A state investigation found that at least 90 clergy members abused 216 children within the Worcester Diocese over more than six decades and identified the diocese as the only one in Massachusetts that still refuses to publicly release a list of clergy credibly accused of child sexual abuse, according to a report Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office released Tuesday, Sept. 30.
The report is the product of a criminal investigation into the Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester that then-Attorney General Maura Healey opened in 2019.
Investigators documented 944 survivors of clergy sexual abuse across the three dioceses combined, tied to 275 accused clergy.
The report says the true number is likely higher given chronic under-reporting.
“For decades, survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including those who are no longer alive, have carried the devastating consequences of abuse, while the institutions entrusted with their care too often failed to protect them,” Campbell said in a statement.
“While important reforms have been made, the report documents decades of failures by diocesan leaders to adequately respond to allegations of child sexual abuse and protect children from further harm.”
Campbell’s office said it cannot bring criminal charges over the misconduct it documented.
Most of it occurred before Massachusetts extended the relevant statutes of limitations and made clergy mandated reporters of abuse in 2002, and many of the accused are now dead.
Scope of the Misconduct
Investigators cautioned that the full scale of clergy abuse in the three dioceses cannot be precisely determined, given decades of underreporting by victims and poor diocesan recordkeeping.
The numbers below reflect all allegations reviewed by investigators — including those against bishops, priests, religious brothers, deacons and nuns — regardless of whether the dioceses themselves deemed the underlying allegations credible.
Worcester. The Worcester Diocese had 90 accused clergy tied to 216 survivors.
The diocese was home to the House of Affirmation, a Whitinsville treatment center for accused priests that one victim said also served as the site of a child sex ring involving clergy connected to the center.
Fall River. The Fall River Diocese had the highest survivor count of the three, with 92 accused clergy tied to 469 survivors.
The diocese was home to one of the state’s most notorious cases: former priest James Porter, who was ultimately accused of molesting hundreds of children and criminally convicted of abusing more than two dozen.
Springfield. The Springfield Diocese had 93 accused clergy tied to 259 survivors — the highest number of accused clergy among the three dioceses.
Two of its own bishops, Christopher Weldon and Thomas Dupre, who together led the diocese for 36 years, appear on the diocese’s own list of clergy credibly accused of raping children.
Dupre was indicted by a grand jury in 2004, though prosecutors later determined the statute of limitations had expired.
Pre-2002 Response
Investigators found that for decades — and especially before 2002, when the Boston Globe’s reporting on the Archdiocese of Boston triggered national reforms, church officials in all three dioceses knew about abuse but did not take effective action to stop it.
The report describes a culture in which priests commanded such deep community trust and reverence that families often protected accused clergy rather than their own children, and in which reports of abuse that reached a supervising priest frequently went no further up the chain.
In one Worcester Diocese case described in the report, a mother learned in the late 1970s that her daughter had been abused by a parish priest, confronted him directly and reported him to his supervisor.
The supervisor never informed the bishop and instead let the priest continue working at the parish, where he had a reputation as an effective fundraiser.
The priest abused at least six other girls in the same parish. Investigators found he ultimately abused well over 50 girls, some as young as 4, over 16 years.
The AG’s report does not name the priest, but the pattern it describes Robert E. Kelley, a former priest at St. Cecilia’s Parish in Leominster.
News reports said Kelley “twice convicted of raping young girls in the 1970s and 1980s,” and whom the survivor law firm Herman Law says “admitted to sexually abusing between 50 and 100 girls” during his time at that parish alone.
Much of the Worcester Diocese’s historical abuse traced back to the House of Affirmation, a treatment center in Whitinsville that operated from 1973 to 1989 and meant to evaluate and counsel priests, including those suspected of sexual abuse.
The report found that the center was co-founded by a Worcester priest later accused of abuse himself, and that priests sent there for treatment were often returned to ministry, where some continued to abuse children.
This reference appears to be to House of Affirmation’s founder and former Worcester priest Thomas A. Kane. Kane was removed from ministry in 1993 after being accused of sexually abusing a boy over several years starting when the boy was 9.
The Telegram & Gazette reported that Bishop Timothy J. Harrington removed Kane in 1993 “for sexual misconduct that occurred in the 1970s,” and that Pope Benedict XVI later accepted his voluntary laicization.
According to one victim’s account, several priests connected to the center participated in a child sex ring. One West Virginia priest sent to the center in 1978 returned to a Northborough parish, where he abused more than a dozen more children over roughly two years before his conduct came to light.
This appears to be a reference to Victor Frobas, a priest from the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, sent to the House of Affirmation for treatment in 1977 and then assigned to St. Rose of Lima Parish in Northborough from 1978 to 1979.
A Worcester County grand jury indicted Frobas on charges, but he died on July 11, 1993, before he could stand trial.
Investigators also found that some Massachusetts law enforcement and prosecutors deferred to the church during this period.
In one instance, a Fall River Diocese priest found in a parked car with a teenage boy in 1963 was released from police custody without being booked after his pastor arrived.
Post-2002 Response
The Dallas Charter, adopted by U.S. bishops in June 2002 following the Globe’s reporting, required dioceses to establish lay-majority review boards, adopt zero-tolerance policies for substantiated abuse, and conduct background checks on clergy, employees and volunteers.
Massachusetts also passed reforms that year criminalizing reckless endangerment of children and expanding the definition of mandated reporters to include clergy.
All three dioceses adopted new policies in response, though investigators found their implementation and rigor have varied.
Worcester. The Worcester Diocese established its Office of Healing and Prevention and a Victim Assistance Coordinator in 2002.
It created a Diocesan Review Committee, composed of seven diocesan clergy and employees and 11 laypeople, including a psychologist, a retired state police officer and a judge.
