Chicago Archdiocese Keeps Silent on Donations from Convicted Politician

The Archdiocese of Chicago is under pressure to return tens of thousands in donations from a city politician convicted of corruption and facing possible prison time.

But while the donations have yet to be returned, several church officials, including Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki, wrote letters to a judge earlier this year asking that former Chicago City Councilman Edward Burke be given a light prison sentence and touting his exemplary status as a Catholic.

While the convicted former city councilman directed more than $100,000 in campaign funds to Catholic projects, his wife Anne Burke was the first leader of the USCCB’s National Review Board, serving as interim chair of the National Child Welfare Board from 2002 to 2004.

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Edward Burke, 80, was sentenced June 24 to two years in prison after being convicted of 13 counts of racketeering, bribery and extortion — for collecting public funds for companies that paid his law firm, bribing government contractors to do business with his firm, accepting a bribe and threatening the Chicago Field Museum with opposing a fee-raising measure when it failed to help him place a son’s friend in an internship.

Prosecutors, calling Burke “greedy” and insisting he had not shown “one shred of remorse,” initially asked U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall to sentence the politician to 10 years in federal prison.

Kendall instead sentenced Burke to two years in prison, citing the number of letters she had received praising Burke’s involvement in the local community.

One letter came from Archbishop Listecki, who wrote that Burke was “a man devoted to the common good” with a commitment to “charitable generosity.”

Listecki, who served as auxiliary bishop of Chicago from 2001 to 2004, wrote that he knew Burke “when I was a priest and auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago.”

“He and his family have always been involved in various charitable works and have supported many civic events,” the archbishop wrote in a March 25 letter.

“I have always been impressed by his family’s involvement in the Church, both locally and nationally,” Listecki added, in a letter he called a “plea for clemency.”

Another letter came from Father Clete Kiley, a Chicago priest who, as a USCCB staff member in the early 2000s, was responsible for coordinating the U.S. bishops’ conference’s response to emerging sex abuse scandals.

Kiley said the former city councilman, who was a seminarian at Chicago’s Quigley Prep High School, helped the church confront the problem of clergy sexual abuse.

Kiley told the judge that when Anne Burke, the former councilman’s wife, was appointed in 2002 as interim chair of the first National Child and Youth Protection Review Board, which oversees compliance with conference policies and specific abuse protection laws, the former councilman “was there to support” his wife’s efforts, demonstrating “moral rectitude and courage.”

With Edward Burke as a city councilman and Anne Burke as a judge — who would later become chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court — both Burkes “lent their moral credibility to combating the moral nightmare” of clergy sexual abuse, the priest said.

Burke did not submit a clemency request to Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, who has been friendly with Burke and his wife since he arrived in 2016 in the Archdiocese of Chicago — and who has credited the Burkes with introducing him to influential Chicago politicians and civic leaders.

But in total, more than a dozen letters came from clergy in the Chicago area.

One of them came from Father Michael Pfleger, the famous “senior priest” of St. Sabina Parish on Chicago’s South Side.

Pfleger said Burke “never asked for anything,” is “deeply committed to his faith” and is “honest, helpful and knowledgeable.”

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When Burke was indicted on corruption charges in 2019, the Archdiocese of Chicago told local reporters that it had not decided whether to return contributions made to Catholic organizations by Burke’s campaign organization — and that it would “await the outcome of the case” before deciding whether to return donations, including a $10,000 donation made by Burke’s campaign to an archdiocesan fundraiser, called “Teaching Who Christ Is.”

According to campaign finance records, Burke’s campaigns and campaign organizations have donated more than $100,000 in total to Catholic parishes, schools and other groups in the archdiocese, including $50,000 since the politician’s indictment.

Some donations were made to schools and parishes administered by the archdiocese, while others went to institutions supported by religious orders.

But now that Burke has been convicted and sentenced to prison, the archdiocese has not responded to questions from The pillar whether any of those funds will be returned — especially given concerns that campaign funds functioned as paywalls for companies hoping to win city contracts.

But Robert Warren, a retired IRS investigator and accounting professor at Radford University, said that because of the uncertainty about the status of those donations, archdiocesan clerics should have refrained from intervening in Burke’s sentencing.

“I think these letters are reckless for a number of reasons,” Warren said. The pillar.

“First, Mr. Burke struggled for years with his public corruption and thus failed to show real contrition until he was indicted, brought to trial, tried, and convicted. Second, the Church received over $100,000 in potentially ill-gotten gains from Mr. Burke’s campaign fund, so Church leaders cannot say that their ministries did not benefit from the fraud. Third, the Church has been largely untransparent in reporting to lay congregants how much Mr. Burke donated, how those funds were used, and whether it intends to return the money to help Mr. Burke pay restitution and court-ordered fines.”

Warren noted that bishops and other clergy are often asked to write letters on behalf of convicted criminals, explaining that “the effect of these letters on the final sentence probably varies from judge to judge.”

The investigator highlighted several cases in which bishops and other priests intervened to advocate for lenient sentences for financial criminals, including several cases in which priests faced prison for crimes committed against the Church.

Warren warned against the practice, stressing that dioceses should be aware of situations where they have conflicts of interest, including those caused by donations received from possible criminal activity.

He also argued that clerics should be concerned with seeing just sentences in all financial cases.

“The judge should impose a sentence that deters the defendant from committing the same crime again, and that also serves as a deterrent to others in a similar situation who might commit a similar crime,” Warren said.

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