In a report earlier this year by the Illinois attorney general, the Diocese of Joliet was criticized for continued secrecy over the extent of child sex abuse by priests and religious brothers who served in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
“The diocese has demonstrated slavish adherence to off-the-books, unwritten policies that derail justice for abuse survivors and much-needed institutional transparency,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul said in the May report, adding that the diocese’s “current approach to abuse allegations against a religious order priest who ministered in the diocese are particularly opaque and ill formed.”
That lack of transparency also extends to church finances, a Chicago Sun-Times examination has found.
As the diocese embarks on an initiative that could lead to mergers and closings of Catholic parishes and schools, Bishop Ronald Hicks and his aides won’t provide key financial details about their organization even as they acknowledge that finances are part of the reasons for the restructuring.
Among the subjects they won’t address: how much money has been spent under Hicks and his predecessors in settlements and others costs responding to child sex abuse accusations lodged against clergy members and other religious figures.
Hicks spokeswoman Michelle Dellinger said the diocese — the arm of the Catholic church for DuPage, Kendall and Will counties, and others downstate — “cannot disclose sealed legal records.”
Yet under church reforms instituted after a wave of the scandal over child sex abuse by Catholic clergy members in 2002, the Joliet diocese has no such obligation. The reforms say the opposite, that dioceses “are not to enter into settlements which bind the parties to confidentiality unless the victim/survivor requests confidentiality and this request is noted in the text of the agreement.”
Lawyers who have represented people who have leveled clergy sexual abuse accusations against the Joliet diocese say the financial terms of their settlements are not sealed.
In some cases, the lawyers have disclosed payouts made to their clients:
- In 2019, the diocese agreed to pay more than $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a man who said he was sexually abused when he was 11 by a Catholic priest in Lombard.
- In 2018, the diocese agreed to pay $1.4 million in a child sex abuse case involving a former Elmhurst priest.
- In 2015, a $4 million payout by the diocese was announced by attorneys for more than a dozen accusers who said that priests, including a former Naperville pastor, molested them as kids.
Published accounts show the late Joliet Bishop Joseph Imesch, who was accused of covering up accusations and shifting around troubled clerics, divulged in 2003 that the diocese had spent $2.6 million over the preceding two decades to settle sex abuse cases, with insurance covering $936,000 of that.
There are 74 priests and religious brothers on the diocese’s publicly available list of clerics deemed to have been credibly accused of abuse.
In his report, Raoul said that’s an undercount, pointing to a Franciscan order priest who ministered in the diocese and admitted to molesting a child but isn’t on the Joliet list.
According to plaintiffs’ attorneys, there are multiple pending out-of-court sex abuse claims against the Joliet diocese made by adults who say that when they were children, they were molested by clerics.
Hicks’ office won’t discuss those claims.
The diocese’s public financial statements show millions of dollars dedicated to future insurance claims. Church officials won’t say whether any of that money is set aside for payouts and others costs resulting from sexual abuse accusations.
But they say the sex abuse crisis isn’t driving the restructuring that’s now centered on 16 parishes in Joliet and Crest Hill, where parishioners are expected to get a clearer picture in coming months on which ones might be closed.
“You have received information about the reasons for past and current restructuring efforts; sex abuse settlements are not among them,” Dellinger said.
Maureen Harton, a lawyer spearheading the restructuring effort for Hicks, said the process was being “driven by statistics, including too few pastors to cover too many parishes, especially as numbers are projected into the near future.
“Other factors include declining Mass attendance and budgetary issues, exacerbated by the pandemic as well as aging buildings that require extensive preservation measures,” Harton said.
During a recent briefing to parishioners from one of the 16 Joliet-area congregations about the restructuring, a church consultant explained how the number of priests has plummeted in the diocese, which includes roughly 520,000 Catholics, 120 parishes and 50 schools.
Active participation and new membership are significantly down, according to slides presented that also showed those Joliet-area church campuses recently underwent or are in need of repairs that collectively would cost about $8 million.
“None of these pieces of information is the piece . . . the smoking gun,” the consultant told the 70 or so people at the event. “You have to look at all of them together.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago, which covers Cook and Lake counties and is run by Cardinal Blase Cupich, has been overseeing a similar school and parish restructuring that’s led to dozens of mergers and closings in recent years.
Hicks’ office won’t say how much money he hopes to save by the restructuring.
The alleged misconduct by priests largely or entirely predates Hicks’ tenure. He arrived in 2020 after working as a top aide to Cupich.
