More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over decades, according to an investigative report the state’s attorney general released on Wednesday.
The report provided what Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the first full public accounting of the abuse and institutional failures that allowed it to proliferate for more than half a century at the Catholic dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester.
Most of the abuse detailed in the report occurred before 2002, the year the clergy sex abuse scandal burst onto the international stage due to a Pulitzer Prize-winning report by the Boston Globe on how officials at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston routinely covered up sex abuse by priests.
The state attorney general’s investigation documented years of similar issues at the three dioceses in other parts of Massachusetts, which Campbell said knew children were being abused by priests and other clerics.
“Too often they protected the reputation of the church rather than protecting children,” Campbell said.
The report counted at least 275 members of the clergy who were accused of abusing 944 children.
“Behind every one of those numbers is a child whose safety was violated, a family that was changed forever, and a survivor who carried the trauma of that abuse for years and, in many cases, decades,” Campbell told reporters.
The Diocese of Worcester, in a statement, said it would study the report “to identify any additional improvements that can be made to respond to victims of past abuse and to continue to strengthen efforts to keep children safe.”
Fall River Bishop Edgar da Cunha issued an apology to survivors of child sexual abuse, saying he was “filled with sorrow over the historical account of incidents and practices reflecting the tragic failings to protect our most vulnerable.”
Springfield Bishop William Byrne in a statement called the report “humbling.” He said prior to its release, his diocese had been “busy correcting our past failures, putting into place many new, trauma-informed policies and procedures.”
The 2002 reporting by the Boston Globe, which was later chronicled in the 2015 Oscar-winning movie “Spotlight,” set off a global wave of investigations that found similar patterns at dioceses worldwide and prompted the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of reforms.
In 2019, then-Attorney General Maura Healey, now Massachusetts governor, launched a criminal probe into the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester to determine if they or their leadership bore responsibility in connection to their supervision of clergy who abused children.
Campbell, who said she herself was a victim of child abuse at the hands of a relative, said her office made three referrals to local district attorneys during the probe, leading to charges in one case in Worcester.
Her office did not pursue any prosecutions due to some conduct not being illegal at the time it occurred or because the statute of limitations had expired, she said.
Campbell said the report demonstrated the need for the dioceses to institute reforms and for new state laws supporting abuse survivors, including eliminating the statute of limitations for civil claims involving childhood sexual abuse.
