The trial date for a priest accused of molesting three children at a Montgomery County parish has been set, more than a year since his first arrest in connection to the allegations.

Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, the former parochial vicar of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe, will go to trial on Feb. 18 on five counts of indecency with a child, Montgomery County prosecutor Nancy Hebert said Thursday. A jury will be selected the week prior.

“From the day we filed the case, we were looking forward to presenting it to a jury,” Hebert said.

The accusations stem from three former parishioners — now adults — who said La Rosa-Lopez abused them from 1998 to 2000 at the Frazier Street parish. One of the accusers was in the courtroom with a view of the cleric as he went before the judge.

The accuser, who has declined to be publicly identified, was seated behind a row of female inmates in pink-striped jumpsuits. La Rosa-Lopez appeared to clutch his rosary and say a prayer, the accuser said.

The news of a trial date brought a sense of relief, if only to finally “get it over with,” the accuser said.

That accuser and one other lodged a complaint against La Rosa-Lopez to the Conroe Police Department in August 2018 and nearly two weeks later, on Sept. 11, the priest surrendered himself to the Montgomery County Jail on the first four charges stemming from their reports. Since that arrest, two more former parishioners have come forward with child molestation claims against La Rosa-Lopez. One of the accusations, alleged to have happened in Houston, is pending further review by authorities, while the other resulted in a civil suit against the church and a grand jury indictment prompting the fifth criminal charge against La Rosa-Lopez.

Authorities have also seized more than 16,000 records during four search warrants at the Conroe church where the abuse was alleged to have happened, the Splendora rehabilitation facility where La Rosa-Lopez was sent in 2001, St. John the Fisher Catholic Church in Richmond where he last worked and the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston chancery in downtown Houston. The trove of documents have played a role in slowing down the case with prosecutors repeatedly citing the copious amount of discovery.

The cache of documents — primarily church records — appeared daunting to La Rosa-Lopez’s lawyer, Wendell Odom.

“Ten thousand got dumped on us,” Odom said. “We’ve got emails, who knows how many emails there are.”

District Attorney Brett Ligon said earlier this year that the amount of records is more akin to white-collar cases, rather than criminal.

With five months to go until the trial, Michael Norris, the head of Houston’s Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests network, believes La Rosa-Lopez still has a chance to do right by the alleged victims.

“If he was a compassionate man, he wouldn’t make these victims go through this,” Norris said. “These victims are going to have to relive their stories. That’s not fair to them.”

nicole.hensley@chron.com