BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
September 30, 2026
By Brian MacQuarrie and Shannon Larson
A state investigation found that more than 270 Catholic clerics abused nearly 1,000 children in Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester over a century. (Video by Danielle Dubois/Globe Staff. Photo by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff.)
Priests were transferred from parish to parish despite their superiors’ knowledge of abusive behavior. Children were left unprotected despite credible accusations against priests. And church leaders withheld information from parishioners and fellow clergy.
The long-awaited report Wednesday on decades of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in three Massachusetts dioceses pointed to a web of institutional secrecy and denial designed to hide the scandal from the public.
The report by state Attorney General Andrea Campbell identified only a fraction of 270 priests that investigators linked with the abuse of nearly 1,000 children in the Worcester, Fall River, and Springfield dioceses, but some of the identified cases showed how church authorities avoided accountability and exposed children to further danger.
Many of the failings reinforce the findings uncovered two decades ago by The Boston Globe in the Archdiocese of Boston. That sex-abuse scandal, unearthed by the Globe’s Spotlight team, set off a global wave of related investigations with similar troubling discoveries.
The latest report cited problems from top to bottom within the church hierarchy, from the monstrous to the mundane, and how priests who were able to relate to youth became highly valued within the church culture.
One of those priests was the notorious James Porter, who was ordained in Fall River in 1960 and served in North Attleborough and New Bedford. Ultimately, he was accused of molesting more than 100 children during 14 years as a priest.
In 1992, the Catholic Church settled with 68 of his alleged victims, who dropped their lawsuit against the Fall River Diocese in exchange for at least $5 million. The following year, Porter pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting 28 children in his parishes and was sentenced to 18 to 20 years in a maximum-security prison.
The Porter scandal prompted the Fall River Diocese, led by then-Bishop Sean O’Malley, to form its first review board and enact new diocesan policies for reporting allegations of abuse to civil authorities and “barring diagnosed pedophiles from ministering within the diocese,” according to the report.
The sex-abuse problem extended even to the seminary level, according to the report. In some cases, diocesan officials had been “fully aware” that some seminarians had faced previous allegations of sexual abuse of children, investigators said.
In one case, the Rev. Thomas Teczar was ordained in 1967 in the Diocese of Worcester despite being fired previously from a summer job at the Nazareth Home for Boys in Leicester for allegedly inappropriate conduct with boys there, according to the report.
Teczar had attended several seminaries and was required to finish his studies privately. Regardless, Worcester Bishop Bernard Flanagan deemed that he had “worked out his problem” and ordained him.
He later became “one of the most prolific abusers” in the Worcester Diocese and later in Texas, where he was eventually convicted of aggravated sexual assault and indecency with a child, according to the report.
In some cases, a priest’s abusive conduct was an open secret. Victims said they believed parish priests or diocesan staff were either aware of the abuse or had witnessed it first-hand — and yet did nothing to stop it, according to the report.
The Rev. Robert Kelley, for example, had a reputation of inappropriate behavior before he was ordained. He had spent a “significant amount of time” working with young girls in orphanages and was known for his “easy approach with children,” investigators said.
Within a year of his ordination in 1968, he began abusing his first victim — an 8-year-old girl — at Notre Dame parish in Southbridge. The girl reported the abuse to his superior, but was told that “she was exaggerating and misinterpreting Kelley’s acts of rape and sexual assault,” the report said.
Kelley later said in a deposition that shortly after he was ordained, he disclosed his “affinity for young girls” to Boston Cardinal Humberto Medeiros. The disclosure, however, resulted in no restrictions to his ministry.
Another victim recalled that in the early 1970s she sang as a young girl in the choir at Notre Dame. The choir director would leave the girls with Kelley before rehearsals, where he would “give them lollipops, pull them onto his lap one by one, and fondle their genitals,” the report said.
Kelley was convicted twice in Massachusetts, according to the report. In 1990, he was sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to charges of child rape and indecent assault and battery on a child. In 2003, he was convicted again for similar offenses, according to the report.
Investigators found evidence that hiding the abuse scandal sometimes extended to the upper reaches of diocesan authority.
Two former Springfield bishops, Thomas L. Dupre and Christopher J. Weldon, are named on that diocese’s list of credibly accused clergy and led its churches for a combined 36 years.
A Hampden County grand jury in 2004 indicted Dupre on two counts of child rape while a parish priest in the 1970s, making him the first Roman Catholic bishop in the country to be indicted on child sex-abuse charges. However, the case was never prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
The diocese cited health reasons when Dupre resigned in 2004, and advocates for victims said the bishop had cultivated a culture of secrecy that kept abuse shrouded for years. The Vatican never punished him beyond accepting his resignation.
Even in cases where leadership in the diocese were aware of predatory priests in their ranks, they often did not take action to minimize the risk to the public, the report found.
The Rev. Ronald Provost was a popular priest in the Worcester Diocese who used federal grant money to run a street hockey league for children, according to the report. In 1993, he was convicted of one count of posing a child in the nude in a pool locker room.
The diocese placed him on “sick leave” and sent him to St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland, a treatment center for pedophile priests, and paid for years of follow-up treatment, the report said.
More than a decade earlier, Provost said, he had told then-auxiliary Bishop Timothy Harrington that he had taken nude photographs of boys. Although the Worcester Diocese made no record of the admission in his personnel file, Provost was sent to the House of Affirmation, a residential treatment and rehabilitation center in Whitinsville for troubled clergy.
Harrington denied knowing about Provost’s “problem.” During trial testimony in a civil case in 1996, Harrington said he had suggested that Provost go to the treatment center for “career counseling,” according to the report.
Provost, who was ordained in 1970, was removed from the ministry in 1992, according to the Worcester Diocese. In 2021, Pope Francis dismissed him from the clerical state.
Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com. Shannon Larson can be reached at shannon.larson@globe.com. Follow her @shannonlarson98.