AG report on allegations against clergy in child sexual abuse claims has one Kendall County connection

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s recent report detailing information on 451 Catholic priests and religious brothers who abused almost 2,000 children in the state over seven decades includes one member of the clergy with a connection to Kendall County.

Raoul said May 23 the almost 700-page report adds to the list of 103 substantiated cases listed by the six Illinois dioceses before the state investigation began in 2018.

The report includes 69 documented cases in the Diocese of Joliet, which includes Kendall, Will, Grundy, DuPage and three other counties, and almost doubles what was reported by the diocese in 2018.

One of the 69 cases involves a Lawrence Dudink, a member of the Society of the Divine Word religious order, who resided at LaSalle Manor retreat center near Plano for a time in the early 1960s.

According to the report, Wisconsin authorities charged Dudink with kidnapping a 17-year-old girl in November 1960.

“He allegedly snatched her from a hospital just hours after she had been admitted ‘for treatment of a nervous condition’; he then took her to Arizona, where he held her in a motel for over a month before he was caught and arrested,” the report reads.

In December 1960, Dudink pleaded guilty to the lesser crime of abduction and was sentenced to three years in a Wisconsin prison. He served barely a year, however, before being released in January 1962.

In December 1961, Bishop Martin McNamara of the Diocese of Joliet granted Dudink permission to reside at LaSalle Manor as part of his supervised parole. The bishop, however, warned Dudink he could not perform priestly functions, wear clerical garb, leave without permission, or have contact with the “girl involved in the (Wisconsin) case” or her family, according to the report.

Bishop McNamara arranged for a psychiatric evaluation of Dudink and asked for the advice of a Catholic priest ministering at Dudink’s prison in Wisconsin. McNamara’s requests and their responses suggest that Dudink sexually abused the child whom he kidnapped; indeed, one explicitly evaluated whether Dudink would pose a “sex danger” to children, the report states. Even so—despite knowing that Dudink had likely abused a child and that housing him at LaSalle Manor would give him access to children—McNamara still granted Dudink permission to reside there beginning in January 1962.

The report concludes, “The Attorney General’s investigators asked the Diocese of Joliet to add Dudink to its list of credibly accused abusers. As evidence, the investigators pointed to Dudink’s conviction for abducting a teenage girl and the letter evaluating his risk as a potential ‘sex danger’ to children. The diocese declined to name Dudink, however, because he was neither charged with nor convicted of sexual abuse of a minor.”