Former priest reveals lifetime of abuse and offending

San Francisco, California –

Since the sex abuse scandal first rocked the Catholic Church, thousands of priests have been accused of molesting children. Rarely are the lawsuits as revealing as the case of Oliver O'Grady, who admits molesting as many as 25 children while a parish priest in California.

The defrocked Irish priest's abusive childhood, his ill-formed ideas about sexuality, his horrifying methods of grooming children and his quiet demands for help that his diocese largely ignored all come out in a 400-page deposition O'Grady gave to lawyers for one of his many victims.

And while the deposition provides a stunningly frank window into one man's crimes, it also portrays a church that waited eight years to contact police after O'Grady told his bishop about his behavior, seemingly turning a blind eye to the molestations and even promoting him to other posts.

"It does show how complicated and how deep the roots are when you're a serial pedophile," says the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest, lawyer and longtime advocate for sex abuse victims. He said the O'Grady case illustrates "the overall pathology of the clerical culture."

Read the article at SignOnSanDiego.com Dated June 4, 2005

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