Oregon Catholic Church Admits Molestation
P O R T L A N D, Ore., Oct. 10, 2000 -- The Roman Catholic Church apologizedtoday for one of the largest claims of clergy sexual abuse andsettled a lawsuit with 22 men who said they were molested by apriest as far back as 50 years ago.
The amount of the settlement was kept confidential by bothsides.
The plaintiffs charged in their $44 million lawsuit that theRev. Maurice Grammond enticed them to engage in sexual acts from1950 to 1974.
The settlement and the church’s apology were announced at thecounty courthouse in Portland. A state judge and a federal judgeacted as mediators in efforts to keep the case from going into alengthy and expensive trial.
‘A Half Century of Shame’“This settlement ends half a century of fear, secrecy, silenceand shame that protected Father Grammond,” said David Slader,lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Grammond, 80, is a resident of the Alzheimer’s unit of aretirement center in suburban Gresham.
The church’s apology, which is to be read in every church in theArchdiocese of Portland, was part of the settlement.
In it, Archbishop John Vlazny concedes that “some of thepriests” of the archdiocese “have sexually molested children whowere entrusted to the care of the church.”
“To any person who has suffered from abuse by any personnel ofthe Archdiocese of Portland and to their families, I express mydeep regret and ask for pardon and forgiveness,” his statementsays.
Over a period of more than three decades, Grammond served at ahome for troubled and abused boys in Portland, for parishes in thecoastal town of Seaside and in Oakridge, a logging town in thewestern foothills of the Cascades.
Most of the plaintiffs had been altar boys in Seaside, whereGrammond spent 20 years before his retirement in 1985.
The plaintiffs, who had kept quiet about the sexual abuse fordecades, mostly live in Oregon and range in age from 39 to 61.
The first lawsuit was filed last year by Joe Elliott, who grewup in Seaside and now lives in Portland. After that, moreplaintiffs came forward.
Doug Ray, now a city councilman in Seaside, has said that fromthe third or fourth grade until he was a freshman in high school,Grammond subjected him to increasing sexual abuse “as bad as onecan imagine, and worse.”
The lawsuits accused the archdiocese of failure to notifyparishioners of Grammond’s past molestations of boys, failure tomonitor his activities and advise authorities and failure to haveother adults accompany Grammond on camping trips and other youthactivities.
Echoes of Massachusetts CaseSlader has said the case was the biggest of its kind after oneinvolving the Rev. James Porter of Massachusetts, who was accusedby 99 people of molesting them while they were children in the1950s and 1960s. He pleaded guilty in 1993 to molesting 28 childrenand was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in prison.
Porter, who married and had four children after leaving thepriesthood, also was convicted in Minnesota of molesting a teenagegirl, a baby sitter for his children. That conviction wasoverturned on appeal and a prosecutor opted not to retry him.
The Portland archdiocese also has been sued by two men who claimthe Rev. Aldo Carlo Orso-Manzonetta, who died in 1996, abused themwhen they were teenagers at St. Michael the Archangel Church inPortland and that the archdiocese ignored complaints.