A Chicago-area priest who was a longtime member of the Augustinian religious order formerly led by Pope Leo XIV has been kicked out of the group.
The Rev. Richard J. McGrath had been accused of molesting a student at Providence Catholic High School in the 1990s and of having child pornography on his phone in 2017.
But McGrath apparently still remains a Catholic priest.
And his expulsion from the Augustinians wasn’t over the allegations of sexual misconduct.
That’s according to a Chicago lawyer representing the Midwest province of the Augustinians — the international order’s Chicago-based arm that McGrath belonged to for decades and which previously was led by Robert Prevost, the Chicago native recently selected as pope.
“In December 2024, pursuant to canonical procedures, McGrath was dismissed from the Augustinian order, following a prolonged period of disagreement with his direct superior,” according to a written statement from Loop lawyer Michael Airdo, whose law firm has represented the Augustinians over sex abuse claims and other matters. “The grounds for his dismissal had nothing to [do] with any allegations of sexual abuse. Pursuant to the canonical dismissal, McGrath cannot perform any priestly functions. However, he has not been ‘laicized,’ meaning he is technically still a priest.”
It’s unclear whether laicization is in the works or might be pursued at some point by church leaders or McGrath himself.
If that happens, Prevost could end up making the decision since laicization goes through the Vatican.
McGrath couldn’t be reached. His attorney declined to comment. International leaders of the Augustinians didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. The Vatican press office had no immediate comment.
The Catholic News Agency has described laicization this way: “While ordination can never be lost — no power on earth can erase the sacramental imprint of ordination — a person can lose the legal status of being a cleric.
“When a person loses the clerical state, he no longer has the right to exercise sacred ministry in the church,” with limited exceptions. “A person can lose the clerical state because he has requested it through a special petition to the pope personally, or he can lose it as a penalty for committing an ecclesiastical crime.”
Airdo’s statement doesn’t say why McGrath was booted from his order.
Church officials previously indicated McGrath was on thin ice for refusing to listen to his superiors after allegations surfaced that he had child pornography on his phone while running Providence Catholic High School in suburban New Lenox in 2017, with other, unrelated accusations following.
A 2018 lawsuit filed by Robert Krankvich — a Providence student in the 1990s who died in April following a lengthy battle with drugs, alcohol and mental health issues — accused McGrath of having raped him when Krankvich was a teenager.
In a sworn deposition in the case in 2023, McGrath denied that, saying he never engaged in “any unlawful, immoral or sexually improper conduct with any student.”
McGrath also was asked whether he had ever viewed child pornography during the time he was president of Providence. McGrath declined to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
After the pornography accusations originally surfaced, McGrath was sidelined from Providence and moved to a South Side monastery that was across an alley from a preschool and less than a block from a Catholic elementary school. The people running both hadn’t been notified of his presence.
When the Chicago Sun-Times reported this — and that Cardinal Blase Cupich’s office had cleared McGrath’s move to the monastery in Hyde Park — the priest was moved.
At some point, though, McGrath stopped listening to church officials about where to live, and a years-long saga played out that’s now culminated in his dismissal from the Augustinians.
“And what is your understanding of why the Augustinians are trying to expel you?” Marc Pearlman, Krankvich’s lawyer, asked McGrath in his deposition in that case.
“Because I left on my own, without their approval,” McGrath said.
In response to other questions, he said that, “After being asked to move four different times in less than a year, I left my residence with the Augustinians and went out on my own.”
“Is there any other reason… that you’re aware of that the Augustinians were trying to expel you?” Pearlman asked.
“No,” McGrath said.
He was asked whether “the terms you would prefer is that you live outside of the Augustinian community but that you remain an Augustinian?”
McGrath responded, “Yes, at least on a temporary interim basis until all of this legal stuff plays out, and we see where we are, see how things have exchanged.”
“And why would you want to live outside the community while these legal issues sort themselves out?” Pearlman asked.
McGrath answered: “There is a preschool less than 100 yards away from the community in Crown Point [Indiana] where they would like me to live. The Sun-Times published that article when I was at 54th Street and Woodlawn in John Stone Friary, saying . . . that friary was less than a block and a half from another preschool.”
The lawyer asked, “OK, and there’s also a preschool where they want you to live in Crown Point?”
