Louis C. Shea
Father Louis Shea sexually abused children while he ministered within the Diocese of Springfield. That much came through when the Attorney General’s investigators analyzed the scant file the diocese produced regarding Shea. So investigators pushed the diocese to add Shea to its published list of substantiated child sex abusers. But the diocese was reluctant to do so without speaking with the survivor who had accused Shea—“we have not heard from her since 2004, and do not want to reach out because she may have moved on; we don’t want to trigger memories.” The investigators knew though that the survivor had not “moved on.” Not only had she contacted the Attorney General’s investigators asking for help regarding the abuse she endured at Shea’s hands, but her sister had done the same regarding her own abuse by Shea.
In the 1960s, when sisters “Abby” and “Annie” were 5 and 6 years old, Shea was considered a friend of the family—Mom, Dad, Abby, Annie, and their siblings. When Shea was an assistant pastor at the family’s parish, he came to their home for dinner at least once a week. After dinner he would drink hard liquor with the girls’ father. “Father Shea always smelled like booze and pipe tobacco,” Abby recalls. At bedtime, he would “come looking for me, lift me up in front of all my family members, and take me upstairs to ‘tuck me in’ and ‘pray over me.’” Abby shared a bedroom with Annie, but as the older sister, Annie was allowed to stay up later. Once upstairs “in the dark,” Shea would pull down Abby’s “bedspread and sheet and then he laid next to me, where he repeatedly tickled, then fondled, then more intently felt my body, moving my top up and bottoms down, positioning my legs where he could feel my genitals.”
Reliving those nights, Abby remembers that “Father Shea always whispered and told me to be very quiet. He told me he loved me, and that Jesus loved me. He asked me how it felt when he fondled and touched different areas of my body. I remember him watching my face and looking into my eyes for a response. I don’t remember penetration, but I do remember regular instances of continual rubbing and him exploring the folds and details of my genitals.”
Being the older sister did not allow Annie to escape Shea’s abuse. She remembers Shea would sometimes stay in the guest bedroom, adjacent to the girls’ room. Shea would come “into the bedroom to tuck me in, and lay down on my twin bed and spoon and grope me.” He “always smelled of alcohol” and would sometimes start by rubbing or massaging the back of her neck, armpits, and then move around to her breast nipples and belly button and then the underpants area. Shea “would kiss the back of my neck and shoulders but not my face. There was never any penetration made but there was massaging and rubbing and groping.”
Annie “liked to read in bed, and this is what I would do many times while Father Shea was groping and fondling me.” She “learned how to bury herself in books—to focus on books, and not what was being done to my little body.”
Over time, it became known to the sisters that the other was being abused. Abby remembers hiding from Shea, afraid of the abuse that was coming. Once “I went upstairs to hide behind a large bathtub and found my sister there. I remember asking, ‘What are you doing here,’ and she said, ‘I’m hiding from Father Shea.’ I said, ‘Me too,’ and crawled in next to her.” Annie too remembers “hiding in the bathroom when we heard Father Shea’s footsteps on the staircase coming up to the second floor.”
Abby says the abuse “went on for a very long time. I didn’t even have words to talk about it for almost a decade afterward.” She was abused “repeatedly, at least once a week for approximately three years.” Abby is not sure why the abuse stopped—“I don’t remember ever thinking I could tell him to stop or to leave me alone.” Maybe it stopped because he “was reassigned or maybe he just lost interest.” Near the end of the period of abuse, Shea (a self-described artist) gave Abby a portrait of her he painted. He also gave her a self-portrait—“it was very dark and looked like Father Shea at night in my bedroom.” Abby has the painting still—“it is creepy to this day.”
Annie estimates that Shea abused her “between 60 and 100 times, over approximately four years.” She remembers the final episode of abuse. Shea was “reaching into my underpants one time when he went too far, I braced my feet against the wall and pushed back hard to push him off the bed and onto the floor.” That “was the last time Father Shea approached me.”
Both sisters have been in counseling over the years to help them deal with, and try to heal from, Shea’s sex abuse. Decades ago, at the suggestion of one of her counselors, Annie summoned the courage to confront her abuser. She found Shea’s telephone number, called him, and told him “I know what you did to me; you’ll burn in hell.” Shea’s only response (repeated over and over during the call)—“I have no recollection.”
For her part, Abby reached out in 2002 to Bishop George Lucas and reported Shea’s abuse. Lucas prepared an internal memorandum after the call, writing that the woman he spoke with “reports sexual abuse by a priest over a period of years when she was 5-7 years old. She claims her sister was also abused during the same time period.” The bishop told Abby that Shea was dead, offered an apology, and encouraged her to contact the state’s attorney “if she wishes. Since it is her story and her reputation that are involved, I would leave to her whether she wishes anyone else to know about it.”
Not satisfied with her 2002 conversation with the bishop, Abby contacted the diocese two years later in 2004 and exchanged communications with the diocese’s victims assistance coordinator. She was again encouraged to “contact appropriate civil authorities.” And that is where things stood at the diocese until Abby and Annie separately (and unbeknownst to the other) reached out to the Attorney General’s investigators in 2018. Annie told investigators that “it’s time for me to step up, and do what I should have done long ago” and report the details of Shea’s abuse. Abby also reported the abuse, commenting that at the time it occurred “we were too young to speak up or understand.” From those communications, it was clear to the Attorney General’s investigators that the sisters had not “moved on,” as diocesan officials had speculated.
