Report highlights 395 Catholic priests and church staff accused of sexual abuse

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A 182-page report released Wednesday compiled information on nearly 400 Catholic clergy and church staff in Illinois who have been publicly accused of sexual misconduct in the state’s six dioceses, including dozens in Chicago.

Jeff Anderson & Associates, a Minnesota-based law firm, released the report which included the names, background information, work histories and photographs of 395 accused priests and lay people statewide.

Although a seminarian, a teacher, and several deacons were on the list, the vast majority were priests.

The law firm said, based on its tally, hundreds of Illinoisans had been victims of child sexual abuse by people connected to the church.

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“Those at the top have chosen not to believe so many survivors for so many years who have come forward with reports and have therefore chosen to keep secrecy not only about the identities of these offenders, but [also] those who were complicit in this cover-up at the top,” said Jeff Anderson, the general counsel who heads the firm that released the report.

The list “represents the past”

Mary Jane Doerr, director of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office for Child and Youth Welfare, told a press conference Wednesday that her office’s efforts to protect children from abuse in the church will “beyond a list of names”.

“What’s frustrating to me is that the lists represent the past,” Doerr said. “And it wasn’t a good past, but we don’t do that anymore. This is not happening today. Today, all allegations are taken seriously.

Anderson’s report named about 115 clergy in the Archdiocese of Chicago, 77 of whom were priests who were officially recognized by the church as having founded abuse allegations against them.

In total, Anderson said of the 395 people listed statewide, only 192 have been identified by the church as actual abusers.

The Archdiocese of Chicago said it is releasing the names of every priest who has had a substantiated allegation against him and passing the names of those charged to law enforcement.

A list on the Archdiocese of Chicago’s website shows that the 77 priests with substantiated claims have either been removed from the public ministry, laicized, or died.

The Archdiocese of Chicago on Wednesday provided background information on 22 more of the 203 people listed in Anderson’s report who do not appear on the church’s public lists of known abusers.

Two of the 22 are priests from the Archdiocese of Chicago who have been removed from ministry pending ongoing criminal investigations. Ten other people had died before the first allegation against them was received. Eight others were cleared after the allegations against them were found to be unfounded. One of the last two cases involved the alleged abuse of a person who was not a minor, and the other was a former seminarian who was criminally charged in 1993.

Only one of the 22 priests is still active in ministry in Chicago. The allegations against the priest have been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated by police, the Department of Child and Family Services and the Archdiocese’s Independent Review Commission, said the archdiocese.

The discrepancy between Anderson’s report and the list of the Archdiocese of Chicago was due to the fact that the Archdiocese of Chicago does not publish the names of priests who are currently under investigation or those who are died before the allegations were made, said Chicago Archdiocese attorney John O’. Malley.

O’Malley took issue with Anderson’s inclusion of men against whom allegations had previously been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated.

“It looks like Anderson is describing someone in [the Chicago priest’s] situation as an aggressor and I think that’s a problem,” O’Malley said Wednesday. “The police did not decide that he was an attacker. The Archdiocese did not. Jeff Anderson did. People are entitled to their reputation until proven otherwise.

Anderson said his priority was to protect alleged victims of abuse, not the church.

“It’s not about smearing reputations, it’s about protecting children. And we will err on the side of their privacy and the protection of children instead of priests,” Anderson said.

At a Wednesday press conference in the Loop, Anderson introduced Joe Iocono, whose allegations of sexual abuse at the hands of a priest decades ago in the Archdiocese of Chicago have been substantiated.

“He was a friend of the family, someone I looked up to,” he said of the late Reverend Thomas Kelly. ” I did not know what to do. I was 11.”

The Springfield Diocese released a statement that offered ‘sentence for the shameful wrongs and wrongs perpetrated during a dark chapter’ in church history, but later called the report and news conference Anderson’s “Awesome Professional Marketing Brochure”.

“It does not represent, as Mr. Anderson suggests, a thorough and diligent review of publicly available facts, and it is highly misleading and irresponsible,” the statement said. He also noted that some priests who were already identified by the church as abusers were listed as deceased on the church’s website but as “status unknown” in Anderson’s report.

Anderson said he plans to continue to search for other priests accused of sexual abuse in Illinois and will update the list, which is posted on his law firm’s website, at the ‘coming.

Contribution: Capitol press service

Editor’s note: This article has been corrected to say that Joe Iocono alleged that he was abused by a priest in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

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