Case reset for accused priest
A deluge of data delayed arraignment hearing until 2019 for a Conroe clergyman facing sexual abuse charges.
A Houston-area priest accused of molesting two teens will not be arraigned until 2019 due to a deluge of documents the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office seized last month as evidence.
Manuel La Rosa-Lopez appeared in a Montgomery County courtroom Tuesday morning clean shaven and without his clerical collar before learning the case would be pushed back to Jan. 10.
Montgomery County District Attorney Brett Ligon said the hearing was postponed due to the large volume of information and documents seized by law enforcement officials in at least three raids at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe, the Shalom Center in Splendora and the St. John Fisher Church in Richmond.
“We executed several search warrants in a very short amount of time,” Ligon said. “Law enforcement is still going through all that data making sure what we have retrieved is turned over to the defense at the appropriate time. There is literally massive amounts of data we are still pouring through.”
A document filed Tuesday briefly details the reason behind La Rosa-Lopez’s delayed court appearance: “Lots of discovery.”
A week before the priest’s court appearance Tuesday, a third accuser came forward to allege that La Rosa-Lopez repeatedly molested him as an altar boy at a Houston church in the mid-1990s. La Rosa-Lopez was then a seminarian studying to be a priest and the boy helped with the Spanish-language Mass.
Adam Dinnell, the lawyer representing the latest accuser, on Monday said his client is waiting to meet with a Conroe Police Department investigator about the report he lodged on Sept. 24 against La Rosa-Lopez. He declined to identify the accuser, now a man, or the church where the alleged abuse took place to protect his client’s anonymity.
In September, La Rosa-Lopez
was charged with four counts of indecency with a child in two separate cases. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison on each count.
The archdiocese has declined to comment on the criminal investigation other than to say it “is cooperating fully with the civil authorities.”
Court records identified the accusers by the initials J.H. and M.V. The documents state the teens were parishioners at the Conroe church when La Rosa-Lopez allegedly assaulted the two in separate incidents spanning from 1998 to 2000. Both accusers spoke to police in August after meeting with Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston officials, including Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, about the allegations.
The accusers have said DiNardo did not appear to take them seriously.
The male accuser, J.H., told the Houston Chronicle last month that the archdiocese flew him to Houston to meet with DiNardo, who chastised him for delaying his complaint.
“Well, you should’ve told us earlier,” the accuser quoted DiNardo as saying during the Aug. 8 meeting. He was told the archdiocese would file a report with Conroe Police Department on his behalf, but the investigator found no record of the report.
The family of the female accuser, M.V., confronted the church about La Rosa-Lopez’s alleged relationship with the girl in 2000, prompting his removal from the parish. More than a decade later, she came forward to authorities because of “the perceived duplicity of Cardinal DiNardo” after her own meeting with the church leader and his conflicting remarks on priest sex scandals.
Remarks made by DiNardo two years before he joined the thenDiocese of Galveston-Houston acknowledged that his Diocese of Sioux City’s mishandling of a sex abuse case, according to a report Monday night.
In 2002, the future cardinal issued an apology on behalf of the Iowa diocese for allowing the Rev. George McFadden to remain a priest after he was accused of molesting children, KHOU-TV reported.
“In hindsight, that was a mistake that we regret,” wrote DiNardo, then the bishop of the Iowa church. “In today’s world, that mistake would not have been made.”
DiNardo’s statement addressed the spate of claims against McFadden that publicly surfaced in 2002 during his tenure in Iowa.
In response to the unearthed allegations, DiNardo suspended McFadden and the priest moved to Indiana to live with his sister. He was already forced to retire a decade earlier, in 1992, after serving nearly 50 years at six parishes.
DiNardo joined the Iowa diocese in 1998 and left for Texas in 2004.
At the time, the Des Moines Register reported DiNardo as explaining the priest was removed from his parish and sent to Maryland for therapy in 1991. The bishop acknowledged that the abuse claims were never reported to law enforcement "because it was so long after the events took place."
In a statement sent to the Chronicle on Tuesday morning, the Archdiocese of GalvestonHouston said McFadden’s history of abuse took place before DiNardo’s time in Sioux City.
“As more information about George McFadden’s history of abuse prior to 1985 became known, Bishop DiNardo publicly stated it had been a mistake for the Sioux City Diocese to have previously permitted McFadden to have even a very limited function in the diocese,” the statement read.
“Although McFadden had already been removed from parish ministry, Bishop DiNardo terminated all of McFadden's priestly faculties in 2002 — and in 2003 initiated the process to have McFadden completely removed from the priesthood.
Bishop DiNardo was assigned to the Diocese of Galveston-Houston in 2004.”