NEWS FEATURE: Church Tries to Forget Banished Priest, but Pain Can’t Be Erased

c. 2000 Religion News Service PORTLAND, Ore. _ The priest is fading away. He has few visitors. He never really fit into the role of beloved parish priest anyway, showing little patience for small-town people and their small-town problems. But now he’s banished from the churches he once served. With 15 years at Our Lady […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

PORTLAND, Ore. _ The priest is fading away.

He has few visitors. He never really fit into the role of beloved parish priest anyway, showing little patience for small-town people and their small-town problems.


But now he’s banished from the churches he once served. With 15 years at Our Lady of Victory in Seaside, the Rev. Maurice Grammond was its longest-serving priest; yet when the parish celebrated its centennial this summer, the historical pamphlets ignored him. When he reached his 50-year anniversary in the priesthood in May, a huge celebration for many priests, their Golden Jubilee, the regional Catholic weekly gave him a paragraph about his schooling. No list of parishes where he served. No picture.

In little judgment calls like those across western Oregon, he’s being deleted from the written record of half a century.

Grammond and the Archdiocese of Portland were defendants in a recent settlement of sex-abuse lawsuits brought by 23 men. The archdiocese did not admit fault, and in the past, Grammond denied any abuse. Two other cases remain unresolved.

The financial terms of the Grammond settlement are confidential, but the church agreed to establish a task force to investigate child-abuse complaints, “healing” services for all families affected by Grammond and an apology from Archbishop John G. Vlazny.

The apology, read throughout the archdiocese at the Oct. 15 Mass, was extended to “any person who has suffered from abuse by any personnel of the archdiocese.”

It did not name Grammond, who served several parishes and two orphanages of the archdiocese.

From its sensational national outbreak in the 1980s, clergy sex abuse has grown into the Catholic Church’s greatest scandal. Every one of the 188 dioceses in the country has faced a pedophilia case.

From the vantage point of a church pew in rural Oregon, pedophilia was something that happened far away. Parents warned to watch out for strangers. The priest wasn’t a stranger. He was more than a man.


“One of the most poignant things about cases of priests molesting children or youths is that they go, naturally, for their easiest targets _ good Catholic families,” author Garry Wills writes in his recently published “Papal Sins: Structures of Deceit.” “Devout Catholic families will be the least suspicious of a priest’s conduct and the most intimidated about challenging the church.”

Pedophiles follow patterns: finding access to children, winning their trust with rewards and praise, isolating them physically as well as psychologically.

Pedophile priests accomplish all that in broad daylight. Or in church.

Grammond’s accusers describe, collectively, hundreds of sexual encounters. Grammond kept them quiet. It’s our secret, he told them. In a rambling, bitter, unpublished autobiography, Grammond decries a young boy who “threw himself at me in a sexual manner,” as if he foresaw the accusations and sought to head them off.

Today, Grammond is silent, 80 and weakening in a Gresham home for Alzheimer’s patients. He speaks only to a couple of acquaintances and his sister.

The impact of the abuse, played out over as many as five decades, is stunning.

THE MEN TELL THEIR STORIES

At the Multnomah County Courthouse, the file “J.W.E. vs. Maurice Grammond and the Archdiocese of Portland” will remain slim, the case having been settled behind closed doors.


The file is a quick read. The real case isn’t on paper. It’s on video.

David Slader, the lawyer for most of the men suing Grammond, hired a filmmaker and, with a camera and small crew, visited several clients at their homes. They hoped to distill their stories into a film to present to the judges overseeing the settlement negotiations.

This summer, the judges watched it, as did the lawyers. So did Archbishop Vlazny.

Most haunting are the glimpses into what these men have suffered. All describe deep loss: wives, friends, peace of mind, self-assurance, trust, faith. None is whole.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and say, `Why didn’t I pull away from him? Grab my clothes and go straight home to Dad?”’ a former altar boy says in his own living room, his eyes puffy from unexpectedly crying at the memory of what happened when he was 12. “I wish I had done that, but I didn’t.”

