BOSTON (MA)
Greater Boston, WGBH-TV, PBS-2 [Boston MA]
October 5, 2026
By Chris Burrell
The recent release of an explosive state report about clergy sexual abuse of children is stirring up old pain for people like 67-year-old Edna Wallace.
Wallace is one of at least 216 people claiming they survived sexual abuse by a cleric in the Diocese of Worcester. She wishes the diocese would accept more accountability.
“They need to come out the closet and let all the people know that what they have done,” Wallace told GBH News.
But Worcester’s Bishop Robert McManus has not released a full list of names of priests and other clergy credibly accused of abusing children — unlike the state’s three other bishops, who have disclosed such names.
On Monday, Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell stepped up calls for the Worcester diocese to release a list of of priests accused of abuse during a conversation on GBH News’ Boston Public Radio.
“We’re not taking our foot off the pedal or lessening our advocacy in pushing the diocese to release lists of credibly accused priests,” she said. “I hope the public also mobilizes to push them too. And I think the legislature obviously can do the same.”
Campbell’s office first released the report last week that found 90 clergy had faced allegations of abuse in the Worcester diocese. Campbell’s team did not investigate or confirm how many of those accusations were credible.
The Worcester diocese has resisted, arguing that it would be unfair to priests and other clerics who were never charged by police and had a chance to defend themselves against accusations
“Lists should not be published of cases which have not been found guilty of a canonical crime,” Worcester diocese spokesman Raymond Delisle wrote by email, citing reports that the diocese has previously released.
Those reports stated that such lists can be seen “as publicly branding as guilty those who never have been charged by law enforcement or had a chance to defend themselves in a court of law, given the fact that many decades have passed between the alleged abuse and the reporting of that abuse.”
In Wallace’s view, the diocese is dodging responsibility. She says she was 10 years old and sexually abused by a nun at a now-closed orphanage in Worcester where she was sent while her mother was dying of cancer.
“She separated me from the other kids. I was in a bedroom downstairs in a guest room by myself. She could come down there any time she wanted to molest me. I wanted to actually die,” Wallace said. “They weren’t supposed to be touching children. They’re supposed to protect us, and instead they did the opposite.”
Wallace has named the nun publicly and says she is still living in the state but neither her lawyer, Mitchell Garabedian, nor GBH News could verify her identity.
Sexual abuse of girls by Catholic clergy is less common than boys, accounting for about one-fourth of the allegations, according to the Worcester Diocese’s own report on abuse in their churches.
“I get into these little tear jerks a lot of times thinking about her because she’s running around free while I’m walking around in pain,” Wallace said. “I want her to say sorry. We need an apology from her. I know I’m probably not going to get it.”
Terry McKiernan, the co-director of the Waltham-based nonprofit Bishop Accountability that researches and documents abuse in the Catholic church, said the Attorney General’s report shocked him because it found more than twice the number of clergy in the Worcester Diocese than his team had found.
“At Bishop Accountability, we do a lot of digging, and only know of 43. It has been very difficult over the years in Worcester to determine who is abusing because Worcester has been so good at keeping all of that secret,” he said. “My strong guess is that there are well over 90 priests who have abused children in Worcester over the years.”
He added that, Worcester diocese “has been very inhospitable to survivors for generations.”
Included in the Attorney General’s report was the case of a priest in the Worcester Diocese, abusing young girls in the 1970s. When a mother reported allegation to the priest’s supervisor and also confronted him, “the priest apologized to the mother for his behavior yet proceeded to abuse at least six other girls in the same parish,” the Attorney General’s report stated.
“The accused priest was thus allowed to sexually abuse well over 50 girls, some as young as 4 years old, over the course of 16 years,” the report added.
Kim Dawkins, the president of a rape crisis center in Worcester and Fitchburg called Pathways for Change, said her nonprofit has served many survivors of clergy sexual abuse as children.
“We want survivors in our community who might be reading this [Attorney General’s] report to be reminded that we are here to support them because it may bring up a whole variety of feelings and emotions,” she told GBH News.
Dawkins said she has heard people on hotline phone calls talk share about being repeatedly abused in the Catholic church only after many years into adulthood.
“Everything changed (for them) from that experience,” she said. “The scars are very deep, and which is why it’s not surprising when many survivors of clergy abuse or just any form of child sexual abuse don’t come forward. Or if they do, it’s most often decades later.”