What happened to you at St. Agatha was not okay, and the Archdiocese had already been told.

St. Agatha on Douglas Boulevard, in North Lawndale. The church, the rectory, the school on the lot, the basketball program, the after-school program. If you were a kid there any time from 2000 to the start of 2006, and something happened that you have never quite put down, then yes. This is about you. The pastor pleaded guilty back in 2007, so nobody has to prove what he did. What a lawyer wants to know now is a different thing: what did the Archdiocese of Chicago know about him, and when did it know. That part is on paper.

Free
Confidential
No obligation
You never pay a dollar

6 questions. Your answers are private and go to one person.

Looking for the page about the man, not the place? Father Daniel McCormack.

This applies to you no matter what

You weren't one of the five. The plea covered five boys. The Archdiocese has received well over a hundred claims about the same man since, and it has settled with people from St. Agatha as recently as December 2024.
You were on the basketball team, or in SAFE, or just around the rectory after school, not a student at the school. The boys in the 2006 charges came from all of those places.
You never told a soul. Or you told somebody at the parish and nothing happened. Either one. The Attorney General's report says a nun, a grandmother and the Chicago police all told the Archdiocese before January 2006, so a kid not being heard was the pattern, not the exception.
It has been twenty years. For anyone who was a kid at St. Agatha in those years, Illinois law puts no deadline on this. Details below.
You've got a record now, or a diagnosis, or years you'd rather not explain to a stranger. None of that changes what the Archdiocese was supposed to do for you when you were ten.
You're a mother, a brother, a grown daughter asking for someone who won't pick up the phone himself. Reach out anyway.

St. Agatha and Father McCormack: what the public record says, and when

None of what's below is ours. It comes from the Illinois Attorney General, the Archdiocese's own hired investigators, a Cook County courtroom and the reporters who sat in it, and every line links to its source. We don't add to it. Where a fact is a conviction we say conviction; where it is a claim the Archdiocese paid to settle, we say that, because a settlement is not an admission.

October 1999

Six years before St. Agatha's boys were in the news, a nun who ran the school at Holy Family, his previous parish, reported that McCormack had a fourth-grade boy pull his pants down, supposedly to be measured for altar-server robes. McCormack called it poor judgment. An archdiocesan official's answer, in the Attorney General's words: "If the parents aren't pushing it, let it go." No police report. He became pastor of St. Agatha the next year. Illinois Attorney General, McCormack narrative.

September 2003

A grandmother of a boy on the St. Agatha basketball team called the Archdiocese to complain about McCormack. Nobody investigated. The Archdiocese's own review later found the call had been filed as anonymous even though she left her number. Illinois Attorney General, Chicago history of claims.

August 30, 2005

Chicago police arrested McCormack on a child's report of sexual abuse and released him without charges. The review the Archdiocese later commissioned from a former FBI agent found the Cardinal was not told for three days, that the only restrictions were spoken ones, and that the priest assigned to watch him "was not advised as to the purpose for the monitoring." McCormack kept teaching and coaching, and two days after the arrest was named dean of the deanery covering North Lawndale. Defenbaugh & Associates review for the Archdiocese, March 20, 2006.

October 15, 2005

The Archdiocese's own review board recommended in writing that McCormack be removed from ministry. Cardinal George did not act on it; police had not charged him. Four boys later reported abuse between that fall and January. NPR.

January 20, 2006

McCormack was arrested a second time and charged. Only then was he removed from St. Agatha. One civil complaint, filed in 2011, puts his start as pastor at 2000 and says the abuse of that plaintiff went on from 2004 right up to the day of the arrest. CBS Chicago.

July 2, 2007

Daniel McCormack stood in the Circuit Court of Cook County and pleaded guilty to five counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, involving five boys, ages 8 to 12, at the St. Agatha rectory: members of his basketball team and students or friends of students at the school on the campus. Five years in prison. Cardinal George, that day: "The sexual abuse of children is a sin and a crime. When the abuser is a priest, the whole church is affected." McCormack was laicized that November. Associated Press, via NBC News.

May 23, 2023

When the Illinois Attorney General's office published its report on Catholic clergy abuse, it counted 130 people who had reported McCormack. Of those, 104 claims concern abuse after the Archdiocese first had notice, which was 1999. Read that number twice. (He himself was found a sexually violent person by an Illinois court in 2017, held on that until an appellate ruling in 2021, and released that October.) St. Agatha is the last stop on the assignment list there. Illinois Attorney General, McCormack entry.

December 11, 2024

Two settlements, both over after-school programs, and the Archdiocese paid both. May 2022 first: $1.2 million, to a man who was 12 in 2005 when, he said, it happened. Then this one, $950,000, to a man who says McCormack abused him in 2004 in the SAFE after-school program at St. Agatha, 3147 W. Douglas Blvd. His lawyer counts more than $9 million in McCormack settlements from her office alone. Settlements, not judgments. CBS Chicago.

We checked this on September 11, 2026, and the newest thing in it is from December 11, 2024. When something new gets filed or decided, it goes in here within 72 hours, with the link.

Who can be held responsible in a St. Agatha lawsuit

Not the man. He has nothing, and he already went to prison. The cases that have actually paid out at St. Agatha were brought against the Archdiocese of Chicago, and sometimes the Catholic Bishop of Chicago, the corporation that holds the parish. The theory is the same every time and it is not complicated. An institution that puts a priest in charge of a parish, a grade school and a boys' basketball program owes those kids ordinary care. When it has been told, more than once, that this priest is a danger to boys and leaves him in the rectory anyway, the law calls that negligent retention. Where someone knew and chose, Illinois lets a jury go further.

