CHICAGO (IL)
SunTimes
February 15, 2019
By Robert Herguth
Asked in September about whether the Archdiocese of Chicago keeps track of religious order priests who have been accused of sexual abuse, Cardinal Blase Cupich’s spokeswoman Paula Waters said, “It is done on a regular basis.”
But even amid heightened scrutiny of predator priests from the semi-autonomous orders, the cardinal’s office learned only recently that three elderly Catholic clerics with long-ago allegations of sexual misconduct that were deemed credible have been living on the Society of the Divine Word order’s grounds near Northbrook for years, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
One of them, the Rev. Joe Fertal, had been the subject of a lawsuit church authorities in California settled after he was accused of molesting a teenage boy.
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