Priests at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago, Illinois (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
This emerges from an investigation by the Attorney General’s Office into the abuses committed between 1950 and 2019
On Tuesday, the attorney general of Illinois, an eastern US state, released the results of an investigation in which he concluded that between 1950 and 2019 more than 450 members of the local Catholic clergy sexually abused about 2,000 boys and girls. The investigation began under the direction of Democrat Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who was succeeded in 2019 by fellow Democrat Kwame Raoul, who announced the investigation’s findings during a news conference.
The investigation is based on the work of 25 prosecutors who examined more than 100,000 pages of documents from national dioceses in more than 600 hearings and interviewed people who were involved in the matters in question in various capacities.
According to the conclusions of investigators, between 1950 and 2019, 451 members of various Catholic dioceses in Illinois abused 1,997 minors: in many cases, the crimes they are charged with have become obsolete, that is, they are extinct and no longer punishable because they were long ago they were complete. In this case, those who committed the abuses “will never experience justice in the legal sense,” Raoul said, adding that the aim of the investigation is to find “a public responsibility” for the abuses and “a form of redress.” to create » to the survivors.
The report just published not only documents individual abuses, but also describes how the dioceses have very often neglected allegations and complaints, avoided punishing those responsible and took measures to prevent incidents of this type from happening again.
In some cases, the report documented incidents whose existence was unknown, in others it established the existence of abuses that were reported at the time without the allegations being followed up. Finally, the report includes some cases that became known because they had legal ramifications: One involves Daniel McCormack, a priest who was arrested in Chicago in 2006 for molesting five boys and against whom more than 100 lawsuits have been filed over the past few decades were sexual abuse.
The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, a major US organization, called the survey results “amazing” but added that the numbers they contained were likely understated.
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