CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Tribune
January 4, 2019
By Elyssa Cherney
In the weeks since Attorney General Lisa Madigan released a scathing report faulting the Illinois Diocese for failing to investigate hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, a daunting question has lingered on the minds of parishioners: Which priests were accused?
Unlike a sweeping grand jury report in Pennsylvania that identified more than 300 predator priests this summer, the preliminary report released Dec. 19 by Madigan did not name the clergy members implicated in her probe or note the diocese where they worked.
Now, as U.S. bishops gather in suburban Mundelein for a spiritual retreat in response to the sex abuse scandal, two attorneys say they will expose the offenders known to them through handling hundreds of Illinois cases over nearly two decades.
The lawyers, Jeff Anderson and Marc Pearlman, announced Thursday their intentions to publish a report in early February that includes the names and photos of every clergy member accused by the 300 survivors they have represented. Anderson called Madigan’s report comprehensive and helpful, but said he needed to do his part to release the information he possesses.
“What isn’t private and what needs to be known and made public is the identities of every one of those offenders, many of whom are still out in the community,” Anderson said at a news conference in a downtown Chicago hotel as he stood between a man and a woman he is representing as abuse victims in a lawsuit against the state’s six Catholic dioceses.
The majority of their cases on behalf of survivors were settled out of court over the years, Pearlman said. In about two dozen of those cases, the perpetrators have not been publicly named by the church, though confidentiality agreements do not prevent disclosing their identities. Some cases involve allegations that arose after clergy members had died, Pearlman said.
Madigan’s bombshell report found such cases were among several other categories of allegations that the dioceses did not investigate. In addition, dioceses often did not investigate cases when a victim wanted to remain anonymous, only one complainant came forward or the clergy member previously resigned, Madigan found. The dioceses also failed to investigate clergy who were visiting priests from a religious order, referring the allegations instead to the order, the report said.
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