Disgraced Ex-ottawa Priest Arrested for Skipping Sentencing for Sex Crimes
By Gary Dimmock
Barry McGrory, the disgraced former Catholic priest who skipped his sentencing in Ottawa court last month for molesting boys, has been arrested and is now in jail. The now-defrocked McGrory, 85, had been on bail awaiting sentencing but didn’t bother to show up on Nov. 18, so Superior Court Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin issued an arrest warrant for the convicted sex predator, who was arrested in Toronto. In June, O’Bonsawin found McGrory guilty of sexually abusing two teenage boys in historic crimes dating back to the late 1960s. The boys were molested in a church rectory. McGrory now faces a new charge of failing to attend court, and is now at the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Centre awaiting his next hearing at the Elgin Street courthouse. McGrory used his position as a parish priest to exploit vulnerable and naive young men, and used drugs and booze to groom them. “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 1980s. 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-Aurele 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 this newspaper that he was healed of his attraction to adolescents after “surrendering” himself to God, and has remained celibate. Born and raised in Ottawa, McGrory was formally dismissed from the priesthood in 2018. Contact: gdimmock@postmedia.com
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