The Illinois Office of the Attorney General has just released it’s report of clerical abuse, and the numbers are staggering. Over 450 priests were found to have engaged in serious sexual abuses of almost 2000 children over the last 70 years (that’s an average of about 30 victims a year). This number was far higher than the paltry 103 the Illinois Diocese had self reported.

The investigation also revealed claims by at least 1,997 survivors who were sexually abused by the 451 Catholic clerics and religious brothers who are now publicly disclosed in Illinois as substantiated child sex abusers, numbers far greater than those reported by the Pennsylvania grand jury

Since no one is actually going to be held accountable for the equivalent of raping a small town, the report instead has a number of “suggestions” that the church has absolutely zero legal obligation to follow. The most reasonable, and least likely to be followed, is the request to reform the way they report crime (which has been “don’t ask don’t tell”). Unless people start going to jail over this, then there really is nothing to force the Catholic church to make any significant changes.

So, the end result is this: zero arrests, a 600 page report that exposes serious sexual abuse that will most likely be ignored by the general population. What exactly was the whole point of it then?