These priests molested kids in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Why aren't they on the Archdiocese's list of abusers?
By Laura Schulte, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Robert Herguth, Chicago Sun-Times, December 12, 2024
If the Archdiocese of Milwaukee embraced the same level of transparency over child sex abuse as other large Catholic institutions, the number of names on its public list of religious figures with abuse allegations deemed credible would nearly triple, a review by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Chicago Sun-Times found.
The archdiocese’s list of “restricted priests” – or those no longer in ministry and, dead or alive, who have credible allegations of abuse – is among the least comprehensive of the 31 archdioceses in the United States that maintain a public accounting of the abuse crisis, the review by the news organizations found.
On its website, the Milwaukee Archdiocese lists only priests who were ordained through the archdiocese, saying it can't adequately verify or rely upon lists compiled by others. That means its list excludes religious order priests and brothers, as well as priests ordained in other dioceses who later lived, visited or ministered in Wisconsin.
“There is no certainty that the archdiocese would be informed of allegations against every priest who worked at some point in the archdiocese,” the website states. “Instead of publishing what would be an incomplete list, the archdiocese leaves the listing of names of clergy with substantiated allegations to their respective groups.”
While officials answered some emailed questions, the archdiocese did not respond to requests for interviews on this topic.
Diocesan priests generally staff local parishes, while religious orders such as the Jesuits or Franciscans often run Catholic high schools, hospitals or other missions, and aren’t confined to a diocese, which is typically based on geography. Orders also maintain a unique spiritual mission and have their own hierarchy, but need permission from a local bishop to serve in his area. All ultimately report to the pope, the church’s worldwide leader.
Led by Archbishop Jerome Listecki, the Milwaukee Archdiocese appears to be just one of eight in the country that uses this standard, according to the Journal Sentinel/Sun-Times review.
If Milwaukee included all religious figures who have been credibly accused of child sex abuse and lived, ministered, visited or potentially offended within the archdiocese’s jurisdiction, its list would grow from 48 to roughly 140 names, the review found.
One such priest not included on Milwaukee’s list is Bruce MacArthur. MacArthur was ordained in 1953 in the Diocese of Sioux Falls.
He was convicted in Texas in 1978 of attempted rape, but went on to serve in Wisconsin afterwards, according to a report from the Aberdeen News in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
In 2008, he was convicted of sexually abusing a girl during his tenure as a hospital chaplain in Beaver Dam between 1965 and 1970. He admitted to abusing numerous children over the course of his 34 years as a clergy member.
He died in 2012, according to court records.
But even with the conviction — which MacArthur appealed, but the state Supreme Court rejected — he is not listed by the Milwaukee Archdiocese because he wasn’t ordained here.
Chicago Auxiliary Bishop Jeffrey Grob, who is set to be installed as Listecki's successor on Jan. 14, has shared little about his views on the sex abuse scandal. In a brief phone conversation, he said he has not looked at the situation in Milwaukee, and could not comment publicly, but wants to make the transition "seamless."
“It’d be inappropriate for me to speak,” he said. “I have not studied the matter.”
The nearby Archdiocese of Chicago, which has a close relationship with Milwaukee, began including religious order clergy on its list in 2022 under the leadership of Cardinal Archbishop Blase Cupich. Grob has served as auxiliary bishop under Cupich since 2020.
The Chicago Archdiocese released the names after pressure from the Illinois attorney general and research that included talking to religious orders and other dioceses. The release of additional names was an attempt to “improve transparency and address the needs of survivors,” according to a statement from that archdiocese.
The Journal Sentinel/Sun-Times review found three archdioceses have no public accounting at all – Miami, San Francisco and one for the military services.
The end result of that lack of transparency is a haphazard and incomplete accounting of sex abuse in the Catholic church more than 30 years after it first publicly came to light, robbing the public of a full picture of a crisis that’s impacted countless lives.
Child sex abuse victims want the horror they experienced acknowledged by the church, said Michael Finnegan, an attorney for Jeff Anderson & Associates who sued the Milwaukee Archdiocese on the behalf of accusers. He said not giving a full accounting of the abuse within the borders of a diocese is “intentionally misleading.”
“Being able to see their perpetrator on a list gives that validation,” Finnegan said.
