Pedophile priest faces new charges

Ottawa police have laid four new charges against a retired Catholic priest in connection with alleged sexual assaults at two local churches in the 1960s.

Rev. Barry McGrory, 82, has been charged with two counts of indecent assault on a male, and two counts of gross indecency.

The incidents — two complainants are involved — are alleged to have occurred at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church on Alta Vista Drive, and St. Philip Parish in Richmond.

McGrory was first arrested in November in connection with the alleged sexual assault of a 15-yearold boy in the 1960s.

A pre-trial conference is scheduled for later this month on those charges.

Last year, the Citizen revealed that the Archdiocese of Ottawa had settled out of court with two women who said they were abused as adolescents by McGrory in the 1970s, when he was pastor at Holy Cross Parish.

One of the victims was paid $300,000 in one of the largest settlements of its kind in the history of the Ottawa diocese.

In an interview last year, McGrory said he was a sex addict and suffered from a powerful attraction to adolescents, both male and female, as a young cleric.

He told then Archbishop Joseph-Aurèle Plourde about his sexual problems, McGrory said, and asked for treatment.

Instead of receiving help, McGrory said, he was transferred to a Toronto-based organization dedicated to assisting remote Catholic missions.

Many of the missions were in indigenous communities in Canada’s North.

Four years after leaving Ottawa, in 1991, McGrory was charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old indigenous male and later convicted of the crime. He was given a suspended sentence and three years’ probation.

McGrory told the Citizen he was healed of his sex addiction and his attraction to adolescents after “surrendering” himself to God following the humiliation of his 1991 arrest.

He now lives in Toronto, where he belongs to a group called Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, which employs a 12-step program similar to that pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. It has helped him, McGrory said, to remain celibate for more than two decades.

Ottawa born and raised, McGrory holds a PhD in theology from Thomas Aquinas University in Rome.

He remains an official member of the Archdiocese of Ottawa.

Diocesan officials, however, launched the administrative process required to remove McGrory from the priesthood in December.