February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The suit was filed by one of O’Gradys’ victims, who listed the Archdiocese of Cashel & Emly in Tipperary as co-defendants.
A court in San Joaquin, in Orange County, ruled last week that there was “no admissible evidence that Cashel and Emly knew that O’Grady had a propensity to molest children and that the ordination of O’Grady would therefore give him a position of authority that would permit him to cause harm in other locations.”
The lawsuit also acquitted the late Archbishop of Cashel & Emly, Thomas Morris, of ordaining O’Grady in the knowledge that “would give him a position of authority that would permit him to cause harm in other locations.”
“I am deeply saddened by the criminal behavior of Oliver O’Grady in the Diocese of Stockton, California, and I pray that Oliver O’Grady’s victims achieve healing,” current Archbishop of Cashel & Emly Dermott Clifford said in a statement after the ruling.
“If Oliver O’Grady’s pedophile tendencies had been known by either the authorities in St Patrick’s College, Thurles, or by the former Archbishop of Cashel & Emly, Dr Thomas Morris, Oliver O’Grady would not have been ordained. I am gratified that the court in California has found that the Archdiocese of Cashel & Emly and St Patrick’s College played no knowing role in these events in California and that the court has declared that the accusations that anyone in St Patrick’s College, or at the Archdiocese, knew that Oliver O’Grady might do such a thing are not supported by any credible evidence.”
Prosecuting attorney John Manly has vowed to appeal the case before the California Court of Appeals and all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.
Speaking to the Irish Independent newspaper last week, Manly claimed that when O’Grady was defrocked in 1997, then-head of Rome’s congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, Cardinal William Levada, acknowledged that O’Grady’s “psychic infirmity” was known to Archbishop Morris.
O’Grady, 61, is widely regarded as the most notorious pedophile in Catholic Church history. He has admitted to abusing 23 young people, including a nine-month old infant, in the diocese of Stockport, California, where he moved in 1971 after being ordained a priest at St. Patrick’s Thurles Co. Tipperary. O’Grady never worked as a parish priest in Ireland.
O’Grady was convicted of child sex abuse charges in 1993. He served seven years of a fourteen-year sentence in a Californian prison before being deported back to Ireland in 2001. At present, he is thought to be living in Phibsboro, Dublin.
O’Grady recently participated in a documentary about his pedophilia called “Deliver us from Evil,” which was nominated for an Academy award.