Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
My constructive feedback for the archbishop of Chicago
On May 18th, I received a seemingly unsolicited email from the Archdiocese of Chicago's Chief Development Officer (gotta be a real shitty job right now), linking to a joint statement from all six dioceses in Illinois informing me that, hey Tony, nothing urgent, just wanted to send out a quick note to remind you how good we are at handling clerical sexual abuse:
"It is important to note that, for many years, the Illinois dioceses have: acted promptly upon receipt of an allegation of sexual abuse of minors, reported all such allegations to civil authorities, established victim assistance ministries, established special offices to handle allegations of sexual abuse of minors, created independent, lay-majority review boards that advise the bishop and review the bishop’s decisions related to allegations of sexual abuse of minors, and conducted robust safe-environment abuse-prevention programs. By issuing this joint public statement, the Illinois dioceses hope to enhance the public’s understanding of how they handle allegations of sexual abuse of minors. As always, the safety and protection of children, and the fair and compassionate treatment of those who report abuse, will remain paramount factors in our actions. The bishops of the Illinois dioceses stand ready to collaborate with all agencies and organizations in Illinois that care for and educate children in establishing effective policies and practices for child safety, confident we can learn from each other."
That's great to see in my inbox. Just some reassurance, hey just dropping a note for no reason, letting you know that we're really good at taking care of all of this, always did everything right and still are. I finished reading the statement and said "okay so the AG is gonna release that report next week, then."
On May 23rd, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul released his final 696-page report after five years of investigating child sex abuse allegations across the six dioceses of Illinois (Chicago, Rockford, Joliet, and the other three that are way out nowhere. Peoria? Peoria sounds right). Raoul’s predecessor in office began the investigation as a result of the infamous Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report and the McCarrick scandal, both of which broke in the summer of 2018 and prompted state AGs across the country to force their way into the church’s books and figure out if bishops were still sitting on allegations and known abuses without making them public. As Raoul put it, a big public investigation may have been the only path left to do right by survivors:
"Because decades often pass between the time when child sex abuse is committed and the time when it is reported, the window in which to bring a criminal prosecution or civil lawsuit has frequently closed by the time a survivor comes forward. In legal terms, when the statute of limitations has run, a survivor is left with little to no legal recourse. As a result, the public reckoning from investigations like this one may be the only form of justice afforded survivors."
Similarly, one of the survivors - psychologist and Catholic deacon Terry Neary, who gave a narrative account of abuse in this report - spoke to the importance of making these stories and names public, and why posting a public list of abusers is critical for moving the church forward. It's worth reprinting his words in full:
Public Proclamation: “No one sees a simple private letter, or a rarely read lawsuit. A public list is different—everyone sees it.”
Validation: “Public listing is an announcement by the church to survivors that ‘we believe you.’”
Invitation for Healing: “After a name goes up, other victims of that abuser are more likely to come forward for the healing the church says it wants to provide.”
Transfer of Guilt and Shame: “Someone carries the guilt and shame. When the name goes up, the survivor can finally put down the guilt and shame, transferring it to the abuser.”
Accountability: “The church is taking action for its past failures in protecting children.”
Transparency: “The church is no longer hiding and covering up.”
Prioritizing: “The needs of survivors finally outweigh those of guilty priests."
If we’re to move forward from this, the people in power in the church have to come clean about everything that went wrong, and do so publicly. Incredibly, the people in power in the church apparently still haven’t figured this out; the bishops, seemingly without exception, are still refusing to work towards any of the things Neary has laid out here. Reports like this keep coming out in every part of the country; California is currently paying out settlements from their investigation, Maryland just had their big report come out a month ago, and now it’s my beloved Prairie State’s turn in the barrel. I’ll let Chicago’s NPR affiliate WBEZ (91.5 on your FM dial) give us the big takeaway from the report:
“In August 2018, shortly after then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan announced an investigation into whether the Catholic church in Illinois had fully disclosed the scope of child sex abuse by priests and other clergy members, Cardinal Blase Cupich said the church had nothing to hide. “Our record’s clean,” the top Catholic cleric in Chicago told a closed-door gathering of about 200 men studying at the Mundelein Seminary to be priests, according to sources who were there. “I’m confident that, when the attorney general looks in our files … that she will, in fact, find that we’re doing our job. We posted all of the names,” Cupich told the group, referring to the publicly available church list of clergy members in the Archdiocese of Chicago deemed to have been credibly accused of sexual abuse."
Okay guys, before I copy it in, what do you think the next sentence of this story is going to be. What do you think is the sentence that immediately follows “Cupich said he got it, everything is covered, all of the names are posted.”
