The victims called it a failure of basic moral arithmetic.
The sequence tells you everything about how faith institutions really work: the first draft always puts the abuser inside the circle of care, and only external pressure can force a space for the people he destroyed.
We who have sat in pews for thirty years recognize the machinery at work. The first reflex is to tend the image of the shepherd. The clerical apparatus treats prayer as an administrative buffer, a belonging-protection mechanism that wraps institutional self-preservation in piety and expects survivors to accept being invisible. The bulletin’s initial version was not malice; it was institutional reflex — a calculation that the community could petition God for the man who had just been sent to prison, while the women he assaulted remained an afterthought.
Isaiah 1:13–17 reads plainly: “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me… When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you offer many prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood.” The plain-language reading is direct: liturgical performance is rejected when it masks unaddressed violence. The prophet’s instruction is not to pray harder; it is to wash the hands, seek justice, defend the oppressed. Yet across centuries of clerical bureaucracy, the institutional reading has quietly inverted the text. Prayer becomes a procedural step that substitutes for restitution. The bulletin’s editors understood the mechanics of devotion; they missed the mechanics of justice.
Jesus gave the most direct warning about this exact configuration of power. In Matthew 23:13, he addresses the most biblically fluent, most outwardly observant religious authorities of his day: “You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces.” When a religious office that is meant to open access to grace instead becomes a mechanism for silencing victims, the kingdom is shut. It does not matter how beautifully the bulletin is typeset. It does not matter whether the archbishop instructs the priest to add a secondary intention a few days later. The door remains shut until the institution names the harm without hedging, without treating the victims as an afterthought to the priest’s spiritual rehabilitation.
The pattern is not a Catholic aberration; it is an institutional constant that crosses every denominational label. When a Rhode Island attorney general’s report found 75 priests abused more than 300 children since 1950, the names sat unpublished for decades because systems know that naming perpetrators is an act of accountability, while naming survivors delivers only risk. The Luling bulletin is a miniature of the same logic: the name that got printed first was the one the institution was most comfortable lifting up. The 2022 Guidepost Solutions report on the Southern Baptist Convention documented the exact same operational blueprint: executive committees mishandled allegations, actively stonewalled survivors, and deployed litigation threats to prioritize liability protection over pastoral care. In both cases, the triage logic is identical: the institution defaults to protecting the office, then apologizes when survivors notice the omission.
The gap between institutional posturing and genuine accountability is measured in the distance between a bishop’s statement and a parish bulletin. The bishop of Austin, Daniel Garcia, offered prayers focused on the victims and said he hoped the process had brought “some peace.” That is the correct sentence. But Archbishop Gregory Aymond of New Orleans said he had “instructed” the pastor to include all who were hurt by Odiong’s actions only after the Guardian’s inquiry, not before. The original document is what the parish produced on its own; the corrected one is what it produced under exposure. That is not repentance. It is reputation management run through a copy desk.
The women who came forward understood the arithmetic that the institution couldn’t do. Jane Doe said the intention made clear that “a lot of people have yet to reckon with this fact” — that Odiong used “the love and trust of communities” to harm them. Mary Doe, who initiated the criminal case after seeing an investigative report in early 2024 about other women who had accused Odiong of sexual coercion, unwanted touching, and abusive financial control, acknowledged that praying for his soul is right and just, but demanded the equal act of praying for his victims. The initial bulletin could not bring itself to do the equal part.
Mary Doe had to force a criminal proceeding, a conviction, a life sentence, and then still had to object to a parish bulletin to get the church to mention their pain. That is the distance between institutional closure and real closure: the institution would have let Odiong’s name sit in a prayer list undisturbed; survivors had to do the work that the institution was built to do, and then still had to fight for a line in a parish newsletter.
The church is not a bishop in Austin; it is the weekly bulletin in Luling, the communal reflex that prays for the offender first and the survivor second — and only after word gets out. Until that reflex is broken, the institution is still protecting itself, and the victims are still asking for the same prayer the rest of the body gets for free. Isaiah’s command remains on the page, unedited and unqualified. Wash. Learn. Seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Until the church does those things in public, in policy, and in its prayer list from the very first print, the intentions remain exactly what the prophet said they were: detestable.