(MA)
Verdict - Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia [Mountain View CA]
October 7, 2026
By Leslie C. Griffin
“Has the horn tackled you yet?” (36). Massachusetts students called Father James Porter, who was accused of abusing hundreds of children, the Horn. We learn this from the new Massachusetts Attorney General’s report on Catholic sexual abuse in the Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester Dioceses in Massachusetts.
This is an old story with new details. Evidence “demonstrate[s] that, for years, church decision-makers in the Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester Dioceses knew that scores of children were being abused by a substantial number of priests in their dioceses and did not take effective action to stop that abuse. Instead, at the time, the dioceses actively sought to cover up the child sexual abuse to protect the reputation of the Church.” (15)
This is not surprising. We already know a lot about Catholic sexual abuse in Massachusetts. The Boston Globe published its huge investigative series in 2002 about the numerous ways the church had abused children and protected abusers. Bernard Cardinal Law, the Archbishop of Boston, resigned after journalists exposed his cover-up of abuse. The story became even more prominent in Spotlight, the 2016 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, which made real what the abuse survivors had suffered. More attention focused on the church’s abusers then, even though the church had been abusing children for years, especially in Louisiana, where Father Gilbert Gauthe was indicted in 1984 and pleaded guilty in 1985.
Familiar names to those of us who study abuse arise in the report. One is Richard Lavigne, an abuser who escaped prosecution for the murder of 13-year-old Danny Croteau in 1972. He died just before he could be prosecuted, in 2021.
The new report covers 70 years of abuse. It examines the horrors of the pre-2002 era. Then it looks at legal and church changes from 2002 until today. Finally, it uses the evidence collected in this investigation to propose changes to our current laws and practices.
This year’s report shows that Massachusetts has continued its fight for children. Catholic then-Attorney General, now-Governor Maura Healey started this new investigation of the church’s abuse in 2019. Her team confirmed what many of us knew: that the church has improved since 2002 but has not taken every step it can to protect children before it protects the institutional church and its members. This report was released by the current Attorney General, Andrea Joy Campbell, who has stated that she herself was the victim of family sexual abuse. That makes it clearer why her report focuses on the need for all of us to protect children and not to allow abusers and their protectors to hide behind religious freedom. She offers the detailed report of abuse “so that it does not occur again” (5).
The investigators examined over 300,000 pages of documents and found 944 survivors and 275 accused clergy in the 70-year history. They issued grand jury subpoenas. They sought the church’s “secret archives” (8), where records of abuse were buried. They interviewed over 100 people.
They tell as much of the story as they can find, from the awful pre-2002 days, to the legal and church changes made post-2002, and, importantly, what the church needs to do now to protect children fully. Their lesson is stark: “for decades, and especially before 2002, church officials in all three dioceses knew about the sexual abuse of children yet did not take effective action to prevent it or to examine the institutional failures of leadership that led to scores of children being victimized at the hands of abusive priests.” (4)
Pre-2002
Before 2002, the church’s conduct was “intentional, reprehensible, and morally wrong” (16). Even bishops raped children.
In those years, there was a lot of reverence for priests who were powerful and holy, and a related reluctance by some victims to tell their parents a priest had done something wrong. Police sometimes deferred to the church. The church treated abuse as a moral question of boundaries, or saw the priest as a victim, or the priest and victim equally participating in an attraction. A former auxiliary bishop of Worcester even testified that “the minor is his accomplice” (28), not his victim. Third-party reports of abuse did not get the church’s attention. The church did not recognize that “abuse is more than a moral failing. It is a crime” (50).
The church often ignored what the victims said. Abusers were transferred all over the place “in a veritable shell game with accused priests” (40), where they were allowed to keep abusing as long as they kept moving.
Nondisclosure agreements were another way the church kept the abuse hidden. They would settle with someone only if he or she agreed not to reveal anything about what had happened. The report describes a brave survivor, Phil Saviano, who refused to sign a nondisclosure agreement and so received just $5,700 after legal fees. His brother has a statement about him in the survivors’ section of this report. Saviano used his courage to found the New England chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and repeatedly stood for survivors over the church. Other survivors tell their own terrible stories in the report’s appendix.
