Catholic order based in Chicago suburb hasn’t kept promise to name sexually abusive clergy

Two years after the Chicago-area arm of the Passionists religious order announced it would establish a sex offender registry of abusive members, the Catholic group hasn’t done so. Its leaders won’t say why or whether that’s still in the works.

In October 2022, as the Chicago Sun-Times was preparing a story about his order’s clergy members who had been accused of sexually abusing children, the Rev. Joe Moons said, “We are in the process of creating such a list and should have it published in the next few months.” 

That hasn’t happened. Neither Moons nor his successor as head of the Passionists’ Holy Cross Province, the Rev. David Colhour, will comment on why.

Timothy Nockels of Vernon Hills says he was molested as a boy by the Rev. John Baptist Ormechea when the Passionist priest served at Immaculate Conception Parish on the Northwest Side in the 1970s and 1980s.

“All they’re trying to do is brush this under the rug,” Nockels says, “thinking eventually people will stop talking about it.”

Many victims of clergy abuse have advocated for church transparency over the years, saying it helps their healing and encourages other victims in the decades-long child sex abuse crisis to come forward. That’s an argument also embraced by many church reformers who say the lists serve as a form of atonement — a central tenet of Christianity.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, the spiritual leader of the Catholic church in Cook and Lake counties, has long encouraged religious orders to make public information about members deemed to have been credibly abused of sex abuse, though he has continued to withhold names of some abusers who have worked in his geographic territory.

Colhour’s province is based in Park Ridge and includes religious communities on the North Side and in Hyde Park. It also has a presence elsewhere in the Midwest and in the South and the West.

There’s another U.S. Passionists province, based in New York, that maintains a public list that’s available on request but not on its website. Thirteen clergy members deemed to have been credibly accused of abuse are on that list, all but one now dead.

A database maintained by the church watchdog group Bishop Accountability includes the names of 20 Passionists in the United States who have been accused of sex abuse.

A report last year by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul on clergy sex abuse includes the name of one Chicago-area Passionists order clergy member found to be credibly accused of abuse. That’s Ormechea.

In the early 2000s, while Ormechea was stationed in Louisville, several men came forward, saying that, as boys at Immaculate Conception, they were molested there by him.

The accusations were deemed by church authorities to be credible, and Ormechea was pulled from public ministry.

But he remained part of the order and moved in 2003 to an ancient monastery in Rome. A man answering the phone there told a Sun-Times reporter who asked for Ormechea, “Talk to my provincial,” then hung up.

In 2016, another accusation against Ormechea surfaced, this one dating to the 1960s when he served in Kentucky.

He’s also included on a list of credibly accused abusers put out by the Archdiocese of Louisville, but his name isn’t included on Cupich’s list. Generally, the Archdiocese of Chicago doesn’t include abusive religious order clergy unless they’re on a list maintained by their order.

Also not on Chicago’s list but included on Louisville’s is Deacon James Griffith, a Passionist who pleaded guilty in 1988 to sexually abusing a young boy in Louisville. In 2002, he was moved by his order to a monastery next to Immaculate Conception, but church officials initially didn’t tell parishioners about his child sex crime conviction or a lawsuit accusing him of molesting another Louisville boy in the 1970s.

The Chicago-area Passionists’ website says it has “worked with the Conference of Major Superiors of Men” — a consortium of male Catholic religious orders — “to promote the protection of minors.” The conference has urged its members to create public lists.

The Passionists, like many other Catholic orders, follow in the mold of a saint — for the Passionists, Paul of the Cross — and embrace a specific mission, which is reaching “out with compassion to the crucified of today,” keeping alive “the memory of Christ’s Passion through . . . service to those who suffer.”

Nockels says he’s still Christian but no longer associates with the Catholic church, which he believes will ultimately pay in a spiritual sense for its continued secrecy.

“My words to the wolves would be straight from my savior Jesus: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,’” he says. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

READ THE SUN-TIMES’ ORIGINAL INVESTIGATION