Among the most powerful video interviews is that of the man who said the least: Dan Ryan, an antiques dealer who contemplated suicide when he heard of the first lawsuit.

“I don’t remember a lot,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I gotta tell you, this feels like I’m in a pressure cooker.”


He described hearing about the case.

Driving toward Portland that December Tuesday, Ryan snapped his head and stared at the radio as if it were alive. A newscaster said a former Seaside altar boy had sued a retired priest, the Rev. Maurice Grammond, alleging sexual abuse in the late 1960s and early 1970s while Grammond was pastor of Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church in Seaside.

Images jumped at him: Grammond visiting his parents, telling the boy to sit on his lap.

Grammond in the tent on a campout. He and Grammond in the same sleeping bag. The boy complaining about mosquito bites. Grammond telling him to pull down his pants.

By Thursday, Ryan couldn’t think of anything else. It was all Grammond, and it was all bad.

He walked out to his barn and found a rope. He tied a noose. He placed it over his head. Crying, he flung the other end of the rope toward the rafters above. He missed.

On the tape, his breathing quickens to the brink of hyperventilation, his voice becomes a throaty growl.


“If I don’t talk about this and get this out of me, I’m gonna die. I feel like I’m gonna explode.”

He doesn’t get much farther in his story before he breaks down into a state beyond crying, falling forward in his chair, his hands balled into tight fists, shaking and growling and choking, all at once.

SOMEONE TOLD

Grammond left Our Lady of Victory in June 1985 on a sick leave. He began to hear his mother’s voice, he wrote in his unpublished memoir, telling him to retire. He heard doctors telling him, too. He was granted a medical retirement in 1988.

Three years later, out of nowhere, after who knows how many close calls, it happened.

Someone told. A former altar boy, listening to ladies after Mass talking about the good old days with Father Grammond, blurted out that they weren’t that good.

Grammond was called down, unaware, for a conference in Portland. When he entered the room, he saw then-Archbishop William Levada, the Rev. Charles Lienert and a counselor, there to deal with a possibly volatile confrontation.


Grammond denied the former altar boy’s description of sex abuse, recalled Lienert, the vicar of clergy, a personnel director for priests. Levada ordered him off to a weeklong psychological evaluation. Grammond said OK.

The evaluation was inconclusive. He denied everything, and the therapist called him “uncooperative.” Levada ordered him to take more tests, in town this time. Grammond refused.

“The fact that he was not cooperative made us concerned,” Lienert said.

So Levada formally suspended him from the priesthood, a grave punishment. In effect, Grammond was forbidden from representing himself as a priest. No performing Mass in public, no marriages or Holy Communion or confession or baptism. Only defrocking _ stripping a priest entirely of his priesthood _ is more severe.

AT OUR LADY

Seaside hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years, a small town of around 6,000. Same arcade down the street from the church, same bumper cars, same cotton candy, same piped-in carnival music. Just different tourists.

Same church. Jean Elliott remembers sitting in a pew toward the front of Our Lady of Victory last December, when Lienert stepped to the pulpit and read a letter from the archbishop.

Archbishop Vlazny said he was very concerned with the allegations against a former Seaside priest and asked anyone who believed he had been harmed to make contact. As for Grammond’s accuser, “we met with him and offered professional counseling, which he accepted. The archdiocese told him that it was willing to discuss any additional assistance he might need. For whatever his reasons, he chose not to deal further with the archdiocese.”


In her pew that morning, Elliott was aghast. That priest was talking about her son. She heard the message as: The church did everything it could to help, but this ingrate decided he’d go for the money.

In fact, Joseph Elliott’s reasons for suing revolved largely around Lienert’s earlier invitation to Elliott to seek counseling “for what you believe happened to you.” His tone, to Elliott, suggested doubt.

“I was going to be believed,” Elliott stewed.

He called Slader, the Portland lawyer who specializes in sex-abuse cases. They filed the lawsuit in December.

