Five former Catholic priests have been charged in Michigan with criminal sexual conduct, the state attorney general said Friday, amid a monthslong investigation of alleged clergy sexual abuse in the state.
Four of the men were arrested in various locations across the country on Thursday, and Michigan will seek the extradition of a fifth from India, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said.
“In this case, some of those clergy who preyed on young children and on vulnerable adults, unfortunately those clergy were hiding in plain sight, purporting to comfort their parishoners, hearing their confessions and taking advantage of their position of faith and authority,” Nessel said in a news conference in Lansing on Friday.
“And today, we begin holding those clergy accountable.”
Nessel’s office has been investigating alleged sexual abuse by clergy in the state’s seven Catholic dioceses. In October, Michigan police seized hundreds of thousands of pages from church offices.
Nessel’s office said it is has been investigating 400 tips made since the start of the year to her office’s clergy abuse hotline, and has asked the dioceses to suspend their own internal review processes until the investigation is over.
“Almost all of these charges came as a direct result of calls to our tip line, but were then corroborated by files seized from the dioceses last fall, followed by multiple interviews with victims,” Nessel said Friday in a news release.
The Michigan investigation of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is joined by a federal investigation and similar probes in at least 12 other states and the District of Columbia.
The investigations follow a damning report released by a grand jury in Pennsylvania last August that accused more than 300 “predator priests” of sexually abusing more than 1,000 children in six dioceses since 1947. The vast majority of cases occurred before Catholic bishops in the US instituted new child-safety protocols.
