by Doug Mainwaring at LifeSite News
A five-year investigation just published by the office of Illinois’ Attorney General reports that 451 Catholic clergy sexually abused nearly 2,000 children, a number vastly greater than previously reported by the state’s six dioceses before the investigation began.
Attorney General Kwame Raoul recounted in a news conference that his office discovered priests and religious brothers had abused 1,997 children in Illinois since 1950.
The 696-page Illinois report comes just one month after Maryland’s Attorney General released a nearly 500-page report detailing sexual abuse of children and teens by clergy of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and the groundbreaking 1,356-page Pennsylvania grand jury report published in 2018 that exposed decades of clerical sex abuse and Church cover-up.
“It is my hope that this report will shine light both on those who violated their positions of power and trust to abuse innocent children, and on the men in church leadership who covered up that abuse,” said Raoul, lamenting that in many cases the statute of limitations had passed or that the credibly accused priests had died. “These perpetrators may never be held accountable in a court of law, but by naming them here, the intention is to provide a public accountability and a measure of healing to survivors who have long suffered in silence.”
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests,…
Continue Reading