On Tuesday, the attorney general of Illinois, a state in the eastern United States, released the findings of an investigation in which he concluded that from 1950 to 2019 over 450 members of the local Catholic clergy sexually abused about 2,000 boys and girls. The investigation began under the direction of the Democratic attorney general Lisa Madigan, who was succeeded in 2019 by Kwame Raoul, also a Democrat, who announced the results of the investigation during a press conference.
The investigation is based on the work of 25 prosecutors’ investigators, who examined over 100,000 pages of documents from state dioceses and listened to people involved in various capacities in the facts in question in over 600 hearings.
According to the conclusions of the investigators, between 1950 and 2019 451 members of various Catholic dioceses in Illinois abused 1,997 minors: in many cases the crimes they are accused of have lapsed, i.e. they are extinct and no longer prosecutable because it is it’s been too long since they were done. In this case, those who perpetrated the abuses “will never see justice in the legal sense,” said Raoul, who has added that the goal of the investigation was to provide “public accountability” for the abuses and “a form of reparation” for survivors.
In addition to documenting individual abuses, the report just published describes how the dioceses have very often neglected accusations and complaints, avoiding punishing those responsible and taking measures to prevent episodes of this type from happening again.
In some cases the report documented episodes whose existence was not known, in others it ascertained the existence of abuses which at the time were reported without the accusations having any follow-up. Finally, the report includes some cases that became known because they had legal consequences: one of these concerns Daniel McCormack, a priest arrested in 2006 on charges of abusing five boys in Chicago, and against whom over 100 complaints had been filed in previous decades sexual abuse.
The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a large US organization, called the survey results “stunning” but added that the numbers within it are likely underreported.