Jan Slattery, the first director of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office for the Protection of Children and Youth, died Aug. 16. She was 82.
Slattery was a leader in the effort to protect children in the Catholic Church and in other environments, lending her experience and expertise to people from other dioceses as well as other faith traditions, according to colleagues who have known her since the office began.
“She was instrumental in creating the office, along with so many other people,” said Mayra Flores, director of the Office of Assistance Ministry, part of the Office for Protection of Children and Youth. “It opened up the opportunity to create good content, good policies. She assembled a really good team.”
Slattery was hired in 2003 to create the office in response to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The charter was adopted at the U.S. bishops’ meeting in Dallas in June 2002, after a widespread scandal erupted following the news of priests who had abused children being moved from parish to parish published by the Boston Globe.
Initially, she didn’t want to take the job, she told the archdiocesan newspaper in 2014.
She was working for the archdiocese in higher education ministry and attended the 2002 USCCB meeting, and she experienced the pall that hung over the gathering, she told the Catholic New World.
But she changed her mind because she felt responsible for protecting children.
“In our own lives we have a family of six and we had been foster parents for 15 years. Our lives had been about children,” Slattery said in 2014. “So the more I thought about it, I realized perhaps we could have a long-term impact on the broader population in the safety of children and the quality of their lives.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago had a head start in forming the office compared to other dioceses because it had started its victim assistance ministry, where Flores was assistant to the director, and its Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigated allegations of clerical sexual abuse of minors and included an independent review board, in the early 1990s.
The Office of Professional Responsibility was led by Leah Heffernan, now director of OPCY.
“We all had to work together,” said Heffernan. “We had to learn from each other. We had to collaborate and take the charter and put it in practice, the parts that we didn’t already have in practice.”
That included mostly parts of the charter and its accompanying essential norms that were focused on creating a safe environment for children, and, in a later revision to the charter, other vulnerable people.
“She could focus on safe environment when other dioceses had to start from scratch,” Flores said. “It’s not to say assistance ministry couldn’t get better, or child abuse investigation and review couldn’t get better. But she had to focus that safe environment piece to meet the needs of this huge archdiocese with such varied resources. It could not be a one-size-fits-all. That was one of the things that was hardest.”
At the same time, she was a public face of the archdiocese as it responded to increasing reports of sexual abuse, many of them from decades earlier.
“She knew that the office had to start out strong,” Flores said. “There was no light entry to this work. ... She was saying, ‘You don’t shy away from this sin of the church. You make it right for victims, you make it right for the people in the pews.’”
Slattery remained active, advising and serving on several boards and other bodies dealing with clerical sexual abuse of children after retiring from the archdiocese, including the USCCB’s National Review Board.
Born Janet Ann McConnell in Monticello, Iowa, Slattery joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary after graduating from high school in Clinton, Iowa. She studied biology at Mundelein College, and after graduating and leaving the religious community, she taught at St. Benedict and Marillac high schools. She earned a master’s degree in higher education administration from Loyola University Chicago, and worked there as an administrator in student affairs before joining the Archdiocese of Chicago.
She is survived by her husband of 58 years, Jerry Slattery; her children Kristin Slattery, Matt Slattery, Sat Hari Khalsa, Daniel Slattery, Megan Oberg and Kenzi Slattery; seven grandchildren; and two sisters, Kay Conroy and Jo Miller.