Asked whether there are any outstanding loans that were used for church payouts and other expenses on those cases, as was the case in the Chicago archdiocese, Joliet church officials wouldn’t comment.
Tom Doyle, a former Catholic priest in the Dominican religious order who has long studied the sex abuse crisis, found through public records and other sources that more than $8 billion has been spent nationwide by the church on sex abuse dating to the mid-1980s and the first wave of the scandal. That includes payouts to victims, legal fees and other costs, some divulged in bankruptcy filings.
More than 30 religious groups and U.S. dioceses — geographic arms of the church, each headed by a bishop appointed by the pope — have sought bankruptcy protection since 2004 as claims over sex abuse and cover-ups mounted.
The Archdiocese of San Francisco went that route in August, with church officials saying the “filing is necessary to manage and resolve the more than 500 lawsuits alleging child sexual abuse brought” against the jurisdiction after a state law extended the statute of limitations temporarily for older claims.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore is considering a similar path.
Critics say such bankruptcies shortchange victims entitled to compensation and can unfairly shroud misconduct that otherwise may come out at civil trials that no longer can move forward.
Marie Reilly, a law professor at Penn State University who studies this subject, said, “One thing that happens when you file for bankruptcy is your books are open not just to your creditors, a lot of that becomes a matter of public record.”
Reilly, who is from Chicago, said many factors fuel church financial problems, “way beyond sex abuse.”
For instance, “COVID just kicked Catholic dioceses in the chops . . . that was a huge revenue issue,” she said. Also, “There’s a demographic shift away from organized religion that’s affecting all religions” and changing ethnic dynamics “especially in urban dioceses.”
None of the six Catholic dioceses in Illinois has chosen bankruptcy, but all had multiple clerics cited in the Illinois attorney general’s report, which found 451 priests and religious brothers sexually abused at least 1,997 children over the last seven decades.
Doyle said the sex abuse crisis permeates virtually everything going on in the Catholic church in the United States, directly or indirectly affecting finances, church attendance and even the number of men choosing to go to seminary.
“The Catholic church not only in Joliet” but the whole country “is bleeding profusely, and one of the main reasons it’s bleeding is because of the sexual abuse,” Doyle said.
Many Catholics aren’t going to Mass because “they no longer believe what the church is telling them, whether the parish priests or the bishops,” and the abuse crisis “has affected men who otherwise might want to become priests,” Doyle said.
As part of its overall restructuring, the Joliet diocese is also pruning Catholic schools, announcing a year ago that two elementary schools in Lockport would merge into one, and one school in Lombard was closing.
Hicks explained in a 2022 column why he launched the overall restructuring, saying in part: “It is because most of us want to see a Church that is focused on the mission of Jesus Christ and not on the preservation of our buildings. As missionary disciples, we should all desire a Church that is thriving, growing and following the Gospel. In other words, everything we do as a Church needs to be about the salvation of souls.”
“At the end of the day, I do not want us to be viewed as a diocese that buried its head in the sand or kicked the can down the road. Instead, with deep faith in God, we need to prune some of the structural branches, so that our Church can continue to produce great fruit.”
Diocesan officials point out declining involvement in Catholic churches is part of a larger, national trend. But they didn’t completely address why that’s occurring, which studies have shown is partly due to disgust over the sex abuse crisis.
Asked how many schools and parishes ultimately will be affected when Hicks’ process is over, Harton said, “Unknown; the process is just beginning.”
Earlier this year, the diocese shuttered St. Charles Borromeo Church in Bensenville. The diocese said at the time that the parish “was placed in the urgent phase due to several factors, including but not limited to long-standing financial problems and increasing structural and maintenance needs that the parish lacks the means to address.”
But parishioners who opposed closing the church say they were given mixed messages, at one time being told by a diocesan official, “It’s not about the money.”
They say they felt that, while the diocese sought input from congregants in “listening sessions,” Hicks’ office seemed intent on shuttering the parish from the start — even though membership and funding were growing under the leadership of a dynamic new priest.
Elmhurst resident Paulette Rebeck, a longtime St. Charles Borromeo parishioner, said the process has felt dishonest and disrespectful.
“They’re closing the doors to God’s house,” she said. “They’ve slammed the door in our face.”
Rebeck said her parish seems to have been a “guinea pig” in the diocese’s restructuring.
She offered this advice to any members of other congregations who might feel their churches are being unfairly dismantled: “Fight. Make some noise.”
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Click here to read the Sun-Times’ May 24, 2023, report on Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s findings.
Related past Sun-Times coverage on Catholic clergy sexual abuse.
