ARREST WARRANT: Disgraced former Ottawa priest skips sentencing

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Ottawa SunPublished: November 18, 2019

Updated: November 18, 2019 5:10 PM EST
Gary Dimmock

Barry McGrory – a defrocked Catholic priest who is alleged to have abused children in the 1970s before being quietly shipped to another diocese – leaves the Elgin Street courthouse Tuesday (May 21, 2019). Julie Oliver/Postmedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disgraced former Catholic priest Barry McGrory skipped his sentencing at the Ottawa courthouse Monday morning.

Superior Court Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin has issued an arrest warrant for the convicted sex predator, believed to be living in Toronto.

McGrory, 85, showed no emotion back in June when the same judge found him guilty of sexually abusing two teenaged boys in historic crimes dating back to the late 1960s. McGrory molested the boys in a church rectory.

McGrory used his position as a parish priest to exploit vulnerable and naïve young men for his own sexual satisfaction, the judge ruled.

The now-defrocked priest used booze and drugs to groom his victims.

“He infiltrated their families and used their faith in him to take advantage of the complainants,” the judge said in June.

The complainants came forward to Ottawa police in 2016 after this newspaper published a story in which McGrory admitted to sexually abusing three young parishioners at Holy Cross Parish in the 1970s and 80s.

In a May 2016 interview with reporter Andrew Duffy, McGrory said that as a young priest, he was a sex addict who suffered from a powerful attraction to adolescents. McGrory said he told then-archbishop Joseph-Aurèle Plourde about his sexual problems in the mid-1980s, and asked for treatment.

Instead of receiving help, McGrory said, he was transferred to a Toronto organization dedicated to assisting remote Catholic missions, many of them in Canada’s North. Four years after leaving Ottawa, in 1991, McGrory was charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old Indigenous youth. He was convicted of the crime and spared jail with a suspended sentence.

McGrory told the newspaper he was healed of his attraction to adolescents after “surrendering” himself to God, and has remained celibate.

Ottawa born and raised, McGrory was formally dismissed from the priesthood in 2018.

He remains at large and no longer has a lawyer on record for the sentencing he evaded Monday.

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