A hidden reality
The Journal Sentinel and the Sun-Times reviewed the public lists of credibly accused clergy from numerous religious orders and found:
28 credibly accused members of the Capuchin Franciscans’ Midwest Province have served within the boundaries of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, though none are currently in active ministry. Six are listed as brothers; the others as priests.
23 credibly accused members of the Society of Jesus, known more commonly as the Jesuits, served within Milwaukee’s boundaries, including more than a dozen assigned to Marquette University High School at various times. One is listed as a brother, the others as priests. They are on the Midwest Province and the Central and Southern Province lists.
Eight credibly accused members of the Society of the Divine Word’s Chicago Province served — or lived at some point — in East Troy. Five are listed as brothers.
Six credibly accused members of the Benedictine religious order belonged to the Benet Lake Abbey in southern Wisconsin. Three are listed as brothers.
The Journal Sentinel and Sun-Times then examined other official church lists, as well as a list maintained by the nonprofit church watchdog group Bishop Accountability, as well as lawsuits, criminal records and media accounts. That review found another two dozen priests and religious brothers who lived or ministered in the Milwaukee area but are not on the archdiocese’s list.
Two of them are members of the Xaverian Missionaries who spent time in Franklin, according to that group’s list of those with credible allegations of sexual abuse. Three of them are on the Diocese of La Crosse’s credibly accused list. Four are, or were, members of the Carmelite order, which has its own publicly accessible list.
Another seven were part of the Society of the Divine Savior, also known as the Salvatorian order, which has a local headquarters in the Milwaukee area. The order has no public list, and no plans to release one.
The names appeared on another diocese’s list or on Bishop Accountability’s list and were confirmed by Salvatorian spokeswoman Sue Kadrich. But she wouldn’t say how many credibly accused members there are in total, “out of the privacy interests of all persons involved.”
“This question has been a matter of repeated consideration by the USA Provincial Council of the Society of the Divine Savior,” Kadrich said. “It has consistently been decided that the privacy interests of all persons involved weighs against publishing such a list.”
Such reasoning has been rejected by victims, church reformers and even some bishops who have called for church organizations to be transparent to aid in healing for those who’ve suffered and seek atonement for not just the abuse, but also repeated cover-ups over the years.
In 2022, Pope Francis met at the Vatican with leaders of several Catholic orders, and implored them not to hide instances of child abuse.
“Please do not hide this reality,” he said.
But he hasn’t mandated that orders and dioceses release lists.
The publicly available lists from the orders and dioceses vary in the criteria for inclusion. Some people on the lists have been convicted of crimes, while others have been accused of abuse without having been criminally charged or named in a lawsuit. Each diocese and order sets its own standard for what qualifies as a credible accusation.
Even among those that have issued lists, there is often sparse detail. Some lists include information like assignment histories, but others do not, making it difficult to know where alleged child molesters served and where they are now, or if they’re alive.
There isn’t a comprehensive accounting listed anywhere by the Catholic church, leaving the public in the dark when it comes to the scope of abuse that occurred.
“I’m not sure that a constellation of bishops have an orchestrated strategy (of secrecy) shared by all,” said Jason Berry, a New Orleans-based filmmaker and author who wrote a pioneering book about the church’s sex abuse called “Lead Us Not Into Temptation” published in 1992.
“But what a given bishop does is heavily driven by what their attorneys tell them,” he said. “I think they’re in damage control, trying to reduce the coverage, trying to reduce the potential for more litigation, trying to keep the lid on as best as they can.”
Milwaukee has pushed back on advocates demanding clarity
Milwaukee’s church leadership has repeatedly rebuffed calls from victims and their supporters to include religious orders on their public list.
Although religious order clergy serve at the pleasure of the bishop, the archdiocese has said religious order clergy aren’t accountable to them.
Jerry Topczewski, Listecki’s chief of staff, said in an email to the Journal Sentinel that the archdiocese's standard "is very clear."
“Other individuals – religious order priests, priests from other dioceses who may have served here, lay people, etc. – are accountable to their Ordinary or Superior, and that diocese or religious order makes their own decision on the listing of names," he said.
The archdiocese also says that it has no way of knowing what allegations have been received. They have refused to say whether religious orders inform them about alleged offenders who lived or worked in their area.
