California bishop banned priest, but that didn’t keep him from ministry around Chicago – By Robert Herguth (Chicago Sun Times) / Feb 19 2021
Despite telling a boy something that the local bishop’s office said amounted to “sexual abuse,” Joseph Jablonski kept working in ministry around Chicago because his order didn’t immediately notify church leaders here.
While ministering in San Bernardino, California, in 2014, a Chicago-area priest named Joseph Jablonski told a boy something that prompted the bishop’s office there, when it found out, to notify the authorities and bar him from ever again ministering in that diocese.
The bishop’s office decided that Jablonski’s words — deemed to be an attempt at “grooming” for a possible sexual encounter — amounted to “sexual abuse,” according to records and interviews.
But that didn’t prevent Jablonski from continuing over the next several years to serve as a priest in other places — including Chicago, Aurora and Joliet.
That’s because, although the Diocese of San Bernardino immediately notified Jablonski’s religious order — the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, whose Chicago-area headquarters is in Aurora — the order, which describes what happened as “an inappropriate conversation,” kept things quiet.
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