California Ex-Priest Arrested In Ireland On Child Porn Charges
LONDON (AP) -- A defrocked California priest made notorious by an award-winning documentary on sex abuse in the Catholic church has been detained by Irish authorities on child pornography charges, police said Monday.
Irish police said in a statement that Oliver O'Grady had been arrested in the Dublin area Friday morning but gave few details about the exact nature of his alleged crime. The 65-year-old was made the subject of an award-winning 2006 documentary, "Deliver Us from Evil," in which he spoke openly of abusing more than 20 children as he was shuffled from one parish to another in California through the 1970s and 80s.
Convicted in 1994 of molesting two brothers, he served almost seven years in a U.S. prison before being deported to his native Ireland.
Earlier this year the Dutch Catholic Church came under fire after it emerged that O'Grady had been working as church volunteer in the city of Rotterdam. O'Grady had been living in the country under another name, but parishioners recognized him when "Deliver Us from Evil" was aired on Dutch television in April. By that time, the disgraced cleric had already left the country.
In June survivors of O'Grady's abuse expressed outrage when the northern California's Stockton Diocese announced that he would receive monthly payments totaling nearly $100,000 over 10 years as part of a deal to get him to leave the priesthood.
The Stockton Diocese, about 60 miles east of San Francisco, has been hit with a slew of lawsuits over O'Grady's actions.
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