“Cupich’s assertions were far off the mark, according to the results of the investigation announced Tuesday by Madigan’s successor, Kwame Raoul, who said the archdiocese, covering Cook and Lake counties, and the rest of the Catholic church in Illinois failed to acknowledge hundreds of allegedly abusive priests and other religious figures."
Here are the specific numbers to which WBEZ is referring: Raoul started the investigation in 2018, and at that time, the Arch of Chicago had listed 68 priests in its history with a substantiated allegation of abuse, in records which have been posted publicly since 2006. It was at this point in August 2018 - again, 68 people on the list - that Cupich said “we’ve posted all of the names”. By December 2018 - which is, famously, not a very long time after August 2018 - there were more names to post. And then more names would come after that.
Cupich had to post 10 additional names on the public list for the Arch of Chicago before the investigation really got rolling at all, and then the investigation really got rolling. Through the AG’s office work interviewing survivors, combing through old diocesan files, and pushing for changes in diocesan records policies, the Arch of Chicago found themselves posting a total 72 additional names in their public disclosures, part of about 350 names added to the disclosure lists across all six Illinois dioceses by the end of the investigation. When Cupich reassured everyone in August 2018 that he had everything taken care of in Chicago, he was only off by a factor of 106%. The only names he was missing were a full list the same length as the list he already had, plus an additional four names. Here’s Raoul’s chart for all six dioceses in the state, tracking the number of priests with credible abuse allegations and when we found out about them:
It’s remarkable that Cupich made his August 2018 declaration with so much confidence. Even if you assume he’s being honest and sharing everything he knows - and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a bishop would be honest about this topic, ever again - how can you not be worried that more names are going to come out? Assuming that Cupich was telling what he thought was the truth, he honestly got up in front of a bunch of seminarians and said “I’m pretty sure we’re going to be the first diocese, ever, where it turns out everything was fine and handled well”? More names have come out, everywhere, every time, every report, every period. If the state AG starts an investigation of historical sexual abuse in Catholic dioceses and your name is at the top of the diocesan letterhead, the primary emotion you should be feeling for the next five years is dread. By late 2018, it should have been obvious that there was a public reckoning coming that would demand some level of public contrition, and Illinois’ reckoning has just arrived with Raoul's report, which is, as every single Catholic except apparently Blase Cupich expected, devastating and damning. While it would be kind of nice to see Cupich dress in burlap and sit on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral, having people throw garbage at him for the rest of his life, he could have at least started his recent response to the report with “I’m sorry” or “the church has screwed up for years” or "it is possible that I could have done one or two things differently" or maybe anything other than “I kind of feel like the AG is picking on me and that's very unfair given how I'm basically the best at protecting children”.
Father Wayne Barron’s alleged abuse happened in 1972. He was permanently removed from ministry in 1990. The Arch of Chicago did not see fit to add Barron to the public list of accused priests until October 2022, although they realized thirty years earlier that he should not be allowed to minister publicly.
Father Patricio William Batuyong was first reported to the Arch of Chicago in 1993, for an alleged abuse incident two years earlier. Batuyong was removed from ministry in 1993 and permanently laicized in 1996. For here, it only took twenty-two years to add him to the public list of priests who had a credible allegation of abuse. He was added to the list in November 2018, three months after Cardinal Cupich had assured his seminarians that he had already released the full list of names of abusive priests.
Father Joseph R. Bennett was first reported to the Arch of Chicago in 2002 and has at least six substantiated allegations of child abuse tied to his name. He was placed on monitoring in 2003, and apparently the monitoring wasn’t working out for him, because he was removed from public ministry in 2006. It took another two years before he was added to the list of priests with substantiated allegations of abuse.
Obviously, you see what these three names all have in common: I’m only through the “B”s. In the first of six dioceses.
Cupich put out a statement immediately after Raoul released the statewide report; this was in addition to the reassurance that Cupich had his Chief Development Officer - who is not the guy that oversees safety policies, but rather the guy in charge of raising money, the same guy that sent me a letter hitting me up for money two weeks after the AG’s report came out - send out immediately prior to the report’s release. Cupich decided to include, in his opening paragraph, that “we have not studied the report in detail but have concerns about data that might be misunderstood or are presented in ways that could be misleading. It is therefore important that we state what we know to be true.” What Cupich knew to be true was that yes, 451 abusive priests sounds like an extremely high number of abusive priests, but that’s for all six dioceses in the state, not just Chicago. And, of course, that included cases that the bishops had already reported publicly, and “ALL were reported to civil authorities, none were undisclosed, none were ‘hiding in plain sight since at least 2002’." On top of all of that, Cupich pointed out that:
“AG said: church is more worthy of investigation because it is a trusted religious organization. We think all children deserve to be protected regardless of whether they are cared for by a religious or secular institution; it isn’t fair or wise to focus only on the Catholic Church, which has made the greatest strides in this area.”
