The preliminary report by Attorney General Lisa Madigan concludes the Catholic dioceses in Illinois are incapable of investigating themselves and “will not resolve the clergy sexual abuse crisis on their own.”
The report said that 690 priests were accused of abuse, and only 185 names were made public by the dioceses as having been found credibly accused of abuse.
The Illinois report is only the latest effort by state prosecutors to hold the Catholic Church accountable by scrutinizing the church’s own records. At least 16 state attorneys general have initiated investigations of varying scope since August, after a grand jury report in Pennsylvania accused more than 300 priests of sexual abuse over 50 years, and accused bishops of covering up.
The nine-page report in Illinois does not name accused priests or call out particular bishops for negligence.
But it tries to quantify the gap between the number of accusations made by victims who dared to contact the church, and the number of accusations the church deemed credible.
Three-fourths of the allegations against clergy were either not investigated, or were investigated but not substantiated by the dioceses, the report found, based on files that the dioceses turned over to the attorney general’s office.
A pattern emerged from the files in which dioceses often failed to find a claim credible if there was only one victim, the report said. They also failed to investigate at all if the accused priest was deceased or reassigned, or belonged to a religious order. The dioceses often discredited survivors’ claims by “focusing on the survivors’ personal lives,” the report said.
Once the attorney general’s office began investigating, the report said, the Illinois dioceses disclosed the names of 45 more clergy who were deemed by the church to be credibly accused of abusing minors — most of them cases the dioceses knew about for years.
“I want to express again the profound regret of the whole church for our failures to address the scourge of clerical sexual abuse,” Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, said in a statement.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.