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Fired Kenosha Priest under Police Investigation

By Peter Isely
SNAP Wisconsin
November 21, 2013

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Fr. Ireneusz Chodakowski, pastor of St. Peter Catholic Church in Kenosha, has been permanently removed from his parish by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and is under police investigation. According to the Kenosha News, an employee of the parish allegedly confronted Chodakowski about pornography being posted through his Facebook page, to or seen by minors.

While the police will not comment on what, exactly, they are investigating, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is saying that Chodakowski simply exercised “lack of good judgment” in his social media usage. How lacking? Enough for Archbishop Listecki to take the most severe, immediate action he could take against him.

Despite being under investigation and fired from his parish, Chodakowski was back posting on his Facebook page again today.

Chodakowski, a native of Poland, is a member of the Massachusetts based religious order, Marians of the Immaculate Conception (“MIC”). He was recruited and officially assigned to run St. Peter’s parish and grade school by Listecki in 2010.

Chodakowski, according to a profile posted on the order’s website, has worked as a priest in Poland and England. More recently, he was pastor of St. Louis Catholic Church in Portland, Maine from 1998-2009 where, according to the parish website, he was assigned to Thomson, Connecticut. The MIC’s operate Marianapolis Prep School in Thomson.

As is typical with the Milwaukee Archdiocese, while they have removed Chodakowski from his post and are freely pontificating on this case, they also claim to allegedly have no information or authority over Chodakowski because he is a religious order priest. Over half the priests working or living in the Milwaukee Archdiocese under Listecki belong to religious orders. Ironically, the website for St. Peter’s Parish in Kenosha states: “We are associated with other Catholic parishes under the direction of the Archbishop of Milwaukee.” Perhaps the Archbishop should inform the parish that this is, in fact, not the case.

So, while Archbishop Listecki is claiming that although he recruits, hires, assigns and pays scores of priests to run his parishes and schools, he has no knowledge or control over them when they commit alleged criminal acts. This alarming claim, of course, does not prevent Listecki from constantly repeating, no matter the continual evidence to the contrary, that he has the situation of child safety well in hand and any criticism of his policy and practices are a “secular attack” on the Catholic Church.

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Earlier this year, Listecki removed another religious order priest, Fr. Robert Marsicek, from ministry, in that instance for “boundary violations”. Listecki put Marsicek in charge of two Milwaukee area catholic churches and grade schools. A subsequent investigation by police uncovered that Marsicek’s “boundary violations” were, in fact, a decade long history of reports of sexual assault or abuse of grade school age children. None of these reports to church authorities got to the police. By the time they did, prosecutors were unable to charge Marsicek because the evidence and witnesses had been obstructed by church officials. In response to public revelations of Marcicek’s abusive past and recent “boundary violations” Listecki proudly announced: “Our system is working.”

Unfortunately, because the employee from the Kenosha parish first reported concerns to several church authorities and not the police, days if not more have passed, and it’s difficult to know what evidence the police have or can still obtain, or Chodakowski’s current whereabouts.

SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 23 years and have more than 10,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Visit us at SNAPwisconsin.com andSNAPnetwork.org

 

 

 

 

 




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