The Illinois attorney general accused the state’s Roman Catholic Church of neglecting to investigate claims of clerical abuse and producing “flimsy reasons” to dismiss such claims, The New York Times reports. The preliminary report, written by Attorney General Lisa Madigan, found that the names of over 500 priests who have been accused of sexual abuse were omitted in lists of accused priests distributed by the Illinois Catholic dioceses. Mandigan concluded that church officials “will not resolve the clergy sexual abuse crisis on their own.” “I want to express again the profound regret of the whole church for our failures to address the scourge of clerical sexual abuse,” Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, said in a statement.
