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Representatives of all six dioceses in Illinois cooperated with the investigation by meeting with the attorney general and her staff, voluntarily producing thousands of documents and providing access to hundreds of clergy files related to abuse allegations, the Illinois report said.

Once the attorney general’s office began investigating, the report said, the Illinois dioceses disclosed the names of 45 more clergy who were deemed by the church to be credibly accused of abusing minors — most of them cases the dioceses knew about for years.

“I want to express again the profound regret of the whole church for our failures to address the scourge of clerical sexual abuse,” Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, said in a statement. “It is the courage of victim-survivors that has shed purifying light on this dark chapter in church history.”

In Chicago, Illinois’ largest city, Roman Catholics have long dominated some neighborhoods and have held a place in the political fabric of the city. Thirty-three percent of residents in the Chicago area are Catholic, tying with Philadelphia as having the second-highest density of Catholics in an American city, according to a 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

Kate Bochte, a spokeswoman in the Chicago area’s branch of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that the idea that nearly three-quarters of the allegations were not deemed credible was a “huge indicator that the church is incapable of these investigations.

“And think about all those people who came in — 75 percent of the people — what happened to them?” she said. “They were basically turned away after they explained the most difficult thing that had ever happened to them. They were left on their own — just basically, like, we don’t believe you.”

Ms. Madigan, a Democrat who served four terms as Illinois’ attorney general and is days away from leaving office, said she had two reasons for bringing preliminary findings forward at this point. She said that survivors of abuse were owed a sense that their concerns were being pursued. Since her office announced a hotline for survivors to report such abuse several months ago, 300 people have called.