WASHINGTON (DC)
Religion News Service
June 5, 2019
By Jack Jenkins
New questions about how Catholic leaders deal with sexual misconduct arose Tuesday (June 4) after a Texas woman claimed in a news report that church officials in Houston allowed a priest with whom she had a sexual relationship to continue in ministry at a parish two hours away.
Yesterday’s story following an Associated Press investigation detailed an unsettling account of Laura Pontikes, who said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, head of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston the current president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, failed to respond adequately to her 2016 claim that Monsignor Frank Rossi, a deputy to DiNardo, had begun a relationship in August 2012 after the cleric spent years as her priest and confessor.
Pontikes claimed that Rossi induced her to perform sexual acts in his office during spiritual direction sessions, absolving her of her sins and eventually consummating their relationship with intercourse — all while the priest argued that such “holy touches” were encouraged by Paul the Apostle. Rossi also allegedly pushed her and her husband to donate millions of dollars to his church, St. Michael the Archangel.
In the era of #MeToo and #ChurchToo, the fact that the accuser is an adult has not spared the church new scrutiny about the church hierarchy’s slowness to respond to sexual misconduct claims or about what experts have been quick to call confusion regarding what constitutes consent.
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