WORCESTER (MA)
Boston Globe
October 7, 2026
By Matt Damiano
EAST BROOKFIELD — In 2021,a young parishioner in the rural middle of the state told a visiting priest that the Rev. Alan J. Martineau had cultivated a special relationship with her and then inappropriately touched her. Beginning in 2019, the girl said, Martineau repeatedly hugged, kissed, and touched her. Martineau also exchanged tens of thousands of text messages with the girl, investigators later found.
Notified multiple times, the bishop of the diocese, Robert Joseph McManus of Worcester, sought to do what church leaders before him had done so often: transfer Martineau to another parish where he would receive the “tutelage” of an older priest.
But before that transfer occurred, a social worker with the diocese decided the allegations had become so serious that they must be reported to the state, so she called the Department of Children and Families.
Ultimately, instead of moving to another parish, Martineau would become the lone priest prosecuted in connection with the Massachusetts attorney general’s years-long investigation into the dioceses of Worcester, Fall River, and Springfield, which concluded last week.
The details of the diocese’s handling of the Martineau case, reported here for the first time, contain echoes of the practices that rocked the Catholic Church two decades ago and that church leaders said were consigned to a shameful past. The church once shuffled accused priests from parish to parish, a practice the Vatican itself has since condemned. Now the church promises to proactively notify law enforcement of allegations of abuse — and Massachusetts passed a law requiring disclosure to the state within 30 days.
The Martineau case, as detailed in previously impounded court records obtained by the Globe, played out over a decidedly longer timeline. Nearly five months elapsed between a meeting when McManus was informed of the initial allegations and when the diocese contacted authorities. In those intervening months, increasingly serious allegations about Martineau’s conduct emerged, including an alleged campaign of retaliation against the victim’s family and details about the approximately 80,000 text messages the priest exchanged with the underage girl.
[PHOTO: Terence McKiernan (left) and Anne Barrett, co-directors of BishopAccountability.org, talked to media outside Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s press conference on Sept. 30. They want Bishop Robert McManus, of the Worcester Diocese, to release the names of accused priests. – Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff]
In a statement, Ray Delisle, chancellor and director of communications for the diocese, said that the “initial concerns raised in the early fall of 2021 by the victim and her family were about boundaries and poor judgment, but not sexual in nature. Additional outreach continued with the family who alleged that the pastor was not treating them appropriately and displaying poor pastoral judgement…”
“It was finally revealed in late January 2022 to our Victim Assistance Coordinator, a licensed social worker who specializes in child abuse, that there was something sexual that took place,” Delisle said. That triggered a mandatory report to the state and a notification to the Worcester district attorney’s office, Delisle said. The court records say that McManus himself asked the social worker to speak with the victim.
Until now, the Martineau case, which was ultimately prosecuted by the Worcester district attorney’s office, was shrouded in secrecy. The case files were impounded. In the public database of Massachusetts court cases, it was as if the prosecution had never happened.
On Sept. 30, when Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced the wide-ranging findings of her investigation into the conduct of three dioceses over the course of a century, she included a brief mention that only said her office had referred a case to the Worcester district attorney that resulted in a prosecution, but did not provide more details.
The Globe identified the case and obtained the court records about the proceedings. The records show Martineau accepted a plea deal in September 2025 in which he agreed that sufficient facts existed to convict him of assault and battery, though he did not plead guilty to that crime.After the plea agreement, the case was dismissed.Martineau had initially been charged with indecent assault and battery on a person aged 14 or older and pleaded not guilty. The court gave him a year of probation and ordered him not to contact the victim, but then his probation was ended early in June this year.
According to Martineau’s lawyer, the charges were reduced because the prosecution could only muster enough evidence to prove Martineau had hugged the victim. “This is the weakest [priest abuse] case I’ve seen,” the lawyer, Louis P. Aloise, said.
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette previously reported the plea agreement.
Martineau was out of work and living with his parents earlier this year, according to the court records. Attempts to reach him and his parents were not successful and Aloise said he did not believe Martineau wished to comment.The diocese hassaid Martineau can no longer present himself as a priest, although he has petitioned to be reinstated, Aloise said. At the time of the allegations, Martineau led the parishes of St. Paul and St. Stanislaus in Warren.
The investigation released by Campbell last week began in 2019, and it found evidence that more than 270 Catholic clerics abused nearly 1,000 children over several decades in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester. It was the most exhaustive investigation since a similar probe of the Archdiocese of Boston released in 2003.
[PHOTO: Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell last week unveiled a sprawling investigation into decades of clergy sex abuse in the dioceses of Worcester, Springfield, and Fall River. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff]
Campbell said the majority of instances identified in the report had occurred before the church scandal erupted in the early 2000s and many could not be prosecuted due to statutes of limitations or because the alleged abuse wasn’t considered a crime under state law when it occurred.
In the decades since the height of the priest abuse scandal, the Worcester diocese has been an outlier by resisting certain reforms, including calls by advocates and Campbell to release a list of names of credibly accused priests. Campbell’s report also criticized the Worcester diocese for how it monitored priests, including those accused of abuse.
One paragraph in the attorney general’s report refers to the Martineau case as an example, although it does not name the priest or discuss his prosecution.
Bishop McManus learned of the allegations against Martineau no later thanSept. 9, 2021, according to the court records obtained by the Globe.
On that day, he met with Martineau and another priest from the Worcester diocese, Alfredo Porras. Porras had convened the meeting after hearing from a young parishioner that Martineau had inappropriately touched her. Porras had then confronted Martineau about the accusation.