For many years churches claimed that religious freedom, based in the First Amendment and occasionally in statutes (religious freedom restoration acts), meant they were free from the law. Pre-2002, Massachusetts courts bought the argument that churches had complete religious freedom to hide abusers’ names in buried files and never say a word to anyone about the harm done to children. This report also explains that many abusive priests could never be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had run.
The House of Affirmation is recognized as a problem. It was where priests went for psychiatric help. Sometimes it did not get full information from the church, and let priests out quickly, so they could be back at abuse pretty soon.
Post-2002
2002 was not only the Boston Globe year, but also the year in which the church set up the Dallas Charter, which set new standards in the hopes that abuse would not happen again. As the report notes, the Dallas Charter set up rules all the churches had to follow, established essential norms, and set up more written policies. It also quotes the Charter’s rule that “Each diocese must comply with civil reporting laws and cooperate in investigations conducted by civil authorities; they are to advise victims of their rights to ‘make a report to public authorities’ (Norm 11, emphasis added)” (64).
The good news for survivors and their lawyers is that the Massachusetts spotlight opened more courts to survivors. Criminal charges against abusers, and civil claims by survivors, were and are barred by statutes of limitations. States slowly opened the courts as they learned, piece by piece, how the existing laws did not protect children.
The report mentions Massachusetts legal reforms that occurred after 2002. One made reckless endangerment of children a crime. The second extended the statute of limitations for many sex crimes against children. Those new laws can only be applied to criminals after the laws were passed, or the state would violate the constitutional ban on ex post facto laws. The first two changes helped future crimes but not past ones.
Mandatory Reporting?
The third change made priests and clergy “mandated reporters of child abuse” (5). The AG reports no violations of mandatory reporting law by Fall River, Springfield, or Worcester. This may not be a major victory, as “the relevant statute only requires reporting for abuse involving victims who are minors at the time of the disclosure” (78). The dioceses have entered into Memoranda of Understanding with District Attorneys’ offices to report abuse, though not always with every office that has jurisdiction—Fall River, for example, has none with Plymouth County. The report even mentions that Fall River uses “Form D” to report past abuse to the District Attorney.
For the record, Massachusetts’ mandatory reporting law has an exception for confession or a similarly confidential communication, but the report does not discuss it. Presumably this issue was never raised by the dioceses to limit reporting.
But everybody is still talking about these requirements. Britain has a new reporting law that, according to the government, “does not provide any exemption from mandatory reporting on the basis of religious practice, or the setting in which information is received.” In contrast, Arizona’s law “allows a clergy member who receives ‘a confession or confidential communication’ to refrain from reporting the ‘confession’ or ‘confidential communication’ if the clergy member ‘determines that it is reasonable and necessary within the concepts’ of the clergy member’s religion.” The Arizona court noted this allows clergy great discretion in deciding which confessions qualify, and broad protection in claiming to be a member of the clergy.
Washington also had a huge debate in trying to make clergy mandatory reporters, and the state was sued for violating the churches’ religious freedom. They reached a compromise that keeps clergy mandatory reporters, BUT “state and county prosecutors have agreed—as the court ordered—not to enforce reporting requirements for information clergy learn solely through confession or its equivalent in other faiths.”
Maybe the AG’s report shows that reporting with confessional exceptions works. I still see it as a means to protect abusers and not their victims by emphasizing secrecy over transparency.
Posting Lists
Anyone who follows church sexual abuse knows of the long debates about posting names of abusers. Survivors want this, and often say churches do not include all the names on their lists. Fall River and Springfield have posted such lists. The report says these lists are inadequate as the information is very limited. Some names are still missing even after reports were made against abusers.
Worcester is one of the few dioceses in the country that has not posted a list—one of just twelve, or fewer than five percent of dioceses and religious orders nationwide. It is the only diocese in Massachusetts that does not have one. The AG says it must create a list.
Religious Orders
These are organizations of clergy that share a religious group, or order. Because they belong to orders, they are not diocesan priests. Think of the Franciscans, the Jesuits, the Christian Brothers, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, etc. The report observes that much more attention is needed to include religious orders in the oversight and supervision of sexual abuse instead of letting them do what they want with no control.
The Review Boards
A huge development post-2002, i.e., post-Boston scandal and post-Dallas Charter, is the churches’ creation of Review Boards to examine records of abuse. The Dallas Charter set out rules for the churches to follow so that Boston would not happen again.
