Much of the public attention on clergy abuse in Illinois has focused on the Catholic Church, for good reason. But abuse by religious leaders happens in every kind of faith community. If you were abused by a pastor, minister, elder, youth leader, rabbi, imam, or other clergy member outside the Catholic Church, you may still have a civil claim.
You do not need to have reported the abuse, and nobody needs to have been charged. A civil claim asks what the religious institution knew, what it should have known, and what it did. Attorney Ervin Nevitt, a partner at Coplan + Crane, reviews these cases. He holds Illinois bar registration 6319808 and was admitted in 2014.
Why the Attorney General's report will not list your abuser
In 2023, the Illinois Attorney General published a report naming 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers as substantiated child sex abusers across all six Illinois dioceses. That report covers only the Catholic dioceses. A survivor abused in a Protestant or Orthodox church, a synagogue, a mosque, a Jehovah's Witness congregation, or another faith community will not find the abuser in it.
That does not mean the records are gone. They sit with the congregation, its regional or national body, and any youth program, camp, or school the faith runs.
The mandated reporter duty applies to every faith
Illinois law treats clergy of every faith alike on one point. Any member of the clergy is a mandated reporter under Section 4 of the Abused and Neglected Child Reporting Act (325 ILCS 5/4). Clergy must report immediately to the Department of Children and Family Services when they have reasonable cause to believe a child known to them in that role may be abused.
Whether that report was made, and what the congregation's leaders did instead, is often central in a case against a non-Catholic institution. A leader who learned of abuse and handled it quietly, or moved the abuser rather than reporting, may have left a record of that choice.
Who can be named depends on how the faith is organized
Faiths are structured very differently, and that structure shapes a claim. In a self-governing congregation, the local church or its board may be the only institution involved. Where a regional body ordains, places, or disciplines clergy, that body may hold the personnel history.
Identifying which institutions had authority over the abuser, and which held information about him, is an early and important step.
Records come out under the same court rules
A congregation that is a party to a civil case has to produce relevant records under the same court rules as a diocese. Once a lawsuit is filed, Illinois Supreme Court Rule 214 lets one party serve written requests on another to produce specified documents. The responding party must identify everything responsive in its possession, produce it as kept in the usual course of business or organized by the categories requested, and sign an affidavit stating whether the production is complete.
Depending on the faith, the useful records may include the equivalent of assignment histories, showing where a leader served and when he was moved. They may include personnel or membership files with complaints and correspondence, minutes from boards that decided where he could serve or reviewed an allegation, and youth program, camp, or school records such as rosters and trip records that place the abuser and the child together.
Illinois does keep a clergy privilege (735 ILCS 5/8-803). It is written around confessions and admissions made to a cleric acting as a spiritual advisor. The court decides whether a given document falls within it. In the Catholic context, the Illinois appellate court held that internal church rules did not allow evidence of child sexual abuse by priests to be shielded from discovery.
The legal theory behind these claims
These claims are usually brought against the religious institution, not only against the individual. Negligent retention is the theory that most often carries clergy claims, meaning an institution kept someone in place after it knew or should have known of the danger. In practice, several theories run together, and which fits depends on your facts.
The responsible body is usually a private organization. The Tort Immunity rules that govern claims against Illinois public bodies do not apply in the same way. The liability questions are the ordinary institutional ones.
What the Catholic report shows about institutional patterns
Even if your case does not involve the Catholic Church, the Attorney General's findings show how institutions tend to respond to abuse. The investigation began in the second half of 2018, covered the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Dioceses of Belleville, Joliet, Peoria, Rockford, and Springfield, and reviewed more than 100,000 pages of documents. Its data analysis tracks abusers year by year from 1950 through 2019, and the men it named abused at least 1,997 children.
When the investigation opened, only Chicago and Joliet posted lists of substantiated abusers, naming 103 men between them. By the end, the report counted 275 abusers in Chicago (against 150 on the archdiocese's list), 69 in Joliet (against 52), 51 in Peoria (against 43), 43 in Belleville (against 42), 32 in Springfield (against 23), and 24 in Rockford (against 24). Those totals reach 494, more than 451, because some men served in more than one diocese. The report also named 160 abusers substantiated by Catholic sources whom the dioceses had not disclosed.
The pattern that recurred was transfer rather than removal. A priest was moved to another parish after a complaint, and the complaint was recorded in an assignment history that still exists. In Belleville, personnel board minutes from 1985 read, "In making assignments, must not forget about Fr. Kownacki," more than a decade after the diocese learned he abused children. At the trial of a survivor's lawsuit, the diocese's vice-chancellor testified that his abuse was common knowledge among diocesan leaders when he was transferred to a new parish in 1982.
The report also found that dioceses often left religious order members off their lists. The Attorney General identified more than 250 order clerics and brothers from more than 30 orders as substantiated abusers. Dioceses told investigators these men were not theirs. The Archdiocese of Chicago left nearly 60 such men off its public list. And the Diocese of Rockford refused to give a priest's personnel file to Kane County prosecutors.
Each named man's entry lists his assignments, the number of reported survivors, the dates and places of reported abuse, and the date the diocese first received a claim. If that date falls before a survivor's abuse, the diocese had a complaint on file while he still had access.
Institutions of every faith can follow similar patterns: moving a leader instead of removing him, keeping complaints internal, and leaving names off public lists. The records of those choices are often where a case is found.
You do not need records to start
You do not need any documents before you speak with a lawyer. Your memory of names, places, and dates is enough to start. Many survivors file a sexual abuse lawsuit anonymously in Illinois. Timing depends on the facts and should be checked with a lawyer.
Common Questions Around Non-Catholic Clergy Abuse
The abuse happened in a non-Catholic church. Does any of this apply to me? The Attorney General's report does not, because it covered only the Catholic dioceses. The rest does. Clergy of every faith are mandated reporters in Illinois, and a congregation that is a party to a civil case has to produce relevant records under the same court rules as a diocese.
Do I need to have reported it? No. A civil claim requires no police report, no charge, and no conviction. Most people we speak with never reported.
Does someone have to have been convicted? No. A civil case uses a lower standard of proof than a criminal one and is usually brought against the institution rather than the individual.
It was a long time ago. That is the norm in this work rather than the exception. What governs it is your age at the time, who was responsible, and the particular facts.
What happens when you contact us
A question sets nothing in motion. You speak with a person, not a form. You do not have to describe what happened. We look into which institution was responsible, what it knew, what records exist, and whether a claim can still be brought, at no cost to you.
We tell you plainly what is possible. If you decide not to go ahead, it ends there, and what you told us stays confidential. If you go ahead, we carry the filings, deadlines, records, and the institution's insurers. Steps can be taken to protect your identity in the court record.
For more information, visit: https://survivorsofabuseil.com/clergy-sexual-abuse-lawyer-il/
