PROVIDENCE (RI)
Boston Globe
March 4, 2026
By Edward Fitzpatrick and Christopher Gavin
“If one wishes to learn the teachings of Jesus Christ, they should read the Bible,” Dr. Herbert Brennan said. “If one wishes to understand the Catholic Church, they need only to read this report.”
PROVIDENCE — Almost every victim of sexual abuse by priests feels shame, clergy abuse survivor Dr. Ann Hagan Webb said Wednesday.
“And it’s time for the diocese to feel ashamed,” Webb said after Attorney General Peter F. Neronha unveiled a report detailing how 75 clergy members in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence were credibly accused of abusing more than 300 Rhode Island children since 1950.
“They should be not only responsible legally,” she said. “They should be ashamed [about] the people — the children — that they put in harm’s way.”
In a video response released Wednesday, Bishop Bruce Lewandowski apologized to survivors.
“As the church, we have a sacred duty to protect children and vulnerable people,” Lewandowski said in the video. “As your bishop, I take this responsibility very seriously. There are no credibly accused clergy in active ministry. Today’s Catholic clergy here in Rhode Island are good and holy men serving Christ and his people with devotion and out of genuine pastoral concern.”
But survivors noted that the report showed that when bishops and other supervisors in the church suspected or became aware of the abuse, they moved priests to different parishes instead of protecting vulnerable children.
Webb, who has talked about being abused by a priest at Sacred Heart School in West Warwick from ages 5 to 12, said she has been pushing for years for a report like the one the Attorney General’s office issued.
“Today, for the first time in Rhode Island, the complicity of the Providence Diocese in a crime way of child sexual abuse spanning more than seven decades will be there for all of your to see in black and white,” she said. “This report should make Rhode Island Catholics and non-Catholics alike gasp in horror at the organized culture of coverup.”
Mitchell Garabedian, an attorney who has represented survivors of abuse in Rhode Island, said Wednesday the Attorney General’s office “should be commended for issuing a report.”
“In doing so, it has given a voice to clergy sexual abuse victims who could not otherwise speak and has provided validation to those victims,” Garabedian said in an interview. “But to trust the Diocese of Providence to now protect children after decades of abusing them is akin to trusting seasoned bank robbers to become bank tellers.”
Garabedian said the report’s findings are “typical of any other diocese that allowed clergy sexual abuse and covered it up.”
“It’s a typical story,” he said. “They didn’t miss a beat on the dance card.”
Webb compared the abuse revealed in the report to the files detailing sexual abuse of minors by the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“The Epstein files exposed powerful and wealthy people trafficking and abusing children and young women,” she said. “This report recounts in detail how scores of trusted clerics preyed on the children of Rhode Island.”
Webb said that the diocese essentially “did the trafficking” by reassigning priests to other parishes after they’d been accused of sexual abuse. “They moved the abusers, not the children, but the result was the same,” she said.
Dr. Herbert J. “Hub” Brennan, who has talked about being molested repeatedly as a child by a visiting priest at Our Lady of Mercy School and Church in East Greenwich, compared Neronha’s report to the Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight investigation into abuse in the Catholic Church, which revealed sexual abuse by priests in the Boston Archdiocese.
“It is equally groundbreaking,” Brennan said. “It objectively details — and confirms — what many have long known and some of us have lived through: that the Catholic Church, including the Diocese of Providence, has essentially overseen a child sex ring for generations.”
Neronha’s report should be considered mandatory reading for any person or organization where a child is left unsupervised with an adult, he said, and those donating or transferring assets to the Church might also want to give it a read.
“If one wishes to learn the teachings of Jesus Christ, they should read the Bible,” Brennan said. “If one wishes to understand the Catholic Church, they need only to read this report.”
After the report was released, thediocese also responded in a lengthy statement, emphasizing the report was the result of its “unprecedented and voluntary agreement to extraordinary transparency” with the Attorney General’s Office. The diocese provided investigators access to more than 250,000 files going back to 1950.
The diocese also said the report “reveals no evidence of recent child sexual abuse by clergy, no credible accusations against those in ministry today, and no instances of the diocese’s failure to meet its legal reporting obligations.”
The report states the “vast majority” of the reported abuse occurred during the tenures of Bishops Russell J. McVinney (1948-1971) and Louis E. Gelineau (1972-1997) – a point the diocese highlighted in its response.
For decades, the diocese has staffed its Office of Compliance with trained law enforcement investigators, and the office “vigorously and transparently conducts investigations and has promptly and fully reported allegations of abuse to the police – regardless of credibility,” the statement said.
Over the years, the diocese established a board to advise the bishop in assessing allegations of abuse, and created the Office of Outreach and Prevention “to promote healing and reconciliation by offering compassionate pastoral care to those who have been impacted by clerical sexual abuse.”
“Beginning more than 30 years ago, and improved throughout the following years, the diocese can confidently say that our protections for children have proven to be overwhelmingly effective,” the diocese said.
But Timothy Conlon, an attorney who has sued the diocese on behalf of victims, said the report “reveals, in shocking and sometimes excruciating detail, the lengths to which an entity, however devoted to lofty ideals, in practice employed its resources and legal might to protect itself for decades at the expense of our state’s children — by hiding the dark secret that it used its power to provide shelter to pedophiles.”
Conlon said the report “cannot be the final chapter.”
A 2019 state law extended the deadline for victims of childhood sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits from seven to 35 years after their 18th birthdays. But in 2023, the Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled the law does not retroactively apply to people or institutions who may have enabled the abuse.
“Thus, in Rhode Island, unlike many other states, victims seeking relief for the damages sustained as a result of the heinous, systemic misconduct documented in this report, encounter a system of justice that is not only blind, but turns a deaf ear,” Conlon said.
“Accountability demands action,” he added. “Our Supreme Court made it clear that the need to act falls to the state legislature, if the courts are to be available to bring justice to those victims.”
Claude Leboeuf, a Providence resident who has talked about being raped by a priest when he was a boy in Massachusetts, said, “ The first step to justice means open communication, which is what this report does. It’s extraordinary.”
He said survivors of clergy abuse having been waiting for justice for years.
“It’s not old history,” he said.
Edward Fitzpatrick can be reached at edward.fitzpatrick@globe.com. Follow him @FitzProv. Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.