The state attorney general's office announced findings this week that clergy in the Catholic dioceses of Fall River, Worcester, and Springfield abused nearly a thousand children.
Mindy Todd, host of The Point, spoke to CAI’s Gilda Geist to learn more.
Mindy Todd Tell us about this report. Why now, when the general public has known about the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse problem since the early 2000s, when the Boston Globe Spotlight team published its findings?
Gilda Geist This particular investigation by the attorney general’s office started in 2019, and what sets it apart from previous reporting and state investigations is that while those investigations focused on the Archdiocese of Boston, this most recent one focused on the dioceses of Fall River, Worcester, and Springfield.
This report is more than 200 pages and is extremely detailed. It goes through not only the actual abuse that happened, but also the institutional failures that allowed it to persist. It also includes assessments of the dioceses’ current policies and practices around how child sex abuse allegations are handled and makes recommendations for how those policies and practices can be strengthened.
Toward the end of the report is a series of impact statements from people who say they were abused by clergy. While the report itself is thorough and detailed, these first-hand accounts are especially powerful and demonstrate not only how the abuse itself was harmful to children, but how it went on to impact their lives as adults.
One of those people was Edna Wallace, who says she was sexually assaulted by a nun at an orphanage in Worcester.
“She separated me because she wanted to abuse me how she wanted to. And she did a good job, because when I left there at twelve, I ended up with epilepsy,” she said. “I will never forget what she has done to me, and it stays with me.”
And the report ends with a list of resources for victims of child sex abuse, which I’ll talk more about later.
MT The report covers three dioceses, and you took a closer look at the report’s findings for the Fall River Diocese. What did you find?
GG Yeah, so first of all I should say, the Fall River Diocese covers much more than Fall River. It includes the entire South Coast, the Cape, and the Islands.
The report explains that the number they were able to land on for how many people were abused is not exact. Because of the sheer number of allegations, it just wasn’t possible to vet them all for credibility, so the purpose of reporting these numbers is to give a sort of idea of how widespread this was. And before I go into those numbers, I think it’s worth noting that the vast majority of child sex abuse claims are true. That’s according to a study in the Journal of Child Sex Abuse, which can be found on the National Institutes of Health website.
So, the total number of survivors—that’s the language used in the report—is 944. Two hundred fifty-nine survivors say they were abused in the Springfield Diocese, 216 in the Worcester Diocese, and 469 in the Fall River Diocese. And each diocese had about 90 clergy accused of child sex abuse.
So, if we have nearly 500 people who say they were abused as children in the Fall River Diocese, and about 90 accused clergy, that tells us that a lot of these abusers were repeat offenders. The reason that matters is that there were so many times in this report where there was evidence that leadership in the diocese knew that their clergy had accusations against them, and they were allowed to remain in active ministry or continue working with children, giving them more opportunities to abuse.
A lot of us are familiar with this dynamic from the Globe’s past reporting, where church leadership would hear allegations against a member of their clergy and would then reassign them elsewhere. And that was definitely happening in the Fall River Diocese. But there were also times where the diocese did other things to protect clergy that didn’t involve allowing them to continue active ministry. For example, it was pretty common for accused clergy to be placed on so-called “sick leave” or be allowed to retire or resign and tell everyone that their departure was for “medical reasons.”
This did a couple things: one, it created major gaps in the Fall River Diocese’s records because they were often not documenting the real reason these clergy were leaving; and two, it allowed the accused to go get other jobs where they’d be working with children.
One very chilling example is that in 1986, the bishop of the Fall River Diocese at the time allowed a known repeat offender to resign citing medical reasons, and he was not laicized, meaning he was not stripped of his sort of priestly status. Within three years of his resignation, this man had a job as a substitute teacher at a public school on Cape Cod, and he worked there for nine years. This would have been roughly 1989 to 1998.
And in 2003, a journalist reached out to the diocese about this, and a spokesperson apparently told them—this is in the report—that they didn’t know the priest was working as a sub, and that it basically wasn’t their responsibility to follow this guy around and make sure he wasn’t harming other children.
So, while a lot of the abuse described in the report happened decades ago, there’s evidence that up until very recently, the diocese did not do enough to make sure that accused clergy weren’t around kids. For example, the Fall River Diocese review board—which was set up in the 1990s to help deal with child sex abuse allegations—as late as 2022, the board did not review allegations against priests who had already resigned.
