More than 450 pedophile priests recorded in the American state of Illinois since 1950

MISE À DAY

Some 451 clergy have committed child abuse crimes against nearly 2,000 minors in Illinois since the 1950s, far more than the Church previously admitted, the attorney general revealed Tuesday of this North American state.

His services had opened an investigation into predatory priests in 2018, after the publication of a report on the Church of Pennsylvania which had sent shock waves in the United States, and they published their conclusions on Tuesday in a document closely of 700 pages.

“Prior to this investigation, the Catholic dioceses of Illinois had made public a list of 130 proven pedophiles. By comparison, this report reveals the names and detailed information of 451 priests and brothers who abused at least 1,997 children,” prosecutor Kwame Raoul writes in the preamble.

These abusers, many of whom are dead, “may never be held accountable in court, but by naming them we want to bring transparency and some healing to the victims who have long suffered in silence,” he adds.

In a preliminary report, his predecessor Lisa Madigan had already indicated that she had been notified of “charges against at least 500 priests” who were not on the list published by the six dioceses. of State. The work of his successor has refined the count.

His report contains many chilling accounts, including of a woman who, when she was ten, was repeatedly raped by a priest employed as a math teacher in a Catholic school; or even men, assaulted in childhood, who then struggled for years with suicidal thoughts and addictive behavior.

He also insists on the responsibility of the hierarchy which, for a long time, contented itself with transferring priests accused of pedocriminality to other dioceses, without denouncing them.

The American Catholic Church has been shaken by a series of Boston Globe articles in 2002 about clergy abuses in the eastern city. These revelations, popularized in the film Spotlight, have freed the voices of victims throughout the country.

Since then, many priests have been expelled from the clergy and prosecuted. The Church has also paid large sums to compensate the victims.

In 2018, the Pennsylvania prosecutor's office dealt another blow to the Church by detailing the sexual assaults perpetrated by more than 300 priests out of a thousand children over several decades.

In the process, several states conducted comparable surveys. In April, Maryland had published a list of 150 predatory priests, guilty of “horrific and repeated” pedophile acts on at least 600 children from the 1940s to 2002.