Some 451 ministers have committed pedophile acts against nearly 2,000 minors in Illinois since the 1950s, far more than the church previously admitted, the North American state’s attorney general said Tuesday.
Its services launched an investigation into predatory priests in 2018 after a report was released about the Church of Pennsylvania that sent shockwaves across the United States, and they published their conclusions Tuesday in a nearly 700-page document.
“Prior to this investigation, the Catholic dioceses of Illinois had published a list of 130 proven pedophiles. In comparison, this report reveals the names and detailed information of 451 priests and brothers who abused at least 1,997 children,” prosecutor Kwame Raoul writes in the preamble.
These perpetrators, many of whom are dead, “may never be brought to justice, but by naming them, we want to bring transparency and healing to victims who have long suffered in silence,” he adds.
In a preliminary report, her predecessor, Lisa Madigan, said she had been notified of “charges against at least 500 priests” who were not on the list published by the state’s six dioceses. The work of his successor refined the Count.
His account contains many chilling accounts, including a woman aged ten who was repeatedly raped by a priest who was a math teacher in a Catholic school; or men who were abused in childhood and then struggled with suicidal thoughts and addictive behaviors for years.
He also stresses the responsibility of the hierarchy, which for a long time was content to transfer priests accused of pedocrime to other dioceses without denouncing them.
The American Catholic Church was rocked in 2002 by a series of articles in the Boston Globe about abuses by clergy in the eastern city. These revelations, popularized in the film Spotlight, have given a voice to victims across the country.
Since then, many priests have been expelled from the clergy and prosecuted. The Church has also paid large sums to compensate the victims.
In 2018, Pennsylvania prosecutors dealt another blow to the church by listing the sexual assaults committed by more than 300 priests on a thousand children over several decades.
Several federal states carried out comparable surveys. In April, Maryland released a list of 150 predatory priests guilty of “horrific and repeated” child crimes against at least 600 children from the 1940s through 2002.