The review committee is to assess allegations and advise the bishop. The diocese requires criminal background checks every five years and mandatory abuse-prevention training for clergy, employees, and volunteers.
However, investigators found the diocese will not take formal action against an accused priest, or report an allegation to prosecutors, until a victim provides a full written disclosure.
The diocese said it changed the policy in 2013 but that investigators found it being followed as recently as 2019.
The Worcester Diocese’s current child protection policies span 14 pages, and its Code of Ministerial Conduct was last revised in 2021.
Fall River. The Fall River Diocese underwent a significant overhaul of its policies beginning in 2020, reconstituting its review board as the Ministerial Review Board and engaging a third-party investigation firm.
The diocese now conducts background checks every three years and requires safe-environment training every three years, recently shortened from six.
Investigators found the diocese’s code of conduct is difficult for the public to locate on its website, and that until the 2020 changes, the diocese’s Review Board did not hear allegations against retired priests or, until as recently as 2022, resigned priests — allowing some cases to bypass formal review entirely.
Springfield. The Springfield Diocese first adopted a child protection policy in 2003 but did not revise it between 2013 and 2025 — a 12-year gap.
Reforms accelerated after 2019, when the diocese commissioned an outside investigation by a retired judge into its handling of abuse allegations against former Bishop Weldon.
That investigation found the allegations “unequivocally credible” and found the diocese’s complaint process “lacking.”
A subsequent task force and oversight committee developed a three-year reform plan.
The diocese’s review board has nine seats, and investigators found no violations of Massachusetts’ mandatory reporting law, though the diocese has declined to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Attorney General’s Office that it entered into with three district attorneys’ offices in 2020.
Criticisms of Post-2002 Response
Despite the reforms, investigators identified ongoing failures across all three dioceses in supervising accused priests, investigating complaints promptly, and maintaining transparency with the public.
The report found that the Worcester and Fall River dioceses repeatedly allowed accused priests to retire or resign rather than face formal review, letting them keep the appearance — and many times the pay and benefits — of priests in good standing for years or decades.
In one Worcester case, a priest accused of abuse in the early 1980s was reassigned to three more parishes despite the bishop’s promise to the victim’s mother that he would never again have contact with children.
He was not removed from ministry until 2002 and was permitted to retire in 2003, continuing to draw diocesan compensation until his death in 2018.
By the end of 2002, the Worcester Diocese was aware of priests with pending abuse allegations against them; several were eventually permitted to retire. Only 11 were permanently removed from the priesthood.
In a separate case, the Worcester Diocese’s Judicial Vicar publicly announced in 2003 that the diocese was moving forward with canonical trials for six accused priests, saying justice had been “delayed” too long.
Two of those priests retired that same year, and a third resigned, with no evidence of a formal determination ever made. Only two were eventually permanently removed, in 2018 and 2020.
The diocese continued receiving new allegations against five of the six priests in the years that followed but never made those allegations public, according to the report.
The Fall River Diocese’s Credibly Accused List includes 50 diocesan priests, with 33 of them now deceased.
Investigators found the diocese was aware by the end of 2002 of 18 living priests with pending abuse allegations; one was permitted to retire in 2015, and five were later removed.
In some cases, the diocese failed to respond to the Vatican’s own requests for additional information for years, and the Vatican eventually closed the case without action.
Survivors’ Experiences
Investigators said many survivors did not come forward until decades after their abuse, a pattern well documented in research on child sexual abuse disclosure — one study cited in the report found survivors disclosed at an average age of 52.
Reasons cited by survivors interviewed for the report included fear of not being believed, shame, a desire to protect their parents, and the relief that came only after an abuser died.
Delayed and partial disclosures sometimes limited the support survivors received. Members of the Worcester Diocese’s Diocesan Review Committee told investigators that survivors often make an initial oral report but do not follow up with a full written disclosure, sometimes for years.
The diocese will not take formal action or notify prosecutors without one.
Even survivors who disclosed abuse immediately did not always see it stopped.
In one case described in the report, a boy in Worcester in the mid-1980s disclosed abuse by a religious education teacher in confession. Instead of reporting it, the priest hearing the confession began abusing the boy himself and continued for three to four years.
In another, a survivor reported his abuse by a Worcester priest to the bishop in 1994. The priest received a transfer to another parish and remained in active ministry until 2002.
Some disclosures led to swift consequences. In one case, a teenage survivor’s disclosure to a state prisoner during a school trip led to a Worcester priest’s first criminal conviction in 1990.
Credibly Accused List
Investigators’ central recommendation for the Worcester Diocese is that it publish a public list of credibly accused clergy — something every other diocese in Massachusetts has already done.
The report found Worcester is one of just 12 Catholic dioceses nationwide, out of hundreds, that has not published such a list, even though more than 90% of dioceses nationally have done so.
The Worcester Diocese has instead shared the names of credibly accused priests privately with the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office since 2002 and disclosed individual cases on a case-by-case basis through its website and diocesan newspaper, the Catholic Free Press.
Investigators found that practice leaves victims and the public with no way to systematically search for a particular abuser’s name, and said publishing a full list would validate survivors, encourage others to come forward, and help ensure offending priests do not quietly remain connected to their communities.
The Fall River and Springfield dioceses published their own lists in 2021, though investigators found both could be improved.
In Fall River, at least one survivor’s abuser was left off the diocese’s list because the diocese said it could not find a document in which its review board specifically used the word “credible” to describe her case.
In Springfield, which first published a partial list in 2011 and expanded it in 2021, Bishop William Byrne said at the time that “public acknowledgement of those credible allegations is a critically important action that the diocese owes to those survivors who have so courageously stepped forward.”
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