More Accusations Of Child Sex Abuse By Priests In Illinois Uncovered In Report
Accusations of child sex abuse against at least 500 Roman Catholic priests and clergy members in Illinois have never been made public, a preliminary investigation by the state's attorney general has found.
That brings the total number of members in the Illinois dioceses who have been accused of sexually abusing minors to about 690, according to the report released Wednesday. The church previously had made public the names of only 185 accused priests, 45 of whom were added after Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office started investigating in August.
Madigan started her investigation into the Catholic Church after a sweeping grand jury investigation in Pennsylvania uncovered more than 300 "predator priests" statewide who committed "criminal and/or morally reprehensible conduct."
The report out of Pennsylvania was scathing:
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro called it a "systematic cover-up" and a "failure of law enforcement," NPR previously reported. Additionally, the grand jury investigation named the accused priests, something the Illinois attorney general's report did not.
Madigan wanted to see if the same thing was happening in her state. Her office said in a statement that it reviewed thousands of pages of documents voluntarily turned over by each of Illinois' six dioceses and set up a hotline where people could report allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
As Susie An reported for NPR's Morning Edition, Madigan said "one of the things we've seen is that the church really took any opportunity it thought it could not to investigate."
Madigan's office found dozens of examples where the Illinois dioceses "failed to adequately investigate an allegation of clergy sexual abuse it received from a survivor," according to the report.
The investigation revealed that, of the allegations the Illinois dioceses have received, they only "deemed twenty-six percent as 'credible' allegations, meaning seventy-four percent of the allegations were either not investigated, or were investigated but not substantiated."
The reasons the dioceses didn't investigate accusations varied, according to the report. Sometimes the accuser wished to remain anonymous, or the accused priest had left the country, but the most common reason was that the accused had either died or resigned.
The dioceses often discounted allegations that came from just one accuser and "sought to discredit a survivor's allegations based upon the survivor's personal life," according to the investigation.
The archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, responded to Madigan's initial findings in a statement:
Cupich said it was "difficult to discern" which of the report's findings apply to the Archdiocese of Chicago but defended its efforts to mitigate sexual abuse, claiming to have been at the "forefront of dealing with the issue of clergy sexual abuse for nearly three decades."
He also said in the statement that all reports of sexual abuse are investigated, whether the accused priest is alive or dead, and that, starting in 2002, they have reported all allegations of child sexual abuse to civil authorities, including "historical allegations."
The Diocese of Joliet also responded to the attorney general's report, saying in a statement that the investigation doesn't distinguish between dioceses and that they have received "no formal or informal indication from the Attorney General that we failed to adequately investigate any allegation of abuse and/or report it to authorities."
The attorney general said in a statement that the investigation isn't finished and that her office has asked the state's dioceses for additional information.
But some sexual abuse survivors don't think the preliminary investigation goes far enough, according to An, who was reporting for NPR.
"I don't know what to believe out of the Catholic Church. I really don't, because everything's been so secretive and hidden," Larry Antonsen, a leader with the Chicago branch of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told NPR.
Decades ago, Antonsen reported a priest who had sexually abused him as a child, but he says he's still waiting for the church to publicly list the man's name. He said he hopes Illinois will launch its own grand jury investigation.
Parishioners worship during a mass at St Paul Cathedral, the mother church of the Pittsburgh Diocese in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Aug. 15, 2018. (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)
13 US States Now
Investigating Catholic Clergy Sex-Abuse Claims
Lawyer: '99 percent of the cases are barred by the statute of
limitations'
BY
At least 13 states have announced they are investigating the clergy
sexual-abuse allegations linked to the Roman Catholic Church in the United
States.
The attorney general’s office in each of
the 50 states and the District of Columbia were contacted by NBC News who found that
nearly a third are currently either actively probing allegations of abuse by
clergy or about to begin a statewide investigation.
Attorney generals have the power to subpoena catholic dioceses for
documents of sex-abuse allegations. The list of states so far
includes Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont.
Steven Kelly, a lawyer with the national firm Sanford
Heisler Sharp who represents child sexual-abuse victims by clergy among others
in Baltimore, called the growing investigation a “step in the right direction”
in an interview with The Epoch Times.
“The idea that the attorney general is investigating is I think a
very good thing for our state, it gives survivors hope that the church might
actually be punished for covering this stuff up,” he said.
Kelly, like other child abuse lawyers,
said the biggest problem is that the statute of limitations blocks prosecutors
from having the power to charge someone a certain number of years after a
crime is committed. The statute of limitations is different in each state.
He said he encounters “many [upon] many” victims of church abuse.
“On average, at least three to five survivors per week have called me
over the past 10 years and out of that number, 99 percent of the cases are
barred by the statute of limitations. The most I can do is help the survivors
report the crime and then guide them to counseling resources and so
forth,” he said.
In Maryland, victims have until age 24 to file a lawsuit based on the
state’s statute of limitations. But Kelly, who has been fighting for victims
since 1988 after his older sister was raped and murdered, said the law weighs
in favors of the perpetrator.
“Most [church abuse] survivors
are just incapable, especially males, of taking the steps they
needed to take until they were at least in their 30s,” he said. “So, the
vast majority of survivors in Maryland … there is no mop,
no financial remedy that they can even get.”
