ILLINOIS
The Worthy Adversary
June 14, 2017
Joelle Casteix
<– Back to Part Two: Is There a Crook in the Diocese of Crookston?
In 2014, Fr. Bruce Wellems was banned from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Church officials there found out that he had sexually abused a seven-year-old boy when Wellems was fifteen. Los Angeles booted him back to Chicago where he had ministered for years.
But they only went halfway: they sent Wellems home, but they didn’t tell parishioners that it was for sexual abuse. When I was at the parish in 2014, parishioners told me that the allegations came from a dating relationship.
What did Cardinal Blase Cupich (pictured above) do when Wellems returned to Chicago? He immediately put the priest back into ministry. Why? Because Chicago officials had known about the abuse all along. They didn’t think it was a big deal. Even when Wellems lied about it in the 1990s.
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