Cardinal Robert Prevost, the new pope and the first American leader of the Catholic Church worldwide, is already being hailed as a breath of fresh air by some.
But the ancient religious order that he’s part of and once led in Chicago and internationally — the Augustinians — is still considered one of the more backward Catholic organizations in terms of transparency and reform when it comes to the decades-old child sex abuse crisis that’s involved children being molested by clergy, and leaders often covering it up.
The Midwest Augustinians — based on the Far Southwest Side, and led by Prevost more than two decades ago — only last year created a publicly available list of its credibly accused offenders.
That came six years after the religious order the late Pope Francis had been part of, the Jesuits, released a comprehensive list of its offenders in the Chicago region and beyond — a log now considered the gold standard in church transparency.
Some other Catholic organizations’ lists — including one from the Archdiocese of Baltimore — date back to 2002, when the biggest wave of the scandal broke following a series of Boston Globe articles about abuse and cover-ups.
Victims have repeatedly advocated for public lists as a form of accountability and a means toward healing.
The Augustinians’ list from 2024 only came under pressure, after a drumbeat of negative news coverage over sex abuse and child pornography allegations against the Rev. Richard McGrath, who was the longtime leader of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox.
The group’s list excludes McGrath’s name; leaders say the accusations weren’t substantiated according to their standards.
The Rev. Tony Pizzo, one of Prevost’s successors at the helm of the Midwest province, has recently refused to answer whether McGrath remains a priest.
So have Prevost’s successors overseeing the Rome-based order around the globe: the Rev. Alejandro Moral Antón, the prior general and a Spaniard; and the group’s vicar general, the Rev. Joseph Farrell, an American.
The main knock against Prevost has been perceived inaction on improving transparency in his order over sex abuse.
But he has faced more direct criticism based on the findings of a 2021 Chicago Sun-Times story that the Augustinians had, while he was in charge of the Augustinians in Chicago in 2000, allowed an accused pedophile priest to live at a South Side monastery without telling a nearby Catholic elementary school the man was there.
Indeed, church records assert there was no school nearby when there was.
That information came to light after the Sun-Times discovered McGrath had also been moved to the monastery in 2017 or 2018 after some of the accusations against him emerged — and by that time a preschool was across the alley, and also hadn’t been notified by the order.
In 2021, as the Augustinians were refusing to come clean about aspects of the abuse crisis, a long-ago friend of Prevost’s from the Chicago area suggested to a Sun-Times reporter that he reach out to Prevost for help in obtaining information, saying, “Bob is a good guy, and I am surprised if he would stonewall.”
The Sun-Times emailed Prevost, who responded:
“I’m glad you’re enjoying good weather in Chicago!”
“I will be traveling internationally over the coming week. It may not be easy to make phone contact. Feel free to send questions you might have, and if I can I will be glad to answer. I have been away from the Chicago area for some time, and am not sure how much information about the Midwest Province of the Augustinians I would be able to offer you — outside of what you have already been able to find. But, again, feel free to send your questions and I’ll see what I can do.”
“Take care.”
Among the follow-up questions asked via email was whether he had “any idea if/when the Chicago province is going to put out a public list of the credibly accused and, if so, when and, if not, why not? Any idea why it’s taken so long after even our cardinal called for greater transparency in 2018?”
Prevost never responded again.
After Prevost had left the Chicago province in 2001 to take over the order internationally, Ken Kaczmarz, who had accused an Augustinian named John Murphy of molesting him as a boy years earlier at a South Side parish, contacted a Prevost colleague in the province to alert him that Murphy, then gone from the order, was serving as a docent at the Shedd Aquarium.
“He refused to do anything about it,” Kaczmarz says, referring to a now-deceased Augustinian leader, the Rev. G. Jerome Knies.
Given Prevost’s oversight of the group for years, Kaczmarz says of his elevation to pope, “I’m shaking I’m so upset, it’s clearly obvious that they didn’t [care] about that guy’s history.”
A Chicago area priest who asked not to be named says of Prevost: “What really bothers me about this new pope is that no matter what his theological background, just like other priests and bishops, he housed predators near a school.”
In 2023, as the Sun-Times asked about whether Prevost failed in dealing adequately with child sex abuse, Pizzo came to his defense in an email forwarded by a spokeswoman. It said:
“Nothing is more important to the Augustinians and me than transparency. Years before it became the general law of the Church, under the leadership of Fr. Prevost” — the new pope’s title at the time — “put into place the requirement that there be a set of protocols in every Circumscription of the Order, to guide all members in the different aspects of promoting child protection as well as in responding to cases where accusations might be received.”
“Under the direction of Fr. Prevost, a course was organized, during the Intermediate General Chapter of 2010, for all Major Superiors of the Order, regarding the protection of minors and the proper ways of responding to victims when cases were presented.”
Prevost’s name surfaced in passing in a lawsuit that accused McGrath of molesting a former Providence student named Robert Krankvich. The priest that succeeded McGrath at Providence, the Rev. John Merkelis, gave a deposition in that case and relayed that Prevost had “invited” him to take a recruiting position in the order. Prevost was not accused of doing anything wrong in that case.
The attorney who represented Krankvich and has ongoing claims against the Augustinians, Marc Pearlman, said of Prevost’s selection as pope: “I hope this is an indication that the Augustinians in Chicago will do a better job at dealing with survivors of sexual abuse. I would say that they owe it to the pope to do so, and the survivors.”