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The Archdiocese of Ottawa will not say how many victims of clergy sex abuse it has recognized or how much it has paid them. But, as Andrew Duffy reports in this series, documents filed in a recent lawsuit begin to answer those questions, while also revealing details of never-before-known cases — such as that of Rev. Barry McGrory.

A retired Catholic priest admitted, in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, that he sexually abused three young parishioners at Ottawa’s Holy Cross Parish in the 1970s and ’80s.

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Rev. Barry McGrory said he was a sex addict who suffered from a powerful attraction to adolescents, both male and female.

Then Archbishop Joseph-Aurèle Plourde, he said, knew of his sexual problems before moving him to a Toronto-based organization dedicated to assisting remote Catholic missions.

Many of the missions were in native communities in Canada’s north.

Four years after leaving Ottawa, in 1991, McGrory was charged with sexually assaulting a 17-year-old native youth.