Listecki did not make himself available for interviews on the subject of not including order priests or others on the list.
Other dioceses in Wisconsin and Illinois came to a different conclusion than Milwaukee. The Dioceses of La Crosse and Superior list members of religious orders, as do all five dioceses in Illinois. Madison and Green Bay do not.
Peter Isely, the program director of Nate’s Mission, which was created following the death of a man who was allegedly abused by Norbertine priests in the Green Bay area, said after the Milwaukee Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protections in 2011 under financial pressure over sexual abuse, accusers submitted claims in the proceedings involving more than 200 other clerics, church employees and order members.
“If you don’t have the names up, you don’t care about children and families,” said Isely. “Who benefits from (omissions to lists)? The offenders who covered it up.”
More: Archdiocese of Milwaukee says it won't participate in AG investigation of clergy sex abuse
It’s unclear how many of those additional people are credibly accused, but Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul has inquired about it as part of an ongoing statewide investigation into faith leader abuse and cover ups. He requested access to the bankruptcy filings, but was denied access by a judge this year following opposition by the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
In an interview, Kaul said his investigation has uncovered a number of people not on the Milwaukee Archdiocese’s list who have been convicted of crimes in other states, for example.
He said the archdiocese should include religious order priests and priests who abused in other jurisdictions on their list.
“Having affirmation from the archdiocese is very significant to survivors,” Kaul said.
More: Wisconsin DOJ inquiry into clergy abuse reaches 3 years. Here's what we know so far
One tip that stemmed from Kaul’s investigation led to criminal charges last year against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for allegedly assaulting a teen in Walworth County in the 1970s. McCarrick never lived or worked in Wisconsin, but allegedly abused a child while visiting.
The case was suspended earlier this year because the aging McCarrick was deemed incompetent to stand for trial.McCarrick was defrocked in 2019.
Accusations that emerged earlier against McCarrick, who served as the archbishop of Newark and Washington, D.C., helped fuel the latest wave of the abuse crisis in 2018, along with disclosures from a Pennsylvania grand jury showing hundreds of abusive clerics in that state.
McCarrick is on several public lists of abusers, including ones maintained by the Archdioceses of New York and Washington, but not Milwaukee’s.
Other priests also not on Milwaukee’s list
Milwaukee’s list also omits names of some diocesan priests, such as the Rev. Mark Santo, formerly a member of the Servite religious order. A Sun-Times investigation earlier this year revealed Santo was assumed into Milwaukee under one of Listecki’s predecessors as a diocesan priest and lived in the city for about a year during the 1990s.
Now dead, Santo is on the list of credibly accused clergy in the Diocese of Springfield-Cape Girardeau in Missouri, though the diocese says it does not have details, and the Servites declined to comment.
Topczewski, Listecki’s chief of staff, told the Journal Sentinel that the archdiocese has “not been able to obtain details on why (Santo’s) name appears on that diocese.”
“We have no details about any allegation, or the process used for substantiation," he said.
Another name that does not appear on the Milwaukee list is that of Rev. Daniel Kenney. Named on the Jesuit’s public list, Kenney served at Marquette University High School from 1957 to 1960 and the Church of Gesu in Milwaukee from 1990 to 1991.
Kenney is also named by the Omaha Archdiocese as an alleged abuser. He was credibly accused of sexually abusing boys who attended a preparatory school in Omaha between 1965 and 1989, according to a report from the Des Moines Register.
He was removed from public ministry in 2003 and defrocked in 2020, but does not appear to have been charged in any criminal cases, the report said.
Sara Larson, the executive director of Awake, an independent Catholic nonprofit that supports sex abuse survivors, said the Milwaukee Archdiocese should be open about how many abusive clerics have served in the area.
“If we as a church really want to focus on pastoral concern for these survivors, we need to have a more complete listing … The current list excludes many abusive clerics who have served in archdiocesan parishes, schools and other ministries,” she said. “Full transparency about the scope of abuse that occurred within this geographic area is incredibly important for understanding the issue of abuse and what’s really taken place.”
Laura Schulte of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel can be reached at leschulte@jrn.com and on X at @SchulteLaura.
Robert Herguth of the Chicago Sun-Times can be reached atrherguth@suntimes.com and on X at @RobertHerguth.