CHICAGO (IL)
The Depaulia
By Tom Fowkes
Published: Wednesday, January 22, 2014
After weeks of anticipation that followed a public announcement by Cardinal Francis George in Dec. 2013, over 6,000 pages of internal Chicago Archdiocese documents concerning cases of sexual abuse by priests were released publicly on Tuesday. The extensive records, which the Associated Press called “the broadest look yet into how one of (the) largest and most prominent American dioceses responded to the scandal,” offer an unvarnished and disquieting glimpse of years of abuse and systematic concealment.
The documents feature correspondence between church officials, lurid details of individual acts and personal information on the accused in 30 of the at least 65 cases where the Archdiocese states it has credible claims of child abuse. Their release came through a settlement between the organization’s attorneys and law firm Jeff Anderson & Associates, which represents numerous victims and has made the documents available on their website. The names of these victims and other details were censored from the records.
“This has been one of the most painful chapters in the history of the Catholic Church, which is a history of 2000 years, with very beautiful moments and very painful moments as any human history,” Fr. Guillermo Campuzano of University Ministry said.
The release of the documents is one of the most proximal and therefore powerful episodes in the global crisis of clergy sexual abuse for Chicago and DePaul Catholics. Campuzano further said that such incidents are a “terrible contradiction of who we are and who we are supposed to be…this is both a sickness and a crime. Both dimensions are very difficult to manage and to explain and to understand.”
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