MT What has been the Fall River Diocese’s response to this report?
GG Edgar da Cunha put out a statement—he’s been the bishop there since 2014. He apologized and explained everything the diocese was doing to try to be better.
In 2019, when the attorney general’s investigation began, da Cunha put out a statement saying the diocese would be looking into its records and compiling a list of accused clergy that had been part of the diocese. They published that list in 2021, and say they’ve been updating it since then. And da Cunha points to that list in his most recent statement.
The list includes 59 names of credibly accused clergy. Most were priests and most are dead. Each name also includes a list of everywhere each clergy member worked while in the Fall River Diocese. I looked through the list and saw placements in 12 out of 15 Cape Cod towns, both islands, and almost every single town on the South Coast. So, these credibly accused clergy were working all over this region for decades.
The diocese has known for a while that this report would be coming out because they turned over records to the attorney general’s office in the investigation, so I wouldn’t expect the release of this report to spur big changes in the Fall River Diocese. The report says that a lot of important changes to policy were already made in the diocese starting in 2020, and the report does sort of give them credit for that. But it also points out that there were major policy overhauls in 1992 and 2002, and we know that institutional failures to protect children continued anyway.
I’m going to read a quote from the report that I think sums up the big, outstanding issue: “While we are encouraged by the dioceses’ recent reforms, we recognize that a policy is only as effective as its implementation.” So, if the Fall River Diocese follows its own policies, children are probably a lot safer there now than they once were. But everything sort of hinges on that one word: “if.”
MT What happens next?
GG Legally speaking, not much. Attorney General Andrea Campbell said her office is not able to press criminal charges stemming from this report. Campbell explained that some of that is because the abuse was apparently not illegal at the time that it happened.
“In other cases, the statute of limitations had already expired,” she said. “And when a statute of limitations has expired, a later change in the law does not allow prosecutors to go back and reopen those cases.”
She did say she referred three cases to local district attorney’s offices. I asked the Bristol County and Cape and Islands district attorneys if they got any of those cases, and they have not responded to me.
I think the fact that the state isn’t pressing charges is confusing and upsetting for a lot of people. I mean, we just got this 200+ page report that is just full of horrific and disturbing stories, and people want accountability, understandably so. But Campbell says the investigation was still important, even if it didn’t result in criminal charges.
“They do not make the abuse less serious, and they certainly do not diminish the harm that was done to children and survivors,” she said. “Our responsibility was to follow the evidence as far as the law allowed us to go.”
I think it’s important to remember that legal accountability isn’t the only form of accountability. One anonymous woman wrote in her victim impact statement that she never wanted to go through the legal process to get redress for her experiences—she was sexually assaulted multiple times over the years by a priest in the Worcester Diocese who worked at her school and was the chaplain for the Massachusetts State Police. She wrote that what she wanted was “restorative justice.” In 2002 she set up a meeting with two leaders in the diocese, and told them everything she went through. She said she found this cathartic, but that feeling was short lived, as it took months for the diocese to review her case and deem her “credible.” And, they didn’t do most of what she asked for, and these weren’t especially huge asks. She had wanted her abuser’s picture to be taken down at her old school, and for the diocese to reach out to the state police and ask them to stop giving out awards in her abuser’s name. She asked for backpay for her counseling costs, but the diocese only agreed to pay for future counseling sessions.
And, a lot of these accused clergy are dead, so it’s not like they could go to jail even if Campbell were to press charges. I think this whole thing is really forcing the conversation of, what can be done for victims when there’s no legal recourse?
In light of that, I want to talk for a moment about resources for child sex abuse survivors. The ones listed in the report are Bishop Accountability, Voice of the Faithful, and Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
And for folks interested in learning more about how to keep kids safe, check out Children’s Cove. That’s a local child advocacy center that helps police with child sex abuse cases, but they also have a very strong community engagement and education program. The manager of that program is Jacob Stapledon, and he invites folks to reach out to him.
“Barnstable County Children's Cove is here as a resource for any member of our community who has questions or concerns, or they need help accessing services, or even if they would like to learn a little bit more about these issues and get some education and training,” he said. “We are here for all members of our community.”