Now, in the Sept. 9 meeting, Porras told the bishop that Martineau had confessed, at least partially. When initially confronted by Porras, Martineau “agreed that he had held hands with [the victim] and might have kissed her on the forehead at some point, but denied any other allegations,” Porras explained to the bishop, according to the court records. The victim was 14 years old the year the alleged touching began, according to the court records.
A few weeks later, on Sept. 27, 2021, Porras met with McManus again and told him that the victim’s allegations against Martineau were more expansive. Porras had met with the victim and the victim’s fatherand learned that she and Martineau allegedly “had held hands, kissed, and hugged each other for prolonged amounts of time,” according to a police report.
The victim was nervous when speaking about the allegations and Porras “believed [she] felt guilty about what had happened,” according to the court records.
In October, the victim detailed her allegations in a written note, rather than speaking them out loud, and gave the note to Porras.
The inappropriate touching had included: “Hugging. Hand holding. Kissing.” The alleged kissing, she wrote, was “usually done when parting, but sometimes randomly — only he kissed me.” Additionally, Martineau “would slide his hands along my waist,” she wrote.
Martineau alsoallegedly held her tightly, cradled her head, scratched her face with his beard “in a teasing way,” and stroked her hair, according to the note. “Our foreheads would touch, then noses, the[n] occasionally lips,” she wrote, according to a police report.
Martineau exchanged approximately 80,000 text messages with the victim between 2019, when the touching allegedly began, and 2021, according to the court records.
The victim’s father had confronted Martineau about the messages earlier in 2021, according to the court records. Then, in August, one ofthe victim’s brothers found Martineau in the family’s home in the middle of the night while the parents and the victim were out of town, according to the court records. The family home was located on church property. The brother was sleeping in the living room when he saw Martineau walking through the house using his phone’s flashlight to see the way. Confronted by the brother, Martineausaid he had entered the house to close the windows before a predicted rain, according to the court records.
After that incident and following the meetings with the bishop, Martineau escalated what the victim’s parents later described as a campaign of retaliation against them.
The victim’s family, which was experiencing financial hardship, lived on the property of St. Stanislaus rent-free in exchange for labor on church grounds. That gave Martineau, who was the church’s administrator, significant power over them.
The parents told police Martineau cut off their internet service, attempted to halt their oil deliveries, and falsely accused a family member of stealing a lawn mower from the church, according to the court records.
Martineau remained the head of the parish, holding sway over the victim’s family for months after McManus first learned of the allegations against him.
At some point — the date is not specified in the records — the victim’s father directly informed McManus about Martineau’s alleged conduct toward his family. Then McManus asked the diocese’s victim assistance coordinator, a social worker named Judith Audette, to speak with the victim. Delisle said this request likely occurred in the fall.
The victim’s father also emailed Audette on Dec. 9 and told him that once Martineau had asked his daughter to bring laundry to Martineau’s bedroom. “Once they got there, they hugged for an extended period of time,” according to a police report’s summary of the email. The victim’s sister, who was in the building at the time, confirmed the account and went upstairs to the priest’s bedroom to find her sister because she was uncomfortable with the situation.
After her first interview with the victim, Audette concluded Martineau had “violated many codes of conduct, but no sexual acts were reported by [the victim].” The court records do not specify which allegations the victim relayed to Audette in the first interview.
At the end of December, the diocese announced in its official newspaper, the Catholic Free Press, that Martineau would transfer to St. George Parish in Worcester. There, Martineau would “benefit from the tutelage of a seasoned pastor,” according to a December 2022 public statement by the diocese.
But before that transfer was completed, Audette, the social worker, continued to communicate with the victim by email. In those emails, the victim described more inappropriate interactions, including one instance in which Martineau allegedly picked her up, and twirled her in such a way that their groins touched, according to a police report.
Audette was a mandated reporter, meaning she had a legal obligation to report allegations of child abuse to the state. In late January and early February, she informed the Department of Children and Families of the allegations. McManus also placed Martineau on leave and the diocese hired an outside firm to conduct an independent investigation, according to the diocese. The diocese also notified the Worcester district attorney’s office.
By then, in February 2022, it had been nearly five months since McManus learned of the initial allegations.
Not long after, the attorney general’s office referred the matter to the Worcester district attorney for prosecution, according to a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office. At the end of 2022, the outside investigative firm hired by the diocese delivered its findings and the diocese announced that Martineau had been suspended due to “a credible allegation of sexual abuse of a minor.” The firm, Matthews and Matthews, shared its findings with local law enforcement.
The next month, in January 2023, Martineau was charged with three counts of indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or over in East Brookfield District Court.
The case then languished for more than two years before the September 2025 plea agreement.
The Worcester district attorney’s office said it was unable to comment because the case files are impounded.
The Globe is not identifying the victim or her family members and they declined to comment. Porras and Audette did not respond to requests for comment.
Aloise, Martineau’s lawyer during the conclusion of the criminal proceedings, said he was prepared to take the case to trial before the Worcester district attorney’s office offered the plea agreement and the court agreed to impound the case files.
He said the prosecution would not have been able to prove the allegations in court. “I’ve done this for 50-something years and I represented quite a number of priests especially back in the heyday in the 2000s and this is the weakest case I’ve seen,” he said.
A search for the case’s docket number in the Massachusetts courts database returned only the words, “No records found.”
Mike Damiano can be reached at mike.damiano@globe.com.
Related: Here’s why the state couldn’t prosecute priests in the Attorney General’s investigation.