In the words of legendary Catholic moral theologian Michael Clayton1: “See, now THAT’S JUST NOT THE WAY TO GO HERE, Karen.” Saying that “it’s not 451 in Chicago, it’s 451 in six diocese and only like 150 in ours” is not the reassurance that Cupich thinks it is. “Doesn't 150 child abusers working as priests in our diocese seem like a perfectly reasonable number of child abusers” doesn’t pair very well with “I’m not sure why the AG would want to investigate us for child abuse.” The AG - not just in Illinois, but in Pennsylvania, in Maryland, in California, in more states - wants to investigate the Catholic church because the Catholic church has been a demonstrable threat to public safety for decades and has deliberately tried to downplay the extent of that threat.
And Cupich’s other point doesn’t work here, either, because he’s essentially asking “can we really hold the Catholic church to a higher standard than everyone else when it comes to policing sexual abuse?” a question to which I feel any reasonable person would say “yes” pretty quickly. Of course the Catholic church should be held to a high moral standard on this, a higher standard than every other institution. The Catholic church tells us who’s allowed to get married, who’s allowed to raise kids, who’s allowed to identify as what gender, who’s allowed to fire gay people, who we should vote for, why our civil laws should reflect Catholic teaching. And they tell us, over and over, that we should trust them with our children. Earlier this year, the superintendent of the Arch’s schools wrote a whole Chicago Tribune op-ed explaining that parents should put their kids in Catholic schools because public school grading was too woke or some shit2. Cupich is currently working to convince the statehouse to expand a school voucher program so his schools can get more funding, and that funding would be redirected from the state’s public school systems. Not only has Cupich - and every bishop - advocated for the church as an important moral authority and protector of children, he’s specifically spelling out that the Catholic church is currently the best at both of these things, better than any institutions of the state. So the institutions of the state are allowed to check his work. If Raoul has screwed up anything in his report - it doesn't seem like Raoul has, Cupich has not denied any of the allegations of abuse in the report and I’d be very surprised if Cupich's attorneys let him do so - voters can always replace Raoul in the next state election. That’s not a perfect system, obviously, but it turns out it’s a much better system than the one the Arch has, where we don’t pick our leaders at all, can’t get rid of them, and they can keep sitting on abuse allegations with no repercussions.
Cupich concluded his statement with “I invite other institutions that care for children and civil authorities to join us in this work and consider adopting the procedures we have developed over the past three decades, so that all children are kept safe,” a sentence of astounding arrogance. The Arch was obviously in a tough spot from a communications standpoint, and whatever strategy they picked was going to be imperfect. But "swagged out" strikes me as the worst possible option.
Now, in his response, Cupich also presented a chart of his own, shown below, where the blue line maps the actual abuse incidents and the orange bars map the reports of abuse:
As happened in most dioceses, actual incidents of abuse slowed down as time went on, and after 2002 - the Spotlight report, the Dallas charter - the number of actual incidents got pretty close to zero. The Dallas charter actually did a lot of the things it was supposed to do - not everything, but a lot of things. People got better at looking out for signs of abuse, at knowing where to go to report concerns, and at making sure abusers didn't just get reassigned to different parishes. So it was good to see this chart from Cupich, and it does make me feel things are moving in the right direction, and basically the only things that could color my reception of the chart would be if Cupich had included caveats explaining that the chart was only accurate because the AG forced him to include stuff he didn't want to include, and then also a caveat explaining that the chart still wasn't accurate.
Well, you're not gonna believe this. It turns out that Cupich needs to tell us, regarding his fancy two-series chart, that "The [archdiocesan] Review Board did not review allegations against (a) deceased priests after March 2003 or (b) resigned or laicized priests after November 2010. Pursuant to policies effective April 2023, the Review Board now reviews allegations against deceased or departed clerics where the cleric is not already identified on the archdiocese’s weblist." In other words, we are being completely transparent about every case, even when a priest is dead or laicized, and we have been completely transparent about every case for almost six full weeks, despite having these reports for literal decades and basically having to change our policy because the state's AG made us. But that chart is now completely accurate and reflects every single case, except for 104 of them.
