The 696-page report found that clergy members and lay religious brothers had abused at least 1,997 children since 1950 in the state’s six dioceses, including the prominent Archdiocese of Chicago. – Ruth Graham
More than 450 credibly accused child sex abusers have ministered in the Catholic Church in Illinois over almost seven decades, the office of the state’s attorney general, Kwame Raoul, said [on May 23rd] in an investigative report. That is more than four times the number that the church had publicly disclosed before 2018, when the state began its investigation.
The 696-page report found that clergy members and lay religious brothers had abused at least 1,997 children since 1950 in the state’s six dioceses, including the prominent Archdiocese of Chicago.
The report adds 149 names to lists of child sex abusers whom the dioceses themselves had publicly identified before or during the investigation. That brings the total number of identified abusers to 451, the report says. None of them are known to be in active ministry, and at least 330 are believed to have died.
The 149 new names are mostly religious brothers, who are accountable primarily to independent religious orders rather than to local dioceses and bishops.
Investigators interviewed hundreds of victims, and matched their accounts with diocesan records and other interviews to substantiate their accounts. Investigators also reviewed more than 100,000 pages of files held by the dioceses, and interviewed church leaders and their representatives.
One case among many documented in the report involves Thomas Francis Kelly, a priest who abused more than 15 boys ranging in age from 11 to 17 in several parishes in the 1960s and 1970s. Three victims contacted the attorney general’s investigators, including one who described being singled out by Father Kelly as an 11-year-old altar server. The priest invited the boy to drive-in movies and to spend the night in the rectory, where the priest offered him beer. The boy awoke in the night to find Father Kelly performing oral sex on him, the report says.
The archdiocese moved the priest from parish to parish, the attorney general’s report notes. The priest died in 1990.
Illinois is the latest state to detail decades of abuse.
Attorneys general and grand juries in a number of states have investigated sexual abuse in the church, including an investigation into the Archdiocese of Baltimore that was released last month. The many investigations were inspired by a sweeping report in 2018 on six dioceses in Pennsylvania, which stunned Catholics across the country.
The Illinois report was initiated by Lisa Madigan, Mr. Raoul’s predecessor as attorney general, who identified early in her investigation a significant gap between the number of clergy members who had been credibly accused and the much smaller number disclosed by the church.
Questions about abuse by Illinois clergy members have lingered for years.
The effects of the clerical sex abuse crisis have rippled through the Catholic Church in the United States for decades, and burst into public view 20 years ago when the The Boston Globe documented a sprawling cover-up of abuse in church settings.
The Catholic Conference of Illinois estimates that Catholics make up about 27 percent of the state’s population, above the national average.
In the early 1990s, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago led a pioneering commission on sexual abuse in church settings, establishing a board made up mainly of lay people to evaluate accusations of abuse against clergy members. But the report also documents how the Chicago archdiocese sometimes failed to act on its own recommendations.
Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, said in a statement [on May 23rd] that the archdiocese “has been at the forefront of developing and improving policies and programs to address the scourge of child sexual abuse and to support survivors.”
Mike McDonnell, a spokesman for SNAP, an advocacy group for victims of clerical sexual abuse, said, “This report clearly tells us that no one knew more about abuse, and no one did less about it, than these dioceses themselves.”.
Prosecutions appear unlikely in many of the cases described
Most of the abuse documented in the report happened decades ago. The report acknowledges that criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits will be impossible for many victims, because of statutes of limitations and the fact that the majority of the perpetrators have died.
Some states, including California and New York, have enacted a “look-back window” allowing victims of child sex abuse to bring civil claims that would otherwise be barred by statutes of limitations, but Illinois is not among them.
The report was intended to provide “public accountability and a measure of healing to survivors who have long suffered in silence,” Mr. Raoul said at a news conference [on May 23rd]. He said the dioceses had fulfilled their pledges to cooperate fully with the investigation. – The New York Times, 23 May 2023
› Ruth Graham is a Dallas-based national correspondent covering religion for The New York Times.
See also
- Sex abuse scandals and the Catholic Church
- Catholic Church in California grapples with over 3,000 lawsuits alleging abuse
- Nearly 2,000 children were sexually abused in the Illinois Catholic Church
- Spain’s Catholic Church finds hundreds of alleged child abusers over eight decades
- About 333,000 children were abused within France’s Catholic Church
- Italy church says 600 sex abuse cases sent to Vatican
- The time is ripe for a clergy abuse inquiry in Latin America
- Rise in sexual abuses of minors by Christian priests in India
- Sexual abuse of nuns by Catholic priests in India
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