Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church: More than 1,900 minors abused in Illinois, state says
Background: Illinois is the latest state to report 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 released last month. The many investigations were inspired by a voluminous 2018 report on six Pennsylvania dioceses that stunned Catholics across the country.
The Illinois report was initiated by Lisa Madigan, Mr. Raoul’s predecessor as Attorney General, who found a significant gap early in her investigation between the number of clergy credibly accused and the much smaller number charged by the Church. was announced. “The number of allegations beyond what was already public is shocking,” she told The New York Times in 2018.
Why it matters: Questions about abuse by Illinois clergy have lingered for years.
The fallout from the Church’s sexual abuse crisis has rippled through the Catholic Church in the United States for decades, coming to the fore 20 years ago when The Boston Globe documented an extensive 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 for states.
In the early 1990s, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago led a pioneering commission on sexual abuse in church settings, establishing a board composed primarily of lay people to evaluate allegations of abuse against clergy. The attorney general’s report calls the Archdiocese of Chicago “a leader in the new era of handling abuse claims,” with a policy of removing credibly accused clergy from ministry rather than reassigning them to new posts. But the report also documents how the archdiocese sometimes failed to follow its own recommendations.
Prior to the release of the Attorney General’s report, the state’s six Catholic dioceses released a statement last week about their handling of allegations of sexual abuse of minors. Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, said in the statement that the Church in Illinois “has been at the forefront of addressing the sexual abuse of minors for many years.”
“This report clearly tells us that no one knew more about abuse, and no one less than these dioceses themselves,” said Mike McDonnell, a spokesman for SNAP, an advocacy group for victims of clergy sexual abuse.
What’s Next: Prosecution seems unlikely in many of the cases described.
Most of the abuse documented in the report took place decades ago. The report recognizes that criminal prosecution and civil litigation will be impossible for many victims due to statutes of limitations and the death of perpetrators. Rather, the goals of the study were to provide an account of past abuse and “give a voice to survivors.”
Some states, including California and New York, have introduced a “look-back window” that allows victims of child sexual abuse to file civil claims that would otherwise be barred by statutes of limitations, but Illinois is not among them.