Two years after the Chicago-area arm of the Passionists religious order announced it would establish a sex offender registry of abusive members, the Catholic group hasn’t done so. Its leaders won’t say why or whether that’s still in the works.
In October 2022, as the Chicago Sun-Times was preparing a story about his order’s clergy members who had been accused of sexually abusing children, the Rev. Joe Moons said, "We are in the process of creating such a list and should have it published in the next few months."
That hasn’t happened. Neither Moons nor his successor as head of the Passionists’ Holy Cross Province, the Rev. David Colhour, will comment on why.
Timothy Nockels of Vernon Hills says he was molested as a boy by the Rev. John Baptist Ormechea when the Passionist priest served at Immaculate Conception Parish on the Northwest Side in the 1970s and 1980s.
“All they’re trying to do is brush this under the rug," Nockels says, "thinking eventually people will stop talking about it.”
Timothy Nockels, who says he was molested as a boy by the Rev. John Baptist Ormechea when the priest was assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish. The Norwood Park church and the former Passionists monastery are in the background.
Robert Herguth / Sun-Times
Many victims of clergy abuse have advocated for church transparency over the years, saying it helps their healing and encourages other victims in the decades-long child sex abuse crisis to come forward. That’s an argument also embraced by many church reformers who say the lists serve as a form of atonement — a central tenet of Christianity.
Cardinal Blase Cupich, the spiritual leader of the Catholic church in Cook and Lake counties, has long encouraged religious orders to make public information about members deemed to have been credibly abused of sex abuse, though he has continued to withhold names of some abusers who have worked in his geographic territory.
Colhour’s province is based in Park Ridge and includes religious communities on the North Side and in Hyde Park. It also has a presence elsewhere in the Midwest and in the South and the West.
There’s another U.S. Passionists province, based in New York, that maintains a public list that's available on request but not on its website. Thirteen clergy members deemed to have been credibly accused of abuse are on that list, all but one now dead.
A database maintained by the church watchdog group Bishop Accountability includes the names of 20 Passionists in the United States who have been accused of sex abuse.
A plaque inside Immaculate Conception Church on the Northwest Side honoring the Passionists for when they ran the congregation.
In the early 2000s, while Ormechea was stationed in Louisville, several men came forward, saying that, as boys at Immaculate Conception, they were molested there by him.
The accusations were deemed by church authorities to be credible, and Ormechea was pulled from public ministry.
But he remained part of the order and moved in 2003 to an ancient monastery in Rome. A man answering the phone there told a Sun-Times reporter who asked for Ormechea, "Talk to my provincial," then hung up.
The monastery in Rome where the Rev. John Baptist Ormechea has been living since sex abuse accusations were made against him roughly 20 years ago dating from his time at Immaculate Conception Parish on the Northwest Side.
Joan Nockels Wilson
In 2016, another accusation against Ormechea surfaced, this one dating to the 1960s when he served in Kentucky.
He’s also included on a list of credibly accused abusers put out by the Archdiocese of Louisville, but his name isn't included on Cupich’s list. Generally, the Archdiocese of Chicago doesn’t include abusive religious order clergy unless they’re on a list maintained by their order.
Also not on Chicago’s list but included on Louisville’s is Deacon James Griffith, a Passionist who pleaded guilty in 1988 to sexually abusing a young boy in Louisville. In 2002, he was moved by his order to a monastery next to Immaculate Conception, but church officials initially didn’t tell parishioners about his child sex crime conviction or a lawsuit accusing him of molesting another Louisville boy in the 1970s.
The Chicago-area Passionists’ website says it has “worked with the Conference of Major Superiors of Men” — a consortium of male Catholic religious orders — “to promote the protection of minors.” The conference has urged its members to create public lists.
The Rev. David Colhour, the new head of the Passionists’ Park Ridge-based Holy Cross Province.
Passionists
The Passionists, like many other Catholic orders, follow in the mold of a saint — for the Passionists, Paul of the Cross — and embrace a specific mission, which is reaching “out with compassion to the crucified of today,” keeping alive “the memory of Christ’s Passion through . . . service to those who suffer.”
