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Illinois — The Attorney General's Report (2023)

The Illinois Attorney General's 2023 report on Catholic clergy child sex abuse in all six Illinois dioceses, naming 451 clerics and brothers who abused at least 1,997 children.

Issuing office
Office of the Illinois Attorney General (Kwame Raoul)
Report
Report on Catholic Clergy Child Sex Abuse in Illinois
Released
May 23, 2023
Scope
All six Illinois Catholic dioceses; substantiated abusers who were clerics or brothers at any point, 1950–2019
Headline figure
451 clerics and brothers; at least 1,997 children
Posture
Attorney-General-compiled substantiations from Catholic sources — not court findings

On May 23, 2023, Attorney General Kwame Raoul released the Report on Catholic Clergy Child Sex Abuse in Illinois, the conclusion of a multi-year investigation into child sex abuse by members of the Catholic clergy in the six dioceses across Illinois. The investigation had been opened in the latter half of 2018 by Raoul’s predecessor, former Attorney General Lisa Madigan, and Raoul committed to continue it before taking office in January 2019. The report runs to 696 pages. Attorneys and investigators in Raoul’s office reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents held by the dioceses and received more than 600 confidential contacts from survivors through emails, letters, interviews and phone calls.

What the report found

The report’s headline, in the Attorney General’s exact wording, is that it reveals the names and detailed information of 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers who abused at least 1,997 children across all of the dioceses in Illinois. Its scope is any substantiated child sex abuser who was a Catholic cleric or brother at any point from 1950 to 2019.

The disclosure contrast is central to the report. Before the investigation, the Catholic dioceses of Illinois publicly listed only 103 substantiated child sex abusers. When the investigation was announced, only two dioceses had published lists at all: Chicago, with 68 listings, and Joliet, with 35 — 103 listings in total. By the conclusion of the investigation, the dioceses themselves disclosed 334 listings, representing 320 men. The report itself carries 494 listings of 451 men, because some clerics and brothers ministered in more than one Illinois diocese and are listed in each. The difference between what the dioceses had disclosed on their own and what the report carries is the measure of the investigation’s work.

What “substantiated” means here

The report defines its accounting this way: substantiated means "the available evidence supports the conclusion that the cleric committed child sex abuse."

That definition needs its full posture, in three layers. First, the report is a compilation of substantiations made by Catholic sources — dioceses, religious orders and other Catholic entities — assembled by the Attorney General’s investigators, who pressed diocesan representatives and attorneys, file by file and one cleric at a time, that sufficient information existed to substantiate a claim. Second, the 160 listings the report adds beyond the dioceses’ own disclosures were men “substantiated by Catholic sources as child sex abusers, but whom have not been disclosed as such by the Illinois Dioceses” — Catholic-source substantiations the Attorney General compiled and pressed into the open. They are not findings by a court, and they are not findings made by the Attorney General’s own adjudication. Third, the report’s “reasonable to suspect” standard — an allegation is substantiated when it is reasonable to suspect that the accused engaged in child sex abuse — is the Attorney General’s prospective recommendation for a uniform standard the dioceses should adopt in future. It is not the test the 2023 report applied, and this archive does not present it as the report’s inclusion standard.

The per-cleric data carry the same provenance. The report states that figures such as reported survivors are as reported by the diocese or religious order and/or as revealed in criminal conviction records.

In this archive

The six dioceses’ own lists are in the Directory in the dioceses’ own postures, as each diocese published them. The men the Attorney General’s roster adds stand in the Directory as Tier 2 entries sourced to this report, with its posture on the face of each entry. Men who were already in the Directory and also appear in the report carry an annotation recording the report; their statuses are unchanged.

Read as a statewide accounting, the report is also wider context for The Pattern, which documents the institutional behaviours that recur across investigations of this kind.

One honest limit belongs on this page. One Chicago name is the subject of a documented source-against-source conflict — the Archdiocese’s own list files him under allegations not sustained, while the Attorney General’s roster includes him — and he is held out of the Directory while that conflict stands.

Sources

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