CALAVARAS (CA)
Calavaras Enterprise
Nov 1, 2019
By Dakota Morlan
A former St. Andrew’s Catholic Church priest who once confessed to abusing dozens of children in Northern California has been arrested in Portugal under suspicion of child pornography-related offenses in his native Ireland.
Oliver O’Grady, 74, was arrested last month by local police in the Algarve area of Portugal under a European Arrest Warrant and will likely be extradited to Ireland, The Irish Times reported.
The Limerick-born former priest was sentenced to 14 years in prison in 1993 after he was convicted of repeatedly molesting two Turlock, Calif. brothers over the course of more than a decade. However, he was paroled after serving just seven years at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, deported to Ireland and defrocked as a priest shortly after.
Between the early 1970s and 1990s, O’Grady served as a pastor at Diocese of Stockton parishes in Lodi, Stockton and Turlock, as well as St. Andrew’s in San Andreas.
O’Grady later admitted to molesting more than 20 children during that time in the 2006 documentary film “Deliver Us from Evil.” The documentary alleged that the diocese knowingly concealed the ongoing abuse by moving O’Grady from parish to parish.
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