O'Grady Deposition: Chilling

The LATimes has reviewed 15 hours of videotaped depositions by defrocked Cathlic priest and pedophile Oliver O'Grady. A long article, complete with video clip, ran today.

As with so many crimes of sexual perversion and addiction, O'Grady's is a story of a boy growing up. He tells of being molested at church and at home. Nothing was done; no one took action. Then he became a priest:

His first assignment as a priest was to the Stockton Diocese in 1971. Five years later, O'Grady testified in an earlier deposition, he fondled an 11-year-old girl he had met at a summer camp and invited to sleep over at the rectory.

"I remember going into her bed, and I tried to caress her and fondle her, and I sensed her objections to that, nonverbally, and I stayed for a little while more and then decided not to continue. So I left and went back to my own bed," he told lawyers during the March deposition, estimating that he had spent no more than 20 minutes in the girl's bed.

The girl's parents complained to then-Bishop Merlin Guilfoyle, who preceded Mahony in Stockton. O'Grady testified that the bishop, who is now deceased, confronted him and he confessed.

O'Grady wrote the family a letter of apology, angering Guilfoyle, O'Grady said. The letter was in O'Grady's personnel file when Mahony assumed the bishopric, according to court records.

O'Grady said he suffered no repercussions for his transgression.

"Life just continued," he testified.

The sins of the Catholic church in not confronting the sins of O'Grady and others mirror the sins of society as a whole. While Eurocentric thinking pushes us to accept lowering the age of conscent, O'Grady's life and criminal record shows that once again the worldly view is wrong and those quaint old Godly rules are right.