Nockels says he’s still Christian but no longer associates with the Catholic church, which he believes will ultimately pay in a spiritual sense for its continued secrecy.
“My words to the wolves would be straight from my savior Jesus: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,’” he says. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
The Catholic church’s transparency on accusations of sexual abuse by clergy members, including the Rev. Mark Santo, remains inconsistent and lacking across the United States, clouding the extent of the crisis more than 20 years after it exploded into view.
The cardinal, a close adviser to Pope Francis, is now at the church’s mandatory retirement age. He submitted his resignation letter, the Archdiocese of Chicago said, but the pope could refuse to accept it.
The Servites has had numerous priests and brothers accused of sexual abuse and faces an onslaught of new lawsuits. Unlike many dioceses and orders, the group has no public list of members deemed to have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. And other church lists are incomplete.
Rev. Goedert, a survivor of the Andrea Doria shipwreck, said in a 2007 deposition that he knew 25 priests had broken the law over the years by abusing children but never alerted police.
Rev. Richard McGrath’s name belongs on lists of abusers kept by all Catholic dioceses where he worked, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said.
The payout is in a lawsuit regarding the Rev. Richard McGrath, an Augustinian priest who ran Providence Catholic High School — and took the Fifth when asked about child pornography.
Bishop Ronald Hicks might consolidate 16 Joliet-area congregations and eventually close other parishes and schools, with “budgetary issues” a factor. His aides won’t say how much has been spent on fallout from the sex abuse crisis.
Kenneth Lewis, 62, entered the plea Thursday to a felony count of aggravated sexual abuse in a deal with Cook County prosecutors that saw other charges against him dropped, including predatory criminal sexual assault.
“I think that they should be” posting lists of abusive members “because it’s been actually asked of us by the larger church,” the Rev. Gregory Polan told the Sun-Times.
The attorney general didn’t name John D. Murphy. The Archdiocese of Chicago settled claims over Murphy but doesn’t include him on its list. And his order hasn’t named abusers — but said Saturday it hopes to “in the near future.”
The cardinal’s questions on how the Illinois attorney general’s abuse claims were substantiated “are particularly perplexing because many of those 125 names” came from the Archdiocese of Chicago, Raoul said.
There’s no room for anything other than full acceptance of the hard, brutal truth revealed by a five-year investigation: The Catholic Church in Illinois failed to acknowledge hundreds of allegedly abusive priests and other religious figures.
At the start of a five-year investigation by the attorney general, Cardinal Blase Cupich told seminarians the Archdiocese of Chicago had “posted all of the names” of predatory clergy. As the investigation neared its end, Cupich kept adding names.
The Rev. Paul Guzman returns to his position as associate pastor at Most Holy Redeemer Parish effective immediately, according to a letter from Cardinal Blase Cupich.
In a letter Saturday, Cardinal Blase Cupich said an accusation has been reported to the archdiocese that the Rev. Paul Guzman abused a minor when he was a layman — 25 years before entering Mundelein Seminary.
The Catholic order’s Marmion Abbey has posted a list of “established offenders.” Unanswered: why Brother Jerome Skaja stayed with the order for years despite “multiple” credible accusations of molesting minors.
The Rev. Michael Pfleger, longtime pastor of St. Sabina Church, was removed pending investigation of a sexual abuse allegation from more than 30 years ago.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago has paid $800,000 this year to settle decades-old claims against the longtime Bronzeville pastor and four other priests.
The Archdiocese of Chicago for the first time has posted the names of credibly accused sex-offender priests from multiple Catholic religious orders — with many unexplained omissions.
During Sunday Mass, parishioners wore shirts saying, ‘We stand with Father Pfleger.’ The popular priest denies the latest allegation — the fourth against him.
‘Treat it as a dead subject,’ the victim says the dean of the Catholic school in Aurora told him. The Benedictines are still keeping secrets about clergy sex abuse, a Sun-Times investigation has found.
