WORCESTER (MA)
The Republican - MassLive [Springfield MA]
October 1, 2026
By Adam Bass
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office identified 11 clergy members and church workers linked to abuse cases in the Worcester Diocese in a report released Wednesday, even as the diocese refuses to publish a comprehensive list of the accused clergy.
The names of the clergy members were included in a report by the Attorney General’s Office following a multi-year investigation into the Worcester, Springfield and Fall River Dioceses.
The report stated that there were at least 90 accused clergy connected to the Worcester Diocese and 216 documented survivors.
While the report did not identify all 90 accused clergy linked to the Worcester Diocese, investigators highlighted certain cases throughout the decades of abuse accusations and the continued lack of transparency concerns.
Many of the 11 clergy and church workers identified in the report were previously named publicly in criminal or civil lawsuits.
Unlike other dioceses, including Springfield and Fall River, the Worcester Diocese does not have a public list of accused clergy members.
“Worcester has refused an open and transparent practice, which is in place in every other diocese in Massachusetts and in over ninety percent of Catholic dioceses nationwide,” the attorney general’s report states.
The Worcester diocese has shared the names of credibly accused priests with the county’s district attorney’s office since 2002, yet only shared limited disclosures with the public, according to the attorney general.
The 11 names listed in the report are a fraction of the 90 accused clergy members in the Worcester Diocese.
The number of 90, however, could be an undercount due to several factors, including underreporting by victims and the failure of the dioceses to keep accurate or organized records of abuse complaints, according to the attorney general.
“There is no other precedent for the publishing of lists of the accused in society — even of those accused in other positions of trust such as medicine, education or law enforcement,” the Worcester Diocese said in a statement to MassLive.
The diocese spokesperson Raymond Delisle also pointed to a 2019 statement by Pope Francis that lists “should not be published of cases which have not been found guilty of a canonical crime.”
Of the 11 individuals, 10 were ordained as priests and one, Raymond Tremblay, was a religious educator.
Ronald Provost
In 1993, priest Ronald Provost was given a 10-year suspended state prison sentence for taking nude photographs of a partially undressed 10-year-old boy, according to Worcester Magazine.
The former pastor of St. Joseph’s Church in Barre, Provost had told police in an affidavit that he had “taken pictures of kids in the nude, mooning,” according to a New Yorker article written in 1993.
Provost was a popular priest in the diocese who used federal grant money to run a street hockey league for children, according to the Attorney General’s report.
In 1996, the boy from the original case testified against Provost in a civil suit filed against the priest, the Worcester Diocese and its previous bishop, Timothy J. Harrington, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
The Attorney General’s report states that Harrington, who led the Worcester Diocese from 1983 to 1994, had a policy to never report allegations to law enforcement authorities, even if he believed the allegations.
A jury in the 1996 civil case rejected the claim that Harrington and the Worcester Diocese were negligent in supervising Provost, the Telegram & Gazette reports. The jury did agree that Provost’s negligence was a major contributing factor to the boy’s emotional distress but disagreed that he suffered any objective “physical manifestations” of his emotional distress, the outlet reports. As a result, the boy was unable to receive monetary damages.
By 2011, Provost faced another accusation, this time of assault and abuse of a different boy, according to the Milford Daily News.
The accuser claims the abuse took place between 1979 and 1982, a claim that Provost had denied.
In 2021, Provost was laicized by the Church, effectively stripping him of his status as a member of the clergy.
Thomas Teczar
In the 1960s, Thomas Teczar was fired from his summer job at the Nazareth Home for Boys in Leicester, after several accusations of sexually inappropriate conduct with boys were made against him, according to the attorney general’s report. Nevertheless, he was ordained. In the 1970s, he was accused of abusing multiple boys at St. Mary’s in Uxbridge.
Teczar was not removed from parishes in Worcester until 1984, when the parents of a 15-year-old victim demanded that Bishop Harrington remove him from ministry, the report reads.
Even after being removed from the Worcester diocese, he later served as a visiting priest in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fort Worth from 1988 to 1993, according to the Herman Law firm.
In 2007, Teczar was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecency with a child, according to the Associated Press. He was sentenced to 25 years for each assault charge and 15 for the indecency charge, the Associated Press reported.
Teczar’s conviction, however, was overturned, with the court of appeals saying the trial judge made an error in admitting evidence from a victim as an expert witness and allowing testimony about alleged abuse for which Teczar had not been charged, according to the Abilene Reporter-News.
Teczar was tried again and found guilty in 2009, being sentenced to 50 years in prison, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Teczar died in prison in 2015, according to Herman Law.
John Bagley
In 2002, John Bagley was accused of sexual assault with a minor, resulting in his removal from his post at St. Mary’s parish in North Grafton, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
According to the outlet, the accuser claimed that Bagley assaulted them in 1967 at Christ the King parish. In 2004, Bagley was accused again of sexual assault by another person, according to the newspaper.
Thomas Kane
In 1993, Thomas Kane faced an accusation of sexually assaulting Uxbridge resident Mark Barry from 1968 to 1979, according to the Boston Globe.
Kane was the co-founder of the House of Affirmation, a Whitinsville-based treatment center that handled clergy accused of sexual misconduct. The attorney general’s report reads that records about the treatment center were destroyed between 1990 and 1997.