See, the other caveat on Cupich's chart is that "Allegations against Daniel McCormack are not included," and it turns out that's kind of a big one because McCormack was maybe the single worst clerical abuser in the history of any Illinois diocese, who has over 100 substantiated allegations to his name and has cost the Arch millions in out-of-court settlements. Obviously, if this abuse is from a different era with different standards of reporting, there might be half a case for omitting him as an outlier, and all of the reports against McCormack came in all the way back in the halcyon days of oh no.
Daniel McCormack, after decades of abuse allegations that were never followed up on, was arrested for suspected sexual abuse of minors in 2005, eventually released without charges, submitted to the Arch's lay review board who said "absolutely do not return this guy to ministry ever again", and then-Cardinal Francis George said "I'm gonna return him to ministry", which he did, and McCormack kept abusing people until he was eventually arrested again and imprisoned (this was a big citywide scandal at the time). This was after Chicago put their safety policies in place in 1992. This was after Spotlight. This was after the Dallas charter. This was after everyone should have known better. These cases count. Cardinal George expressed deep regret that he screwed this one up so badly in a way that directly led to more children being sexually abused, and then he got to continue running the Arch of Chicago for nine more years until his retirement. Cupich left these cases off of his chart because it would fuck with the y-axis too much. So you can trust that Cupich is being completely transparent and sharing all of the facts with you, they just happen to be the facts that someone else forced him to share and even then not the really really bad facts.
One thing I have learned in the past few years is that when I get angry, it's helpful to be very clear and specific as to what it is I'm angry about. And I want to be very specific here, because I don't think that Cupich - or any bishop - fully understands what everyone is angry about. I think Cupich understands why abuse survivors are angry, to be sure. I haven't really focused on the actual narrative accounts of abuse in the report, but you can read those if you like and they will turn your stomach. But I think it's also worth taking a minute to explain why someone like me, who isn't a survivor but just some guy that still wants to be Catholic even though the people in charge make it so fucking hard, are mad too.
I am, of course, angered by the abuse detailed in the report and the narratives provided by survivors, the descriptions of children being preyed upon, parents going to the church for help, and laity being told the effective message of "have you considered that you're whining a whole bunch?" I am angry that hearing stories like this has been a routine part of Catholicism for the majority of my life. I am angry that the people who could have done something about this made their top priority protecting the church's reputation. I think the church leadership is kind of tracking with me up to this point, gets that people are mad about all of this, and now they're saying "right, so the abuse cases really dropped off after 2002, so now we're cool, right? Nobody’s hiding in plain sight anymore".
See, the abusers may not be hiding in plain sight anymore, but the people responsible for the coverup absolutely are. They do everything they can to keep cases from going public, and they get promoted and are still powerful Cardinals today. They admit to the press that they did nothing to stop abuse that they knew about, and they get to style themselves as moral arbiters with their shitty Twitter accounts. They are recorded under oath admitting that they knowingly covered up terrible things and also get caught embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay off their own lovers, and are remembered as "complex men who were good at piano". They don't say "I need to resign", and they don't even say "we can and should be better than this". It’s not even a case of empty rhetoric meant to comfort while eliding the material issues. It’s a case of no rhetoric at all, of just desperation that everyone forgets about it and that they, the same people who let these things happen, can just carry on doing their jobs and handing down moral condemnation, now that the report’s out and we’re cool.
And that's the part they don't get. We're still not cool with things as they are now, and it's not reasonable to think that we would be cool, because the people in charge never faced repercussions for their screwups, and seem desperate to minimize the scope of those screwups. Bishops didn't lose their jobs over this; they all said "okay, fine, Dallas Charter, now can we please go back to normal. Yes, ok, there are way more reports we should have released and in fact we hadn't even published half of the names that we should have, but those guys are dead so let's just go back to normal please, we're just going back to work." We can't go back to normal while they go back to work. The bishops did not face consequences, and the bishops are not sorry for anything. Nobody in power is willing to admit that there still need to be more changes before the laity are ready to trust the clergy again. And if there aren't more changes, is there anything really keeping all of this from happening again? Will the people who can change things actually take action? Will the people who know something actually share what they know? Will every diocese actually open up its records so we can understand what has happened and what has changed and what we need to do next? The answer, from every bishop and every diocese in every decade, an answer so uniform that you have to wonder how such a fractious bishops' conference can be so in lockstep on this one issue over the years, is "only if you force us to, and even then we're going to bitch about it."