After the Attorney General’s investigators made it known to the diocese that Abby and Annie had contacted them regarding Shea’s abuse, the diocese wrote both sisters, showing a newfound interest in their wellbeing and offering an opportunity to “meet with our Diocesan Review Board” and “with the Most Reverend Thomas John Paprocki, Bishop of Springfield.” The invitation seemed straightforward enough. But the ordeal that followed in the spring and summer of 2019 was far from straightforward.
As it turned out, the invitation to meet with the review board was conditioned upon Abby and Annie first meeting separately with the diocese’s victims assistance coordinator so an “incident report” could be completed for the review board’s consideration—a significant condition for Abby given that she now lives far from Illinois. The sisters also learned that outside legal counsel for the diocese would be present during this initial meeting. Because they were comfortable with the Attorney General’s investigator they had worked with regarding Shea’s abuse of them, they asked the diocese if he could join the meeting to offer emotional support. The diocese denied their request. Instead, the diocese told Abby and Annie they could bring anyone for emotional support—anyone, that is, except the Attorney General’s investigator.
Abby and Annie’s request for emotional support was well founded, because rather than an opportunity for each of them to separately report what happened to them, the initial meetings were in the nature of inquisitions, with legal counsel for the diocese interrogating the sisters. To Abby and Annie, it seemed the actual purpose of the meetings was for legal counsel to obtain information in the event litigation ensued. Worse yet, the draft incident reports generated by the victims assistance coordinator for Abby’s and Annie’s review both omitted critical facts about Shea’s abuse and included misstatements relating to the meeting (for example, failing to note legal counsel to the diocese was present) and relating to the sex abuse Abby and Annie suffered. To their credit, Abby and Annie weathered the storm, with each submitting corrected incident reports for the diocese’s review board to consider in a meeting scheduled for a few weeks later, a meeting they wanted to attend. In those reports, both Abby and Annie made clear that the “assistance” they sought was for Shea’s name to be added to the diocese’s list of substantiated child sex abusers, something the diocese refused to do.
As Abby put it, “there was a stubborn refusal to act for 17 years, and not until forced to do so by the Attorney General."
Still stinging from the interrogation by the diocese’s legal counsel a few weeks earlier, as the date for the review board meeting approached, Abby and Annie asked if they could have a friend accompany them to that meeting to offer emotional support. The requests were denied—if they wanted to address the review board, they would do so alone “in keeping with past practice of the diocese.” While disappointed with that news, Abby and Annie remained undeterred. Each would meet with the review board to detail the child sex abuse they suffered so many years ago at the hands of one of the diocese’s priests.
Abby and Annie’s separate experiences with the review board were not significantly different. As they intended to do, each detailed the abuse Shea heaped upon them. Remarkably, the review board conceded that they had seen no evidence that the diocese had undertaken any investigation regarding Shea’s child sex abuse. Beyond that, Abby and Annie both found the majority of the review board’s members detached—as Abby put it “they showed a lack of empathy or coldness. There were two men who did not, or could not, look at me when I talked about the abuse I endured by Father Shea. Were they even listening?” Two members were “trying to absorb what was being said. The rest appeared to me as cold, hiding, indifferent or dismissive. It made me angry.”
A few days after her meeting with the review board, Abby met with Bishop Paprocki, the victims assistance coordinator, and the head of the review board. The bishop asked Abby if she was “Catholic, do you believe in God?” Abby explained that she was no longer Catholic and that her “experience with Father Shea is what helped me examine and come to this decision.” Undeterred, Bishop Paprocki told her to “come back, I am the shepherd of souls.” He then asked, if “I put Father Shea on the list, is that going to make you happy?” In response, Abby simply reiterated that he “needed to put Father Shea on the credibly accused list.” Abby then thanked the three of them, and excused herself from the meeting.
The takeaway for these survivors from the diocese’s “victims assistance” program was a negative. Throughout the process the Diocese of Springfield and Bishop Paprocki prioritized their own interests over supporting the survivors, and showed a failure to truly listen and understand what survivors need along their path to healing. As Abby put it, “there was a stubborn refusal to act for 17 years, and not until forced to do so by the Attorney General. Incredible pain for the victim, who provided all the information, as there was no investigation. An interrogation by a nationally known defense lawyer, with the results of that meeting producing a badly written, incomplete incident report that diminished the horror of my experience. Then a review board gathered to judge whether a victim’s experience is credible. It all feels unfair and incomplete, only to serve the diocese, not the victim.” And the meeting with the bishop, in which her faith was questioned and she was told that the bishop was “the shepherd of souls,” left Abby shaking her head in amazement.
The one positive from the experience (a significant one) is that after Abby and Annie met with the review board, it recommended to the bishop that Shea’s child sex abuse of both Abby and Annie be substantiated. With that, Shea’s name was added to the diocese’s list of child sex abusers. This news was communicated to Abby and Annie by the victims assistance coordinator, but rather than acknowledge the abuse with a humble apology and request for forgiveness, the victims assistance coordinator closed with this—“The Holy Spirit intervened and wisdom prevailed.”
Reflecting on it all, Abby’s final point to Attorney General’s investigators was that “much work remains in order for the Diocese of Springfield and Bishop Paprocki to understand the needs of survivor healing.”