Church pays abusive ex-priest

Oliver O'Grady has been called the Hannibal Lecter of pedophile Catholic priests. He has been gone from the Stockton Diocese for 17 years, but the civil lawsuits keep coming — 22 to date, resulting in $18.7 million paid to victims.

And Saturday, when O'Grady turns 65 in his native Ireland, an annuity purchased by the diocese seven years ago will pay him about $788 a month for 10 years, totaling $94,560. There is nothing the diocese, its parishioners or his outraged victims can do about it.

"He gets rewarded. I get very frustrated," said Nancy Sloan, 45, who was sexually abused by O'Grady when she was 11. "The church has certainly gone back on its word countless times. I don't know why it wouldn't even cross their minds to go back on the annuity — give it back to a victims fund."

O'Grady has admitted abusing many children of various ages, boys and girls, and said he slept with two mothers to get access to their children. He was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1993 and spent seven years in prison.

Some blogs and news reports have called the payments "hush money," part of a deal to keep O'Grady from testifying against former Bishop Roger Mahony and other diocesan officials accused of knowing about his abuse but moving him from parish to parish.

"That's not true at all," said Bishop Stephen Blaire, who said he was the one who arranged the annuity after he took over leadership of the diocese in 1999.

The truth, Blaire said, is that he fervently wanted O'Grady to be stripped of his priesthood. His faculties, or authority to exercise his priesthood, already had been taken away. But defrocking a priest was a

"long and cumbersome process," one with "no guarantees," especially a decade ago, Blaire said.

The only sure way to make that happen was for O'Grady to request a change in status.

"He was going to be paroled in November 2000," Blaire said. "I was determined that he not leave prison as a priest. His lawyer told me O'Grady would consider seeking laicization if a pension annuity would be made available to him.

"I found it distasteful to provide an annuity as part of the arrangement. But I wanted to provide some measure of justice or peace of mind for his victims that he could never again use his priesthood to damage families. I didn't see any other way of guaranteeing that he would be out of the priesthood."

Blaire knows the annuity payments are "going to be perceived badly. But there was a reason."

'Rare, but not unheard of'

The annuity cost the diocese nearly $11,000 annually over a seven-year period and was paid for in 2009. The payments will be made to O'Grady from the insurance company.

Buying an annuity is "rare, but not unheard of," said Mary Jane Doerr, associate director of the office of Child and Youth Protection for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C.

The more common thing is for a defrocked priest to retain any pension he earned from the diocese, she said. O'Grady doesn't receive a pension.

"Yes, he did a terrible thing," Doerr said, but a bishop has a responsibility to take care of priests in any case — he can't just kick them to the curb.

The lack of safety around O'Grady was highlighted when the ex-priest made international news in April.

He'd been living in the Netherlands for about 18 months and going by the name "Brother Francis," his middle name. He worked as a deacon in a small Rotterdam church, volunteered at a shelter for women and children, and worked at McDonald's as a children's party coordinator.