Dominic Aloysius Diederich
“Why do the interests of dead priests take precedence over live victims?” This was the question posed in 2006 by a woman who had contacted the Archdiocese of Chicago about abuse perpetrated by deceased Father Dominic Diederich. The archdiocese had already found evidence corroborating the allegations against him. But because Diederich had died in 1977, under the archdiocese’s longstanding policy, his name was not included on a list of priests credibly accused of abuse.
Beginning in the 1960s, Diederich was pastor at Saint Maurice in the McKinley Park neighborhood of Chicago, where he allegedly abused at least five children. His abuse followed a consistent pattern of singling out young girls from economically disadvantaged families.
In 2006, multiple survivors came forward with their experiences of Diederich’s abuse. One explained her motivation: “When I read the story in the press and I saw that this had happened to someone else, I wanted to say to her—it happened to me too, you are not the only one.”
In fact, the Archdiocese of Chicago had long known Diederich was an abuser. In 1994, 12 years before these survivors came forward, a different survivor contacted the archdiocese about Diederich’s abuse. The allegations involved the same types of sexual misconduct toward young girls at the Saint Maurice school that the other survivors would later describe. But although the archdiocese concluded there was reasonable cause to suspect that Diederich had engaged in sexual misconduct, it refused to formally review the allegations because Diederich was deceased. In a 1994 letter, the administrator of the archdiocese’s review board explained it “could not proceed formally through the procedures in a matter involving a deceased priest.” Yet that same year, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin approved a financial settlement of the claims against Diederich.
The archdiocese’s policy against formally reviewing allegations against deceased priests kept Diederich off the list of credibly accused priests. As recently as 2015, an archdiocesan attorney wrote to a survivor’s attorney that “[s]ince Monsignor Diederich is deceased, this case will not be going to the Review Board.”
Finally, in November 2018, after the Attorney General began an inquiry into the church’s handling of abuse allegations, Diederich was added to the archdiocese’s public list of clergy with substantiated allegations of child sex abuse. This addition came almost 25 years after the archdiocese first internally acknowledged that Diederich was an abuser—and more than 12 years after multiple women came forward to help assure other survivors that they were not alone.