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…