Chaplain’s Work With Abusers Was Little-Known

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In March 2000, then-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), attempting to quell a firestorm of Democratic criticism that he was anti-Catholic, appointed a Catholic priest as the new Chaplain for the House of Representatives. Hastert told his colleagues that the Rev. Daniel Coughlin came with the “highest recommendations” from Cardinal Francis George of the Chicago Archdiocese, and that Coughlin “has been a parish priest and spent the past several years counseling parish priests within the archdiocese.”

What Hastert did not say — and probably did not know — is that for 10 years Coughlin had been at the center of the Chicago Archdiocese’s efforts to manage priests who had been accused of sexual abuse. When the archdiocese removed an accused priest from ministry, Coughlin frequently became his caretaker, providing services ranging from room and board to spiritual support and advocacy.

Coughlin spent five years running a Catholic facility outside of Chicago where the archdiocese sent priests who were suspected of committing sexual offenses — though Coughlin was not responsible for overseeing the men. He then spent the next five years serving as the vicar for priests, the archdiocesan point man for counseling troubled priests, including those accused of sexual misconduct. Hastert apparently did not know the details of Coughlin’s service, and for the most part, they have never been made public.

“I was dealing with priests that had problems themselves and maybe were causing problems on a staff or causing problems in the community,” Coughlin said in an interview with Roll Call on Monday. “And so in that sense I was pastoring priests.”

In that role, shortly before he came to Washington, D.C., Coughlin petitioned Wisconsin corrections officials to release from prison a Chicago priest who had been convicted of molesting children, according to documents recently released by the archdiocese. The man is still incarcerated, and the Chicago cardinal last year asked Wisconsin to ignore Coughlin’s prior appeal and keep him in custody, concluding that he remains a threat to children and the church is incapable of caring for him.

Coughlin’s role in working with alleged sexual abusers is little-known. Even attorneys who have pursued abuse cases against the Chicago Archdiocese said they did not realize that the center Coughlin ran was where the archdiocese placed suspected priests, and several advocates for victims of clergy sexual abuse said they had not realized that Chicago’s Coughlin was the same Coughlin who became the House Chaplain.

By the time he left the archdiocese for Washington, Coughlin had been professionally responsible at various times for at least a dozen priests who were ultimately forced out of the priesthood. But in most cases, under the archdiocese rules at the time, their conduct was not made public until years after Coughlin left.

Coughlin told Roll Call he did not create the policies for handling accused priests and had no authority to decide how the church should deal with the allegations against them. He was, he said, essentially the priest to these fallen clergy, and his role as vicar was to make sure that they “continued to be motivated to participate” in the protocols for their management that the archdiocese had created. Church officials point out that the archdiocese did not have power to compel compliance by its priests, and their participation in any disciplinary action was voluntary.

Coughlin said he was the point man for carrying out the church’s legal obligations to priests who, under church law, could not simply be fired and cut loose. “My job in that case was, when other people made judgments about whether this person is fit for ministry or not fit for ministry, or needs to take time away to go to treatment or be removed from ministry ... mine was to make sure that priests were living according to the protocol that had been decided.”