The victims had been fighting for eight years perpetrated sexual abuse were known by several priests of the Archdiocese of Chicago and finally achieved this Tuesday. Most humiliating acts that are explained in the over 6,000 pages occurred decades ago, and many of the priests involved were never prosecuted.
The lawsuit is unprecedented in the city and follows the trail of other dioceses that show how the Roman Catholic Church has hidden child abuse, protecting and preventing their clergy to report these incidents to the relevant authorities. The documentation has been published thanks to an agreement reached between lawyers, victims and the archdiocese.
The documentation refers to 30 religious, while victims have reported during this time at 65, and contain new details and intricacies that tell how the third largest archdiocese in the nation hid the actions of its priests by moving them from church to church for not reporting their behavior.
The officers of the Roman Catholic Church believed that abusers could be cured with clinical advice and some bishops acted as blind giving second chances and giving forgiveness, according to the documents. Testimonies about specific acts vexatious;; meetings to discuss cases, and letters of repentant priests, among others also internal communications between members of the Church are included in these. No name appears, the information is protected under the laws of the U.S. mental health, reports AP.
"Within how painful it can be to show the past, this action is part of the transparency with which the Archdiocese wants to be compromised. I apologize to all who have suffered these violations and this scandal, "said Cardinal Francis George, archbishop of Chicago, when he announced at a press conference last week that the documents would be published. "Hopefully these incidents are part of the past," he said.
"The incidents are prior to 1988 and after 1996," George said in an interview on Sunday. Despite their good intentions, emphasizes the Chicago Tribune, George has been punctuated by such incidents during his tenure. And there are abuses that occurred after his appointment as archbishop in 1997, which are included in the documentation.
"The problem is not when the abuse happened, the problem is when it was reported," said attorney Marc Pearlman, who represents more than 200 victims in the Chicago area, told The Washington Post.
In 2008, the archbishop, as part of a civil lawsuit, admitted concealing three cases: the Rev. Joseph Bennett, accused of sexually sisters abuse between 1967 and 1973 -, the Cardinal Norbert Maday, who was jailed in Wisconsin 1994 after molesting two children -, and David McCormack, who was convicted in 2007 of molesting five children and whose case led to an apology from George and an internal investigation of how the archdiocese responded this type of incidents.
While the McCormack case is not in the thousands of documents released Tuesday, while Bennett Maday and do appear showing in more than 500 pages, how the archbishop responded to accusations about them. According to the documents, more than a dozen complaints fell on him after leaving the archdiocese.
Tags: abuse, Archdiocese, Chicago, decades, hid