Nearly $3.2 Million Settlement for Victim Abused by Fr. Daniel McCormack Against Archdiocese of Chicago

Fr. Daniel McCormack served as a parish priest at St. Agatha Church on Chicago's West Side, where he also coached youth basketball. For a young man from a difficult home situation, McCormack became a trusted figure: coach, friend, and spiritual guide. That trust was violated repeatedly. According to court filings and reporting by NBC Chicago, the abuse began when the victim was in eighth grade and continued through eleventh grade.

McCormack was arrested in January 2006 on multiple counts of criminal sexual abuse involving children in his parish. He pleaded guilty in 2007 to abusing five victims and received a five-year prison sentence. After serving roughly two and a half years, he was transferred to a state mental health facility, where prosecutors sought indefinite commitment under the Sexually Violent Persons Commitment Act.

The civil lawsuit, filed in 2010, named both the Archdiocese of Chicago and Cardinal Francis George as defendants. The central allegation was institutional failure: the archdiocese had received warnings about McCormack from its own review board as early as October 2005, yet failed to remove him from ministry until he was arrested a second time, in January 2006. During that gap, the abuse of the plaintiff continued.

Gary Annes and David Abels of Abels & Annes, P.C., co-counseled with William Martin of Hilfman & Martin on behalf of the plaintiff. After years of litigation, the Archdiocese of Chicago agreed to a settlement of nearly $3.2 million, announced on January 30, 2014. The agreement came one week after the archdiocese released a tranche of internal documents related to priest sex abuse cases.

At the time of the settlement, at least two other civil cases involving McCormack remained pending. The plaintiff was 25 years old when the settlement was reached.