Top US cardinal accused of protecting deputy after sex abuse

HOUSTON (AP) — When Cardinal Daniel DiNardo first met Laura Pontikes in his wood-paneled conference room in December 2016, the leader of the U.S. Catholic Church's response to its sex abuse scandal said all the right things.

He praised her for coming forward to report his deputy in the Galveston-Houston archdiocese had manipulated her into a sexual relationship and declared her a "victim" of the priest, Pontikes said. Emails and other documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the relationship had gone on for years — even as the priest heard her confessions, counseled her husband on their marriage and pressed the couple for hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

She says she was assured the priest, Monsignor Frank Rossi, would never be a pastor or counsel women again.

Months after that meeting, though, she found out Cardinal DiNardo had allowed Msgr. Rossi to take a new job as pastor of a parish two hours away in east Texas. When her husband confronted the cardinal, he said, the cardinal warned the archdiocese would respond aggressively to any legal challenge – and that the fallout would hurt their family and business.

Today, three years after the meeting with Cardinal DiNardo and after written inquiries by the AP last week, the church temporarily removed Msgr. Rossi, announcing in a statement from his new bishop he was being placed on administrative leave.

Laura Pontikes, a 55-year-old construction executive in Texas, had been at a low point in her life when she sought spiritual counseling from Msgr. Rossi, the longtime No. 2 official in the Galveston-Houston archdiocese Cardinal DiNardo heads. Instead, she said, Msgr. Rossi preyed on her emotional vulnerability to draw her into a physical relationship that he called blessed by God.

"He took a woman that went into a church truly looking for God, and he took me for himself," she told the AP.

Msgr. Rossi's sexual relationship with Pontikes is now the subject of a previously undisclosed criminal investigation in Houston. Yet it is Cardinal DiNardo's handling of the case that poses far-reaching questions for the church in the #MeToo era, when powerful men and institutions are being called to account over sex abuse.