#USA #IL – The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago reached out-of-court settlements totaling $5.4 million with nine people who accused eight Chicago-area priests of sexually abusing them as children, attorneys announced on September 10th, 2026.
The agreements were finalized in the two weeks before the announcement. The alleged abuse dated from the early 1970s through the late 1990s. The claimants were between 6 and 14 years old at the time, according to their lawyers. All eight priests named in the cases were deceased.
Attorney Marc Pearlman, who represented some of the claimants, told reporters that the payments themselves were significant. “Nobody’s paying that kind of money for something that didn’t happen,” he said. “This is validation that it happened.”
The priests and the parishes or schools where they served were identified as:
- Fr. Michael Cepon, St. Mary of the Assumption Church, Chicago
- Fr. Russell Romano, Quigley Preparatory Seminary South High School, Chicago
- Fr. Clement Carroll, Our Lady of Peace School, Chicago
- Fr. William Devereux, St. Martha of Bethany Church, Morton Grove
- Fr. James Sayers, St. Joseph Parish and St. John Neumann Parish, Homewood
- Fr. Norbert Mayday, Our Lady of the Ridge, Chicago Ridge
- Fr. David Braun, St. Francis Xavier campus of Saints JFX School, Wilmette
- Fr. William O’Connor, St. Paul Catholic Church, Chicago Heights
Two of the nine settlements involved accusations against Mayday. Four of the eight priests — Cepon, Carroll, Sayers and O’Connor — did not appear on the archdiocese’s public list of clergy members with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse of minors.
The law firms Jeff Anderson & Associates and Pearlman and Anderson represented the claimants. Attorney Melissa Anderson said the settlements provided “some sort of measure of justice” for their clients. The firms said they had obtained more than $130 million in settlements from the archdiocese over more than two decades. At the same news conference, they unveiled a searchable database of Catholic clergy accused of sexual abuse or misconduct involving minors.
The Archdiocese of Chicago said in a statement that it had paid more than $400 million to survivors in total and that its child-protection policies had been in place since 1992. Officials noted that the newly settled claims involved incidents alleged to have occurred 30 to 50 years earlier, a timeframe they described as consistent with most claims still coming forward.
“We continue to ask for survivors to come forward,” the statement said. “They will be received with dignity and compassion.” The archdiocese also said that in the previous two years it had seen a surge of new claims, some of which it characterized as false, and that it viewed fraudulent filings as a disservice to genuine survivors.
According to figures cited by the claimants’ attorneys, the archdiocese had settled roughly 300 cases involving alleged sexual abuse of minors since 2001, involving about 100 accused perpetrators.
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