“Correct,” McGrath said, adding that he felt his order was dealing with him unfairly and without “due process.”
McGrath also said in the deposition that he hasn’t “been treated very well up until this time, in my opinion” by the Augustinians.
That civil case was settled several months after that deposition, on the eve of trial, with the church agreeing to pay Krankvich $2 million while not admitting any wrongdoing.
Police and prosecutors investigated McGrath over the child pornography allegation — a female student at Providence had reported seeing the image of a nude boy on McGrath’s cell phone while he attended a school wrestling match — but dropped the case without criminal charges.
Their investigation was complicated by McGrath refusing to turn over the phone, which then went missing, authorities have said. He refused in the lawsuit deposition to answer whether he destroyed the phone, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Airdo’s statement offers this defense of McGrath: “The allegations by Krankvich were the first and only allegations of sexual abuse by Richard McGrath. McGrath vehemently denied abusing Krankvich. The evidence regarding the claimed abuse was questionable.”
Child pornography is considered a form of sex abuse, and other behavior by McGrath emerged in the Krankvich lawsuit as well. An anonymous letter sent to the Augustinians sometime between 2006 and 2010 complained about McGrath, saying: “Dear Augustinian provincial, please make Father McGrath stop giving… back rubs to the boys at Providence.”
The letter said McGrath “also watches the boys in the weight room and does it there, too.”
Around the time the pornography accusations emerged, another former Providence student called the police in New Lenox and said he had been molested by two priests years earlier and that McGrath was one of them, records show.
When investigators followed up, the man recanted what he’d said. But according to a police report, he said McGrath would enter the boys’ locker room after football games and “stand at the entrance of the showers” and talk with the students “and stare at the naked boys while they took showers.”
McGrath also “blocked the entrance/exit,” causing “the boys to touch Father McGrath on their way out of the shower area,” according to the police report.
Questioned during his deposition about standing by the showers, McGrath said, “I don’t recall doing that.”
The Augustinians had been one of the highest-profile holdouts in making public a list of members deemed to have been credibly accused of being sex offenders, posting a list in 2024.
That was long after many other Catholic orders and dioceses had done so in response to victims and their advocates asking for such transparency from the church to help their healing and as an acknowledgment of their suffering amid a child sex abuse crisis that spanned decades and involved cover-ups by some church leaders.
Prevost ran the Augustinian order’s Chicago-based province from 1999 to 2001, then was head of the worldwide order for more than a decade.
There are five names on the Augustinians’ misconduct list from the Midwest province, which has offices on the Far Southwest Side and also oversees St. Rita High School on the South Side.
McGrath isn’t on the list, with the Augustinians’ statement explaining: “In determining whether an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor is ‘established,’ the Midwest Augustinians adhere to the canonical standard of ‘moral certitude.’
“An allegation is ‘established’ when ‘there is objective certainty that the accusation is true and that an incident of sexual abuse of a minor has occurred.’”
Some news reports have confused McGrath’s move to the monastery with the move of another accused priest, James Ray, to the same building nearly two decades before.
The Augustinians have said Prevost played no role in McGrath’s placement in the friary, though the new pope, while leader of the Chicago-based province, signed off on Ray moving there — which the nearby Catholic grade school wasn’t informed of.
“At the time Krankvich alleges abuse occurred, from 1995 to 1996, then-Father Prevost was assigned to work in Trujillo, Peru,” according to the order’s statement. “While in Peru, Prevost had no responsibility for any Augustinian in the United States.
“Similarly, the time of both the cell phone investigation in 2017 and when Krankvich’s allegations first made in 2018, Prevost was the bishop of the Diocese of Chiclayo in Peru. At that time, the then-Bishop Prevost had no responsibility for the Augustinians.”
Pearlman, Krankvich’s lawyer, said the order’s defense of Prevost rings hollow. “From 2001 until 2013, he’s the CEO, period. Anything that happens during that time frame is on him.”
That includes the anonymous letter about McGrath, Pearlman said, as well as the revelation in 2003 that the Rev. John D. Murphy, an accused pedophile now on the Augustinians’ list, was working as a docent at the Shedd Aquarium with the knowledge of his order. Murphy is long gone from the order and has since gotten married and had been living in the northwest suburbs.
