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St. Sabina plans to withhold monthly $100,000 assessments until investigation of the Rev. Michael Pfleger complete

Chicago Tribune - 2/28/2021

St. Sabina Church plans to stop paying about $100,000 in monthly assessments to the Archdiocese of Chicago to try to hasten the investigation into decades-old sexual abuse allegations involving the Rev. Michael Pfleger.

Tonia Carr, chair of the Auburn Gresham church’s cabinet, said at the Sunday morning service that it’s the “next strategic move to keep the pressure on the archdiocese to expedite the alleged abuse investigation.”

Parish supporters have organized around Pfleger’s return for weeks, and the announcement was met with applause Sunday. Carr said St. Sabina will hold on to the funds starting in March and pay when the investigation is closed.

The archdiocese did not respond to request for comment.

The church’s effort to move the investigation along follows the Friday release of a letter from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services that said its investigation concluded as “unfounded.”

But the archdiocese said Pfleger would not be immediately returning to the parish, noting that the agency’s review confirmed that under state law, it may only make a finding about whether credible evidence of abuse or neglect exists in cases where a child is currently involved. Pfleger’s two accusers are brothers in their 60s.

“The Independent Review Board of the archdiocese will conduct its investigation into the allegations and will communicate its findings in due course,” an archdiocese spokesperson said last week. “Father Pfleger will remain away from the parish pending the outcome of that process.”

Pfleger’s attorneys, James Figliulo and Michael Monico, have said the brothers’ claims are false and stem from them seeking a financial settlement. The attorneys also have said Pfleger should be allowed to return to the church. Figliulo called the archdiocese response to the DCFS finding “misleading” and said it “attempts to minimize the significance of the very investigation and report that the archdiocese itself has cited as a reason for delaying its decision to return Father Pfleger to St Sabina’s.”

Pfleger, 71, has said he is innocent. “When this is over, which i hope is soon i will have much more to say,” he wrote in a Facebook post last week.

In a January interview, the men told the Tribune that Pfleger molested them dozens of times over several years. They said the abuse began in the 1970s after they joined the choir of Precious Blood Catholic Church near their West Side childhood home. Pfleger was a seminary student at the time.

The brothers, who live in Texas and have asked not to be publicly named, said they were victimized in Pfleger’s rectory bedrooms at three churches including St. Sabina, where the priest has been assigned since his May 1975 ordination.

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