A new lawsuit alleges that Bishop Louis E. Gelineau, the former leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, raped an altar boy at St. Luke’s Church in Barrington in the 1980s.
Gelineau, who died in 2024 at age 96, has never before been publicly accused of sexually abusing children.
For 25 years, Gelineau oversaw a system where priests accused of abuse were moved from parish to parish and to treatment centers and back, keeping those incidents quiet.
Now, the former altar boy, a Newport man who is 56, is suing the diocese for abuse that he said he suffered from Gelineau and two other priests, including one who was credibly accused of molesting other children.
In the lawsuit, filed on Friday in Providence County Superior Court — one of more than 100 lawsuits filed against the Diocese since July — he alleges that “St. Luke’s was the center of a ring of pedophiles led by Bishop Gelineau himself.”
When asked about the allegations, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Providence said that diocesan responses to the lawsuit, “will be confined to that forum.”
A priest accused. A planned transfer to another parish. Two decades after scandal, history repeats itself.
After a scathing report about sexual abuse by clergy, can the Catholic Church in R.I. keep the faithful?
The man, who is identified as John Doe in the lawsuit, told the Globe in an exclusive interview about his struggle to come forward. (The Globe does not name alleged victims of sexual abuse without their permission.)
“I’d say all the time, ‘I wish I had spoken up.’ But I couldn’t,” he said, during the interview, in which he confirmed the allegations in the lawsuit. “Who’s going to believe a 13-year-old? Or, are they going to believe the esteemed ‘Pope of Rhode Island’?”
When Gelineau became the sixth bishop of the Providence Diocese in December 1971, about two-thirds of Rhode Islanders identified as Catholic. It is still the most-Catholic state in the US.
During his 25 years as the leader of the Catholic community in Rhode Island, Gelineau took action against causes and people whom he believed went against Catholic teachings.
He also oversaw the 157 churches and 62 schools in the state’s only Roman Catholic Diocese.
John Doe was around 10 years old when he began serving as an altar boy in the early 1980s in Barrington, at St. Luke’s Church, under the Rev. Oscar Ferland.
Ferland “showed him special attention from the start,” the lawsuit alleges.
The priest began abusing him soon after he became an altar boy, summoning him into the sacristy, the rectory, and the church basement under the guise of needing help with “altar boy duties,” according to the lawsuit.
The abuse began with groping and fondling, and progressed over time to rape, throughout his teens, according to the lawsuit.
“He would usually say to me he was helping me discover who I was as a person,” John Doe said in an interview. “It completely destroyed my psyche.”
Ferland is on the diocese’s list of credibly accused clergy, with complaints that he had sexually abused boys and girls going back to 1964, according to an investigative report released by the Rhode Island attorney general’s office in March. Ferland died in 1998.
In the lawsuit, John Doe also alleges that another priest, the Rev. Clifford J. Cabral, molested him during outings at Rocky Point Amusement Park with groups of altar boys. Cabral, who is not on the diocese’s list, died in 2023.
St. Luke’s is a wealthy parish in a wealthy town, and Gelineau, the bishop, visited it occasionally. During one particular trip, in 1983 or 1984, according to the lawsuit, John Doe met Gelineau.
Gelineau was “very charismatic. He knew how to hold a room,” John Doe recalled. “He was always smiling and jovial.”
After Mass that evening, Gelineau, the clergy, and some of the altar boys went to the rectory for dinner, according to the lawsuit. Ferland told John Doe that the bishop wanted a tour of the rectory.
“I’ll never forget this as long as I live,” John Doe told the Globe.
They climbed the stairs to the second floor, where Ferland’s bedroom was. “As they walked up the stairs, Bishop Gelineau picked up a jar of Vaseline sitting on the small table outside Ferland’s room,” according to the lawsuit. “Once in the bedroom, Bishop Gelineau violently sexually assaulted . . .[John Doe].”
When his mother came to pick him up, John Doe said nothing, he told the Globe. He remembered taking a long shower and crying himself to sleep.
“I couldn’t ask for help,” he said in the interview. “I was brought up in a super-strict Catholic family, where the church is almighty.”
About a year later, Gelineau returned to St. Luke’s and asked to see John Doe again, the lawsuit alleges. ”On this visit, prior to Mass, Bishop Gelineau requested that [John Doe] join him in Ferland’s room in the rectory. Once in the bedroom, Gelineau again sexually assaulted [John Doe],“ the lawsuit says.
