By Logan Jaffe, ProPublica

Originally published on Friday, January 31 While researching a bit of context to introduce this week's newsletter, I came across a column from May 2019 written by Chicago Sun-Times journalist Laura Washington. In it, she writes about the horror she felt as she sat in the pews of her church earlier that year while a representative of the Archdiocese of Chicago informed the congregation that its "beloved pastor" had been accused of sexually abusing a minor in 1979, when he was at another parish.

"I sat in the pew in stunned silence," Washington wrote, adding: "The headlines of rampant abuse and cover-ups in the church are horrific enough. This was surreal." Illinois is home to six Catholic dioceses; the Chicago Archdiocese is the third-largest in the U.S. They are among many dioceses across the nation that have released names of priests currently or formerly in their ranks who they have deemed to have been credibly accused of sexual abuse or misconduct. Those lists had not been aggregated in one place, however. That changed this week, as my ProPublica colleagues released a searchable database of this information, which also functions as a sort of priest tracker, since parishes have sometimes transferred accused clergy elsewhere.

Still, as ProPublica's president, Dick Tofel, wrote in his Not Shutting Up newsletter this week, our "Credibly Accused" database can be a powerful tool for survivors of sexual abuse. Not only could finding a clergy member's name and information in the database help validate an individual's experience, it could help place the "burden of shame and self-blame to the perpetrator, where it belongs," said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks allegations of clergy abuse and seeks to hold priests accountable.