Cupich does not have an answer for these questions. Cupich does not seem to realize that these questions are out there at all. While he was hailed as a pastoral, groundbreaking, Francis-esque leader when he was appointed to Chicago, he is identical - identical - to every other bishop when it comes to responding to abuse scandals. And that’s not to say that he’s cheering on child abuse, but it is to say that he feels no need to be transparent or proactive when it comes to communicating what is going on with his church that has been a threat to public safety for decades, no need to communicate the full extent of the problem. That’s evident in the list of accused priests that more than doubled in size for Chicago (and grew rapidly in the other five Illinois dioceses as well) because Cupich didn’t think it was any of our business who was accused of what and who got to spend time alone with whose children. The apparent best pick for archbishop that Pope Francis could possibly find came in to the job with no new ideas on how to minister through the ongoing abuse crisis, and now he gets to close out his tenure by being a disappointment just like every other bishop.
In 2018, I stopped going to church (although I eventually started going back). I stopped giving money to the church (still haven’t started that back up). And I really just didn’t think that I was ever going to be Catholic again. Like, I could maybe get to the point where I dragged myself to church every week to be with my family, but I couldn’t care about being Catholic ever again. I was just too mad, and I didn't think you could be as mad as I was and still be Catholic.
I was wrong, of course; you can be mad at the church and still be Catholic, and better people than I have pulled it off. I even wrote about those people in a rinkydink piece that four people read back in 2018, and then, partly to entertain myself in a very dark time, I started poking around at other stupid things I was seeing on the internet related to Catholicism and power and the stupid things people say to justify themselves. And then I kept doing that, and, well, that brings us to this exact moment. I was by no means an expert at researching or analyzing these kinds of things, but I had a long memory, a sense of humor, and a vague understanding of how to look at power, and that was enough to get started.
My point is that there’s a difference between how I felt in 2018 and how I feel now. In both cases, very bad information has come out and I've been just blindingly angry as a result. But five years ago I thought I had lost my faith, I felt grief over that. I don't feel that way this time. I've spent five years understanding what I'm actually mad about and how we got here and what needs to be different, and that understanding - as well as the people that I connected with as a result of sharing that understanding, who in turn helped me refine and better articulate that understanding - has served as a very important fortification for my faith. A shitty bishop being a shitty bishop cannot take my faith away, because now I have a better handle on how he's shitty, why he's shitty, how many of his predecessors have been shitty, what pressure could make him less shitty, and what a non-shitty person could do in that situation. I don't feel lost, I don't feel confused, I don't feel like something has been taken from me. I'm still angry at my church, but I see much more clearly than I used to.
Can you be angry and still be faithful? Saint Anselm gives us the most famous definition of “theology” as “faith seeking understanding”. If your faith has been completely soaked in anger, but you use that anger to seek understanding, that can still be theology, and that can still be faith.
My current parish, the one where my daughters were baptized, is named in the report, which is not actually all that interesting. My childhood parish from my hometown is in there too, as is the other Catholic parish in my hometown, as is my Jesuit high school, as is the parish where I got married. Most of the abuses described happened long before I was born, and also that's just how this shit works now.
I went to Mass the Sunday after the report came out, and it turned out we had a guest priest saying Mass, so he didn't bring up the report in any context (and I wouldn't really expect him to). But at the end of Mass something happened that I didn't expect: our pastor showed up and read his letter which he had also sent to everyone in the parish, addressing and naming not only the accused priest who had once served in our parish, but other accused priests in the neighborhood who could have served in our parish at some time3. None of these are guys our pastor ever knew, as he's younger than I am and the vast majority of incidents happened before he was a priest, or even an adult. But he felt that it was his responsibility to stand up in front of all of us, tell us that we were right to be angry, that he was angry too, and that more things still needed to change. At one point, he said something very striking:
"In a situation like this, prayer is not enough. Prayer moves hearts, but steps must, and are being, taken to ensure all are safe in the Church. Abuse of any kind by the hands of someone in power is a sin and there is no room for it in the eyes of God or in the Church."
So he decided not to go with "you know we're actually kind of ahead of the curve on preventing abuse", not to go with "maybe the AG is kind of a prick who hates Catholics", not to go with "I really think you all should calm down here". He went with "this is wrong. It should never have happened. It does not belong here. We clearly have not done enough. We will change things." He went with something closer to contrition. A pastor who says 'prayer is not enough' is a pastor who has started to think seriously about power, who realizes that faith may require being angry enough to want to change things. So, as always, when it comes to Catholicism, I'm hanging on by a thread. But, as always, I'm still hanging on.
I think they mention in passing in the movie that he was born at a Catholic hospital.
“Some schools don’t even give out grades under fifty percent anymore! We promise you that if you send your kid to a Catholic school, we will give them zeros on their shitty papers. Uh, we still have that other problem, though.”
I'm not naming the pastor, or the accused priests, or the parish, mainly because I don't need you all knowing where I go to church.