CHICAGO (IL)
Sun Herald
The Associated Press
January 21, 2014
For decades, the Archdiocese of Chicago struggled to prevent a sexual abuse scandal from going public. It tried to monitor and manage priests accused of abusing children, forced them to get psychological counseling and moved them from parish to parish.
Lawyers for some of the victims planned Tuesday to release some 6,000 pages of documents detailing the cases of 30 accused priests as part of a legal settlement with the church.
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Here is a timeline of key events in the decades-long scandal:
— April 25, 1982: Archbishop John Cody dies. He is succeeded by Joseph Bernadin.
— Nov. 15, 1985: The Rev. Robert Friese becomes the first priest from the archdiocese to be convicted of a sex crime in a criminal prosecution. He’s sentenced to four years of probation for molesting a teenage boy.
— Oct. 25, 1991: Cardinal Bernadin sets up the Cardinal’s Commission on Clerical Misconduct to investigate abuse allegations and review existing policies after a succession of public allegations and the indictment of a priest, the Rev. Robert Mayer.
— Dec. 11, 1992: Mayer is convicted of abusing a teenage girl in a church rectory in Berwyn. In February 1993 he becomes the first priest from the archdiocese to be sentenced to prison, receiving a three-year term.
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