A former employee of the facility testified that the priest had sexual relations not just with the staff but their spouses, patients and minors from a nearby parish, according to the report.
The Mark Barry lawsuit was settled in 1995, according to court records.
Kane left the Catholic Diocese of Worcester in 1993 after the accusation. He then spent the next five years as director of an international training institute for teachers in Guadalajara, Mexico, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
He was formally laicized in late 2012.
Raymond Messier
Priest Raymond Messier was accused in the early 1980s of sexually abusing a minor at a camp in Charlton.
The victim’s mother reported that when she disclosed the sexual abuse to Bishop Harrington, he promised her that the priest would never be in a position to have contact with children again and would receive treatment at the House of Affirmation.
Messier, however, was reassigned to three other parishes where he continued to minister.
In 2002, when the Church adopted the Dallas Charter, a set of procedures implemented to address the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy, the Worcester Diocese removed Messier from his parish assignments, according to the report. The diocese assured the public in a statement that he would not be engaging in any public ministry in the diocese or anywhere else, according to the attorney general.
Despite the statement and suspension, the priest continued to receive wages from the Worcester Diocese — even after he retired, according to the attorney general’s report.
David Blizard
In 2002, former priest David Blizard faced several accusations of sexual assault, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
Two of the accusers were William Allen, who intended to become a priest at the diocese and Naval Chief Petty Officer Stephen J. Saucier of Upton, the outlet reported.
A suit in 2002 accused Blizard of participating in a child sexual abuse ring that operated out of the House of Affirmation, the Telegram & Gazette reported.
Blizard, who left the Worcester diocese in 1988, was arraigned in 2003 on a charge of indecent assault and battery of a person over age 14. He was found not guilty following a trial in 2004, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
He was formally laicized in late 2012.
David Holley
Holley faced accusations for sexually abusing children in multiple states, including Massachusetts, New Mexico, Texas, and others, according to the Herman Law firm. The Diocese of Worcester sent Holley to the Servants of the Paraclete in Jemez Springs, New Mexico, for treatment.
He was convicted in 1993 of sexually abusing eight boys in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and received a sentence of 275 years in prison, the law firm reports.
He died in prison in 2008, according to the law firm.
Holley was accused in numerous lawsuits, with allegations of sexual abuse beginning as early as the 1950s in Pennsylvania, according to the Herman Law firm.
Additionally, he was named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in 2020 in New Mexico, alleging abuse of a boy in the 1970s in Alamogordo. That suit named the Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts as one of the defendants, the law firm states.
Brendan O’Donoghue
Brendan W. O’Donoghue served within the Diocese of Worcester and had a pattern of frequent transfers and multiple sexual abuse accusations, according to the Herman Law firm.
O’Donoghue was transferred 12 times in his first 15 years as an ordained priest, according to the attorney general’s report.
After several more transfers and more accusations of sexual abuse of children, O’Donoghue spent time at the House of Affirmation but continued in ministry until his retirement in 1993, the report reads,
By 1994, a man filed suit against O’Donoghue and accused him of sexually assaulting him at age 13 in 1978, according to Herman Law firm.
The suit was settled in 1999, according to the law firm. That same year, another person accused O’Donoghue of abuse in 1962. That case too was settled, this time in 2001, according to the law firm.
O’Donoghue died in 2014, while living at the Southgate retirement home for priests in Shrewsbury, the report states.
He did not face any criminal charges, according to Herman Law firm.
Robert Kelley
The attorney general’s report describes former priest Robert Kelley as “notorious” for abusing young girls. He spent a significant amount of time working in orphanages for girls before his ordination, where he was known for his “easy approach with” children, the report reads.
“Within a year of his 1968 ordination, Kelley began abusing his first victim at Notre Dame in Southbridge. The girl, eight years old at the time, reported the abuse to Kelley’s superior, who told her that she was exaggerating and misinterpreting Kelley’s acts of rape and sexual assault,” the report reads.
Kelley served six years in prison in the 1990s for raping a girl and was sentenced to a five- to seven-year prison term in 2003 after pleading guilty to raping another girl, according to the Boston Herald.
He was officially laicized in 2015.
Jean-Paul Gagnon and Raymond Tremblay
In 2002, Priest Jean-Paul Gagnon and religious educator Raymond Tremblay were accused in civil lawsuits of sexually abusing children, according to the Telegram & Gazette.
Timothy P. Staney and his parents accused Gagnon of violating the Confessional by using information obtained in the Confessional to set Staney up as a sex partner for the priest, the outlet reported.
The suit also accuses Tremblay of using his role as religious educator to sexually molest and abuse Staney in several incidents, starting in 1980 when he was 10, the newspaper reads.
The priest and the educator settled the civil lawsuit in 2004, the Milford Daily News reported.
Gagnon, however, was arraigned in 2004 on one charge of indecent assault and battery on a person over 14. Another man came forward with an assault and battery accusation in April 2004, the Milford Daily News reported.
Gagnon was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation in 2005, according to the Woonsocket Call.
Adam Bass is a reporter covering news in the City of Worcester and in Worcester County Massachusetts. You can email Adam at abass@masslive.com.