When Elliott first spoke out, there was an instant and overwhelmingly skeptical backlash: Here we go again. He waited all these years, until the priest had Alzheimer’s disease and couldn’t even defend himself. The archdiocese countersued. A process server delivered his summons at the Hollywood hair salon where he worked.

What they didn’t know was that Slader and Elliott had Grammond on tape.

Eleven days before they filed the lawsuit, Dec. 2, Elliott called the priest from the lawyer’s office. They recorded the call.

It’s a common, and perfectly legal, tactic Slader has used before in sex-abuse cases: Get the guy on tape before he suspects anything, before he has a lawyer telling him to keep his mouth shut.


Then the lawyer’s phone started ringing.

JOINING `LITTLE JOEY’

Doug Ray, 43, a six-year city councilman in his hometown of Seaside, was floored by the news of the lawsuit. Memories rushed at him.

“Little snapshots of things I hadn’t thought of in three decades,” he said. “Infinite sadness. Really deep, infinite sadness. De-energizing.”

He pegged J.W.E. for Elliott, “Little Joey,” a childhood buddy with whom he’d lost touch.

As he saw his old friend strafed in the press and heard him denounced by anonymous callers on talk radio, snapshots kept coming. Camping trips. In the rectory. He and Grammond and other boys, all at the same time.

“The more I was remembering, I was just really crashing down bad.”

He called the lawyer.

Grammond’s only living relative, his sister, Dolores, saw the story on the television in her home outside Portland.

Oh, no.

She called her brother at the suburban care center for Alzheimer’s patients where he’d lived since the summer, after he collapsed in his apartment at a priests’ retirement community.


They’d never been close. She resented the way he abandoned the family when he became a priest, the way their mother doted on him from the minute he put on that white collar.

“Well, I see you made TV. Aren’t you proud of yourself?” she later recalled telling him on the phone. “Wouldn’t Mother be proud of you?”

“I didn’t do nothing,” he told her. “I never touched anybody. They’re just lying.”

They hung up.

Later, she mentioned the story to one of her sons. He looked at her.

And said: “We all went through it.”

“You what?” she recalls shouting. “This is disgusting. They ought to take him out and hang him. Why didn’t you tell me before this?”

The sons told their mother about the sleepovers at Our Lady of Victory. They’d run and hide at bedtime, and Grammond would lock them out. They’d sleep outside in sleeping bags they’d stashed in the bushes.

One of her sons was 9 when he told his grandmother, Grammond’s mother. She scolded the boy, ordering him to say nothing more about it and to “go pray,” the son told his mother later.

Two of the priest’s nephews picked up the phone and became plaintiffs.

NO ONE SUSPECTED

Longtime parishioners at Our Lady of Victory said they never suspected anything untoward about Grammond. One woman praised his fiscal judgment, pointing out that he built the parish hall.


Perhaps no one was more stunned by the allegations than former altar boys he had never touched. “He had a big impact on my life,” said John Stadter, formerly of Seaside, now a tech worker in Coos Bay. “He introduced me to a lot of things, camping-wise and outdoors-wise, that my father wouldn’t have. I credit him with a lot of my interest in the outdoors.”

But after Seaside city councilman Ray came forward in tears at a Memorial Day press conference, people stopped him on the street and congratulated him.

“I’m going to get my life back, but it’ll be better,” Ray said. “It’s not good to have a secret from your wife, who’s your best friend in the world. You shouldn’t have any, but I did.”

Ray had blocked out a lot of his childhood, like other plaintiffs, by staying very busy. He saw the world as a Marine embassy guard, working in hot spots like El Salvador.

It was easy not to think about Grammond, and pretty soon he didn’t at all, until the attorney’s office called about Joe Elliott.

He saw Elliott’s mother recently. They sat in Ray’s living room and remembered. Jean Elliott, who had worked as Grammond’s secretary for 18 years, told him she can’t believe how she never noticed anything.


“It’s not your fault,” Ray told her. “There’s no way you could have known. It’s not, Jean.”

(Michael Wilson is a staff writer at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

DEA END WILSON

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