However, the churches did not always use the boards. Instead, they would let abusers resign or retire or be restricted from ministry and never get to the board, so the system that was supposed to protect survivors did not. Without review, the priests could get paid and live well and the full extent of their abuse was not revealed. In Fall River, for example, from 1993 to 2020, fewer than a third of the allegations received by the diocese were sent to the Review Board for review.
The boards were a good start, but their records are not complete. There was a lot of poor record keeping and oral conversations never noted anywhere. The AG acknowledges that its report is not complete because diocesan records are incomplete.
The report repeatedly says that the people on the boards were not trauma-trained, and that they need more understanding of how to deal with victims. Often the victim’s representative was the same person who cross-examined him during the board hearing, leaving survivors unsure where the board’s loyalties lay. The boards were often too hard on the credibility of survivors. If the victims did not remember the exact dates of abuse, or if their reports were influenced by the trauma of abuse, the board would find them not credible. They did not understand how trauma influences people.
The Future
The report observes that adults as well as children can be victims of abuse. Therefore, reporting should include ALL allegations of abuse, whether of a minor or of an adult.
The AG recommends disclosure to the state’s Attorney General as well as to the District Attorneys, so that there is one central record of abuse, which Massachusetts does not yet have.
The report notes that reviewers often had conflicts of interest, serving on boards where they knew the abusers, and being a victim’s adviser at the same time as her cross-examiner.
Grooming is something churches were not quite able to identify or deal with, even though it is part of abuse. The AG is happy that some of the newest policies are dealing with it, or at least beginning to notice it is a problem.
The AG wants protection for whistleblowers, who often go unprotected. Sometimes whistleblowers are fired by the people who should be encouraging their reporting. That, too, protects abusers over those who want to help victims.
The churches need to improve their review boards. They need to keep better records. They should have a case management system that keeps the records more organized and secure. The reviews should take place promptly, not dragging out for years as currently happens. They should be sure to hear from the victims, and should become allies with the state in opposing abuse. They should not get a complaint from a victim and then take years to speak with her.
The AG is super firm that reviews must be conducted by trained investigators who understand trauma.
They should release everyone from confidentiality provisions in past nondisclosure agreements.
The AG complains a lot about the past practice of letting abusers go free without any supervision. Abusers need more supervision to make sure they are following restrictions placed on them. Sometimes men who could not operate as priests would show up at events or conduct a ceremony or maybe even say a mass dressed in their priestly robes. Numerous times priests violated the restrictions on their ministry. This might be the hardest recommendation to follow, as churches might ask how they could perform such supervision. The AG insists it is essential.
The AG recommends changes for civil tort liability for survivors, understanding that Massachusetts currently bars most of these claims after age 53, even though a study the report cites found that survivors were, on average, 52 years old when they disclosed their abuse. “[S]urvivors whose claims have already expired have no opportunity to seek relief.” The state needs to change that.
Massachusetts still has charitable immunity in place, which limits how much in damages charities can pay to victims, allegedly because charities do such good work for everyone. The AG says the state’s cap on charitable immunity damages at $20,000 must end.
“For these reasons, the Attorney General’s Office supports the passage of legislation that would eliminate the statute of limitations for civil claims involving childhood sexual abuse, eliminate the charitable immunity cap for any claims of childhood sexual abuse, and create an indefinite lookback period for civil claims of childhood sexual abuse so survivors whose claims have expired have an opportunity to seek justice.”
That lookback opening has had great success in other states, bringing some justice to survivors who were long kept out of court.
There is a lot of support from survivors for these reforms, but they note they have advocated for them for years and not gotten any changes.
BishopAccountability.org founders Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan called for greater disclosure in this area, especially the names of the abusers. As McKiernan put it, “[I]t’s absolutely essential that these names be known.” The AG said grand jury secrecy laws limit the release of the names, but McKiernan countered that the records don’t belong to the grand jury, the AG, or the church.
The report ends with the stories of survivors, some named, some anonymous. One victim talks about abuse from 60 years ago. It harmed all of them. This is why the courts should be open to their harms and put priority on protecting victims, not abusers. Massachusetts has started but in no way completed its job.