CHAMPAIGN (IL)
News Gazette
March 21, 2019
By Ben Zigterman
At least 16 priests with area connections are among the nearly 400 Catholic clergy members and church staff in Illinois named in a report — released Wednesday by a Minnesota-based law firm — that accuses them of sexual misconduct.
All had been previously mentioned on lists released by the Joliet, Peoria and Springfield dioceses, but Wednesday’s report by attorney Jeff Anderson is the largest list of accused clergy in Illinois and includes where each priest served.
It comes after a report in December by former Attorney General Lisa Madigan, which found that Illinois dioceses had only publicly identified 185 accused clergy out of the 690 it had been made aware were alleged to have committed sexual abuse.
The new report accuses the Illinois dioceses of “orchestrating an institutional cover-up of enormous magnitude” by transferring and retaining alleged perpetrators.
The Springfield, Peoria and Joliet dioceses all issued statements Wednesday about the report, explaining why some names on the list aren’t on their own publicly available lists, either because they never received allegations or found them to be unsubstantiated or not credible.
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