The latest state to officially initiate
such an investigation is Florida. Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Oct. 4
during a press conference that their office will “immediately” start
issuing subpoenas to all seven Catholic dioceses in the state.
As part of the inquiry, a new tip site was initiated; Florida
law enforcement is also assisting with the investigation.
“Any priest that would exploit a position
of power and trust to abuse a child is a disgrace to the church and a threat to
society,” Bondi said in a statement. She urged
victims and anyone else with information to assist them with the ongoing
statewide investigation.
Some attorney generals, like Florida’s,
attribute their decision to investigate to the bombshell Pennsylvania grand
jury report from August that accused more than
300 “predator priests” across Pennsylvania of sexual abuse. It also found that
Church officials were complicit in a decades-long cover-up of the alleged
activity. At least 1,000 child victims were identified.
Pope Blames Devil
In response to the growing outcry, Pope Francis said that Satan is to
blame for the sexual abuse crisis dividing the church.
He has since asked Catholics around the globe to recite a special
prayer every day in October to beat Satan down.
“(The Church must be) saved from the
attacks of the malign one, the great accuser and at the same time be made ever
more aware of its guilt, its mistakes, and abuses committed in the present and
the past,” Francis said on
Sept. 29.
But the pope’s use of the term “the great accuser” in describing Satan
sparked outrage from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s former
ambassador to Washington, who accused the pontiff in a scathing 11-page letter
of knowing and doing nothing about allegations against then-U.S. Cardinal
Theodore E. McCarrick.
In an updated statement, Viganò complained that Francis “compared
me to the great accuser, Satan, who sows scandal and division in the Church,
though without ever uttering my name.”
Won’t Forsake
Kelly, who is a practicing Catholic himself, said the church’s growing
scandal hasn’t made him renounce his faith.
“I am a practicing Catholic, I have not left the church. I believe that
the church does not belong to the people who covered this stuff up,” he
said.
The lawyer instead called for the corrupt and complicit church officials
to be removed from their posts.
“I think those people need to be rooted out of the church and the church
needs to be reformed,” Kelly said. “You may have to bring down and destroy a
lot of the church as it is today to really fix this problem. It needs to be
done.”
The Holy See's blindness
Politics and sex. There was a time when some of us "seasoned" individuals believed that you could not get enough of either. Sadly, that is not the case lately. Politics and sex; sex and politics. I do not know about you, but it has not been good for some folks in a long time.
Sex in some form is all part of a day's work for a political figure. It can range from criminal behavior (alleged or actual) to extramarital (real or imagined) to issues of gender (same or trans or whatever is in vogue at the moment). Former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards combined all of them when he famously said the only way he could lose the 1983 election was "if I'm caught in bed with either a live boy or a dead girl."
Even our sanctuaries are not free from sex scandals. If we are not reading about pedophile priests, we are reading about pedophile preachers. If we are not hearing about a preacher in a car with a hooker, we are reading about Jesus in bed with a prostitute.
Most of the time, the scandals fade into the mist and the dark nightmare that spawned them. Other times, they breed and grow because smart people make stupid statements that keep the controversy on the front pages.
The Vatican's latest attempt to explain the growing scandal of pedophilia among priests is such a case. The Holy See still does not see that there is no easy way out of this mess.
Reuters reported this week that Pope Francis continued his campaign to make the theology of Evil the main issue instead of the child-molesters and those who gave them cover. "[The Church must be] saved from the attacks of the malign one, the great accuser and at the same time be made ever more aware of its guilt, its mistakes, and abuses committed in the present and the past," Francis said in a message Sept. 29.
A friend, a member of the Eastern Orthodox clergy, called BS on an Oct. 6 statement from the Vatican press office asserting that the massive and pervasive (my words, not theirs) cover-up "would not be consonant with a contemporary approach to such issues" and that child abuse and cover-ups "represent a form of clericalism that is no longer acceptable."
My friend rightly pointed out that the Vatican wants us to believe that the problem is not that somebody did something wrong, but that our standards have changed when it uses phrases like "contemporary approach" and "no longer acceptable," as if this sort of thing were acceptable at any time.
I am always amazed at the Vatican's deafness on this subject and its inability to take a rock-solid position. It reminds me of a politician or celebrity who does or says something outrageous and then says, "I'm sorry if I offended someone."
No one, particularly victims, wants to hear the Vatican's version of that old joke "the Devil made me do it." People want to hear the vicar of Christ say, "The abuse was wrong, the cover-up was wrong, everything associated with these horrible acts was wrong. For all of that, we can only ask for forgiveness and prayers. But these will not change the past. So I ask for your prayers and help to change the future, knowing that the Devil himself is working overtime to destroy the Faith and the faithful and that we, as shepherds, cannot now and will not again allow the Wolf of Souls to destroy our flock."
Words alone mean nothing. Public relations professionals churn out millions of words a day that mean nothing until someone takes action. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition (with no apologies to Monty Python), but all victims of child sexual abuse and all people, regardless of religious belief, expect and demand accountability, a path to justice, and a promise to stamp out the evil wherever it lurks.
John David Powell is an award-winning journalist living in Texas. His email is johndavidpowell@yahoo.com.
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