“I didn’t even fight it,” John Doe remembered during the interview. “I knew I wasn’t winning this battle.”
Gelineau retired in 1997 and died in 2024.
John Doe said he stayed silent about the abuse for decades.
“Growing up and living in Rhode Island, I’m well aware of the power of the Catholic Church, and my experience with Bishop Gelineau,” John Doe said. “I knew the pushback I would get if I started to speak about that publicly.”
Then, a few years ago, he happened to catch the movie “Spotlight” during a flight. He recognized himself in the story about sexual abuse and coverups in the Boston Archdiocese.
“I got off the plane and I was blubbering, I was so emotionally distraught and exhausted from watching that movie. Oh, my God, that’s exactly what I went through,” John Doe said. “And then I saw in the movie that there were actually people that were helping people like myself and that maybe I can finally speak about this and not be labeled by the church folk.”
He contacted a lawyer, who explained the statute of limitations to bring this kind of lawsuit in Rhode Island had expired.
This year, Rhode Island passed a state law that gives alleged victims of childhood sexual abuse an opportunity to sue the institutions that allowed that abuse.
John Doe contacted the Grant & Eisenhofer law firm, which filed the lawsuit on his behalf on Friday in Providence County Superior Court.
It’s the first to publicly accuse Gelineau of sexual abuse, said lawyer Steven Kelly.
Charismatic and charming, in addition to overseeing the church, Gelineau wielded political power.
He led the excommunication of an outspoken leader of Planned Parenthood. He stood against a gay-rights ordinance in Providence.
And he forced Arlene Violet, a nun with the Sisters of Mercy for 23 years, to leave the sisterhood when she asked for permission to run for attorney general in 1984.
“He said, ‘I don’t think people should be in politics [and] in the religious life,’” she said in an interview. “In retrospect, the ultimate irony was the church was always in politics.”
Violet won the election that year, and her office prosecuted four priests accused of sexual abuse of children. Dozens of lawsuits followed from people alleging they were abused by clergy.
Violet said that Gelineau did not speak with her about them.
In 1990, Gelineau promulgated the diocese’s first written policies and procedures for responding to complaints of sexual misconduct.
He made clear that a priest is bound by the “seal of confession,” and that a priest who hears confession of child sexual abuse may not disclose it to authorities or act upon the admission.
According to a report from Attorney General Peter F. Neronha in March that investigated how the diocese handled complaints of child sexual abuse since 1950, the diocesan policy also kept confidential allegations and admissions of child sexual abuse made outside of confession on the grounds of “Internal Forum.”
In 1997, when the bishop was ordered to testify under subpoena by the state in a criminal case against a priest accused of rape, Gelineau testified that under canon law, his conversation with the priest was confidential.
A Superior Court judge ruled Gelineau could not be compelled to testify during the trial.
Gelineau retired soon after.
Violet said she was surprised by the new allegations against Gelineau. “But, I’m jaded by all of this by now,” she said. “I’m more disappointed. ... You are the shepherd of the flock and [should] do no harm to them.”
A spokesperson for the diocese declined to answer questions about Ferland, Cabral, or Gelineau.
“Accounts of victim survivors stir emotions and anguish, remind us of real pain experienced, but also efforts over many decades for healing and reconciliation,” Michael F. Kieloch, the diocese director of communications and public relations, wrote in an email on Monday.
“Claims like those recently asserted, on average from 50 years ago, present many challenges for courts and litigants including lost evidence, unavailable witnesses, altered memories and the opportunity for spurious claims to enter the court system.”
Neronha has said that the true scope of abuse throughout the Providence Diocese was likely greater than the state investigators knew.
His report showed state investigators suspected the diocese did not turn over documentation of all of the incidents of abuse by clergy, and child sexual abuse was not routinely documented in the priests’ files.
Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine priest and a lawyer with expertise in the church legal system, said that in nearly every litigation he’s seen, documents can be found. “Because the secret has always been, ‘Don’t look,’” he said. “‘Have a policy to retain documents, but don’t look.’”
John Doe said he hopes his lawsuit directly accusing the bishop of abuse will bring accountability.
“It needs to change,” John Doe said. “You can’t use faith as a tool to destroy human beings.”