What makes St. Agatha different from most parish cases is that the knowing isn't something a lawyer has to prove from scraps. The Attorney General's office wrote it down: the 1999 report, the 2003 call, the August 2005 arrest, the review board's October 2005 letter the Cardinal set aside. The Archdiocese's own investigators wrote it down first, in March 2006, and the Cardinal said in public he should have found a way to remove him. Those are the facts a St. Agatha complaint pleads.

One honest caveat. Because so many people have already come forward about this one parish, the Archdiocese looks hard at each new claim, and a lawyer will want to go through the specifics with you before anything is filed. That's why the first conversation is with a person, not a form.

Your deadline: the Illinois statute of limitations for what happened at St. Agatha

For anyone who was a kid at St. Agatha in the McCormack years, there is no deadline. Since January 1, 2014, when 735 ILCS 5/13-202.2(f) took effect, Illinois has had no statute of limitations at all for childhood sexual abuse. The catch on other pages we run is that the change did not bring back claims that had already expired under the old rules. Here it doesn't bite, and here's why: the record runs from 2000 to January 2006, so the oldest kid in it was born in the 1980s, and in 2014 nobody from those years had a claim anywhere near expired. No age test, no closing date.

We still ask whether you were born in 1983 or later, for two reasons. The same question sits on every page we run, and some people were at St. Agatha, or at his earlier parishes, before 2000. If that's you, born before 1983 doesn't shut the door; it means a lawyer needs two more facts: when you first connected what happened to the harm it did, and what the Archdiocese said, or hid, along the way. Illinois keeps that second path open when an institution kept quiet.

In plain words. Most St. Agatha kids: no clock at all. Everyone else: probably a path, but it turns on facts only you know. Either way, that's a conversation. Not something a web page can guess at.

Your situation still qualifies even if

You told somebody. A nun, maybe, or a teacher, a coach, your grandmother. Or you told nobody at all. Both are in the record already.
It wasn't Father McCormack. A different priest, a volunteer, a staff member; the case is against the institution either way.
You still go to Mass there, or your mother does. St. Agatha is still open. It got united with St. Martin de Porres in 2022, July 1 to be exact, one pastor for the two of them, but Mass is still said there. And the people in the pews have nothing to do with this.
For a while you loved that basketball team, or the school. Maybe even him. Plenty of people did. It doesn't cancel anything.
You live in Indiana now, or Wisconsin, or the South Side. Same page, same call.

Facilities covered

Start with the church and the rectory at 3147 W. Douglas Blvd, North Lawndale, and the grade school on the same lot (Our Lady of the Westside in his years; by the time it closed in June 2016 it was St. Agatha Catholic Academy). Then the St. Agatha basketball program, the SAFE after-school program, any other parish program he ran. Holy Family on the Near West Side? St. Ailbe in Calumet Heights? Those were his earlier parishes, and the questions work for them too. Answer them and say where on the call.

Questions people are asking

Can I sue St. Agatha church, the parish itself, for what happened there?

In practice you sue the Archdiocese of Chicago, which owned St. Agatha, assigned its pastor and got the warnings about him. People from St. Agatha have been doing exactly that since 2006; the most recent settlement we can point to was December 2024. Whether a lawyer will take your claim depends on what happened and when, which is what the questions above sort out.

Did the St. Agatha priest actually get convicted?

He did, and there's no ambiguity about the number. A separate charge over a sixth boy, filed in 2014, was dropped in 2016; what stands is the guilty plea of July 2, 2007 in the Circuit Court of Cook County to five counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse, five boys, all of them at the St. Agatha rectory. Five years in prison, laicized that November. Five counts, exactly.

The Archdiocese already paid a lot of people. Is there anything left for a new claim?

Nothing has closed. The Archdiocese of Chicago hasn't filed for bankruptcy, there is no claims deadline, and it settled a St. Agatha claim as recently as December 2024. What has changed is that it looks closely at each new one. A lawyer who has done McCormack cases will know what that means for yours.

What does the Illinois statute of limitations say about someone who was a kid at St. Agatha in, say, 2004?

For that person, nothing. Illinois took the limitation period off childhood sexual abuse claims on January 1, 2014, for any claim still alive that day, and every St. Agatha claim from 2000 to January 2006 was alive then. It's alive now. The extra discovery and concealment facts only come into it for people whose contact with him was much earlier.

How much does a sexual abuse lawyer cost?

Nothing, here. Every case is on contingency. The lawyer is paid only out of what is recovered, and if nothing is recovered you owe nothing. Not for the call, not for the review, not for the case.

Who sees your form

Kerim Eravci · Survivor Advocate · Not a lawyer

I was a victim, and I waited. Not because I didn't know what happened to me (I knew every day), but because I'd decided it was over, mine to carry, nobody's business. When I finally went looking for a lawyer, the answer came back in two words I'd never thought about: statute of limitations. My time had run out while I was busy getting through it.

What that has cost me since is a long story, and I'll tell you the whole thing in private, if you want it. The short version is the reason my name is on this page: I'm here to help people do what I wish I'd done, which is find out where you stand while the door's still open.

I'm not a lawyer. I read what you send, I call you once, on your terms, and nothing gets filed unless you say so. Ask sooner than I did.

Kerim Eravci is not an attorney. He's a survivor.

What happens next. Three steps, nothing more until you say so.

You answer 6 questions. Nothing is filed. Nothing starts.
A survivor calls you, once. Not a robot, not a call center. Someone who has been where you are.
You decide. You find out your options. If you want to stop there, you stop there.

How this works

ME2 Survivors Alliance protects the heart. Licensed Illinois attorneys do the legal work. We are not lawyers and we don't pretend to be.

You never pay a dollar

Every case is on contingency. There is no charge for the call, the review, or the case. The firm is paid only out of a recovery, and if there is no recovery you owe nothing.