Archdiocese Reveals There Are 120,000 Pages of Clergy Sex Abuse Related Documents under Court Review

By Peter Isely
SNAP Wisconsin
December 6, 2012

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In a startling admission today in Federal Bankruptcy Court, Frank LoCoco, a lawyer representing the Archdiocese of Milwaukee conceded that at least 120,000 pages of abuse and financial related church documents have been turned over to the Creditors Committee and the Court. That’s 60,000 more than previously reported. Most of these documents are still under court seal because the Archdiocese, while claiming transparency, refuses to release these documents to Catholics or the public and are fighting motions by victim/survivors and Creditors to immediately release them.

Why are these documents so important for the protection of children? Because they detail decades of child sex crimes by scores of clergy and others working in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Many of these documents, including the 570 direct victim reports filed into the court, concern an institutional pattern and practice of fraudulently concealing and transferring known child sex offenders. According to attorneys representing 350 of these victims, there are at least 100 never before identified child sex offenders whose identities are contained in sealed court documents, 70 of whom are priests. Many are likely to be religious order clerics, such as Franciscans and Jesuits, others are clergy who might today be working in parishes and schools.

When you build a management structure of an organization to enable and then hide criminal acts, there are bound to be financial consequences, including fraud, which is what has brought the archdiocese to Federal Court in the first place.

Deploying the hundreds of parishes and schools of the Archdiocese as a kind of underground railroad for child molesters is an expensive enterprise. Victim/survivors and their families, Catholics, and the public have a right to see every single one of these 120,000 pages of documents, since their children’s safety and their family’s weekly financial contributions were used to deceptively criminalize a part of the Catholic Church as an organization.