Woman abused by priest tells her story
An Ottawa woman who was sexually abused by Rev. Barry McGrory in the mid-1970s said a senior church official made her feel that she was to blame for the crime.
Barbara Erlandson said she met in 1977 with then Bishop John Beahan, one of the most powerful figures in the Catholic Archdiocese of Ottawa, to relate her story of abuse.
“I had a meeting with Beahan in which I explained what had happened to me and was made to feel it was my fault,” Erlandson said. “There was no acknowledgment. He did nothing … I was swept under the carpet.”
Beahan is a key figure in the Ottawa chapter of the clergy sexual abuse scandal. He served for 12 years as vicar general — essentially the archdiocese’s chief administrative officer — and was in a position to address repeated complaints of sexual abuse brought against McGrory and other Ottawa priests, such as serial child abuser Rev. Dale Crampton.
Beahan, who died from a stroke in March 1988, has also been accused of child sexual abuse in a lawsuit filed by a now 55-year-old Ottawa man.
Erlandson, 62, a retired teacher in the Catholic school system, is telling her story publicly for the first time. She wants details of her case known before McGrory, 85, is sentenced for molesting two adolescent boys in the rectory at St. Philip Church in the late 1960s, years before her own abuse at Holy Cross Parish.
“The church was well aware that that man (McGrory) had a problem,” Erlandson charges. “It’s sick, it’s sick. The whole thing is sick.”
Erlandson met McGrory when her father brought the parish priest to their home so he could offer counsel on her drug and alcohol use.
McGrory began to work with Erlandson, then a 15- or 16-year-old student at Brookfield High School, and gained her trust. Two months later, according to Erlandson, he took her to his rectory bedroom and sexually assaulted her for the first time. The abuse only stopped, she said, when she told McGrory she was pregnant.
Years later, in April 1994, Erlandson went to the Ottawa police and filed a criminal complaint against McGrory.
The priest had, by then, been moved from the Archdiocese of Ottawa.
In a 2016 interview with the Citizen, McGrory said he went to Archbishop Joseph Aurèle-Plourde in the mid-1980s to beg for help with what he considered to be a mental illness: his powerful attraction to adolescents, both male and female.
Instead of offering help or launching an investigation, Plourde in 1987 approved McGrory’s transfer to a Toronto-based organization that served remote Catholic missions. (Erlandson said her father was thrown out of the archbishop’s office when he tried to complain about McGrory.)
Four years after leaving Ottawa, McGrory was charged with sexually assaulting an Indigenous youth he had met through his work in the north. He was convicted of the crime and given a suspended sentence.
Erlandson’s criminal complaint was investigated, but charges were not laid in the case because she had signed an out-of-court settlement in 1995 with the Catholic Church that included a non-disclosure agreement.
Erlandson regrets it: “I lost my voice,” she said.
McGrory admitted in his interview with the Citizen that Erlandson was one of three young people he sexually abused during his years at Holy Cross Parish.
In that interview, the Citizen asked him how many young people he sexually abused during his clerical career. “I have no idea,” McGrory said. “I don’t think I’ve … I’m not going to answer that question. I don’t think … it’s not a very nice question to ask.”
Asked what it was like to live with his history of sexual abuse, McGrory said: “It’s pretty awful. It’s pretty awful. It’s absolutely disgusting, but I believe in a merciful God, and I would not have been able to survive that otherwise”
McGrory said he was healed of his sex addiction and his attraction to adolescents after “surrendering” himself to God following the humiliation of his 1991 arrest.
Erlandson said her abuse at the hands of McGrory left her deeply cynical and sometimes angry. “His lack of empathy scarred me for life,” she said. “I have lost my faith and have worked all my life to continue to see the best in others.
“Abuse is a reality: It permeates every level and place in the world that I live. I hope, by sharing this, I will help stop the cycle of abuse.”
McGrory was officially removed from the priesthood — laicized — last year by the Vatican following a sustained campaign by another one of his victims, Colleen Passard.
Also last year, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michelle O’Bonsawin found McGrory guilty on two counts of gross indecency and two counts of indecent assault for sex crimes dating back to the late 1960s. O’Bonsawin said McGrory used his position as a priest “to exploit vulnerable and naive young men for his own satisfaction.”
A third criminal complainant died of cancer in July 2018, before the case could reach trial.
All three complainants came forward in 2016 after the Citizen published a series of stories that revealed details of McGrory’s sordid clerical career.
McGrory is to be sentenced early next month. The Crown has asked for a six- or seven-year prison term, while his defence lawyer has argued he is too old to survive such a sentence.
Abuse is a reality: It permeates every level and place in the world that I live. I hope, by sharing this, I will help stop the cycle of abuse