NORTHBRIDGE (MA)
Worcester Telegram & Gazette [Worcester MA]
October 6, 2026
By Brad Petrishen
The sordid past of the Oakhurst Manor – the historic Whitinsville mansion that suffered serious damage in a 2024 fire – receives significant attention in attorney general’s recently released report on clergy sex abuse.
The 1890s structure, located at 120 Hill St., housed “one of the most problematic treatment facilities used to clear abusive priests for service,” the report said, with influence extending far beyond Worcester County.
Allegations about the house – including one victim’s report that it served as the base of a clergy sex-abuse ring – were covered by the Telegram & Gazette in the early 2000s, as part of a series of articles from reporter Kathy Shaw, the report notes.
Below is a summary of what the attorney general’s report included about the home, as well as some of the unanswered questions that remain.
National reach
The home, which operated from 1973 to 1989 as the House of Affirmation, was part of a “select group” of psychiatric treatment centers across the country where the Catholic Church sent priests following allegations of abuse, the report said.
It was founded by a Worcester priest, Thomas Kane, who was himself later accused of sexual abuse, and who was forced out of the organization in 1987 amid allegations of financial misconduct.
Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston lawyer who has represented victims of clergy sex abuse for decades, opined that treatment at such centers was a “facade” to facilitate getting priests back into service.
The attorney general’s office wrote that bishops viewed such facilities as “addressing the problem of sexual abuse or, at least, plausible deniability in the event of recidivism, because the facilities provided assurances from physicians that offenders could safely be returned to ministry.”
All records destroyed
The attorney general’s office said that a former diocesan finance director testified that all House of Affirmation records were destroyed by 1997 “in accordance with the seven-year retention requirement for treatment records” in Massachusetts.
The gap added to a pervasive problem of poor record-keeping in the diocese that the attorney general’s office said hampered its ability to investigate.
Worcester is one of 12 dioceses across the country that has not released the names of credibly accused priests, Attorney General Andrea Campbell noted last week at a press conference in which she called on the diocese to do so.
The attorney general’s report alleged that 90 accused clergy who served in the Worcester Diocese abused 216 children, and found that a “significant number” of Worcester Diocese victims reported being abused by priests connected to the House of Affirmation.
“Once there, the priests were permitted to participate in ministry in local parishes where they continued to sexually abuse children,” the report said. “Some victims reported being sexually abused at the House of Affirmation itself.”
The report chronicled a number of cases of named priests who were treated at the House of Affirmation and went on to abuse more children.
All the priests named in the report have been named publicly before, the report said.
Victor Frobas
Victor Frobas, a West Virginia priest, was sent to the House of Affirmation in 1978 after at least six children accused him of abuse, the report said.
Within two months, the House recommended outpatient care, and Frobas was allowed to serve at St. Rose of Lima in Northborough, where he reportedly abused more than a dozen additional children over about two years.
Frobas was allowed to return to ministry in West Virginia despite a young boy’s mother catching him in the act, the report said, and remained a priest until he was criminally charged in 1988.
Frobas, who pleaded guilty in 1988 to sexually abusing two boys in Missouri, died in 1993 before he could stand trial in Worcester on rape charges.
Thomas Teczar
Teczar was sent to The House of Affirmation from 1973 to 1975 after abusing multiple boys at St. Mary’s in Uxbridge, the report said.
“Thereafter, Bishops [Bernard] Flanagan and [Timothy] Harrington assigned him to four more parishes in the Worcester Diocese, where he sexually abused several more boys,” the report said, noting he was not removed from the parishes until parents of a 15-year-old victim demanded it in 1984.
The Worcester Diocese then paid for additional treatment for Teczar before determining “too much was known about him” for him to return locally.
Harrington then supported Teczar’s transfer to Texas, where he served in at least four different parishes and abused “many more” victims, the report said.
“It was in Texas that he was criminally convicted for child sexual abuse,” the report said. “This conviction came about because one of Teczar’s Massachusetts victims went to Texas actively looking for possible victims in the parishes where Teczar had served.
“Some of them were more than twenty-five years younger than the Massachusetts victim, but he was able to convince them to come forward, and the Texas prosecutor was able to build a case,” the report said.
Teczar died in prison in 2015.
Brendan O’Donoghue
Worcester priest Brendan O’Donoghue – who was transferred 12 times in his first 15 years as an ordained priest, from 1950 to 1965, by two bishops with knowledge of sexual abuse allegations against him – also spent time at the House of Affirmation.
O’Donoghue’s transfers were treated as “fresh starts,” the report said, with one bishop writing to the priest in 1955, “this is a vote of confidence. Don’t let me down.”
O’Donoghue continued in ministry until his retirement in 1993, the report said. He died in 2014 while living at the Southgate retirement home for priests in Shrewsbury.
Raymond Messier
Raymond Messier was accused of sexually abusing a child at a camp in Charlton in the early 1980s.
Bishop Timothy Harrington “assured” the child’s mother he would “never be in a position to have contact with children again and would receive treatment at the House of Affirmation,” the report said, yet Harrington later reassigned Messier to three other parishes.
When the Catholic priest abuse scandal exploded decades later, the Worcester Diocese removed Messier from his parish assignments, the report said, but kept paying him despite additional victims making allegations.
The diocese announced it would conduct a canonical trial for Messier, but he was allowed to retire in 2003, the report said, with entitlement to compensation and benefits.
It was unclear from the report whether Messier was ever tried in the church. The office said the diocese “produced no evidence that it engaged in any meaningful effort to supervise the priest or restrict his contact with children between 2003 and the priest’s death in 2018.
“Even today, the Worcester Diocese refuses to make the scope and nature of the allegations against the priest publicly known,” it wrote.
Ronald Provost
Ronald Provost was a popular Worcester Diocese priest who ran a children’s street hockey league using federal grant money.
He was convicted in 1993 in connection with taking seminude photographs of a boy in a pool locker room, the report said, after admitting to Harrington years earlier that he had taken nude photographs of boys.
The report said the Worcester Diocese made no record Provost’s personnel file of his admission to the House of Affirmation, and noted that Harrington, in a civil trial, contradicted statements Provost made and stated he had sent the priest to the house for “career counseling.”
The example is one of many in which the report said the Worcester Diocese, along with those in Fall River and Springfield, engaged in a “culture of reverence and indulgence” toward priests, and “hostility” toward victims.
The report portrayed the House of Affirmation as part of a broader church culture that regarded priests as “family to be cared for, guided, and protected,” saying sympathy for troubled priests “too often stood in contrast to indifference and even hostility toward survivors.”
It quoted George Rueger, a former auxiliary bishop of Worcester, expressing his opinion in a 2003 deposition that if a priest sexually abused a minor, he was “sinning with the minor, the minor is his accomplice.
“What the gravity of the minor’s culpability is hard to say,” Rueger said.
Garabedian, the plaintiff’s attorney, called on Bishop Robert McManus to publicly release all Worcester Diocese records that relate to child sexual abuse, as well as the names of all accused priests.
“The Worcester Diocese is one of the worst dioceses in the world regarding the care and protections of innocents and the validation of survivors,” Garabedian said.
House corporation survives
The House of Affirmation ceased operating as a treatment center in 1989, the report said, but still exists as a nonprofit corporation.
The corporation amassed “vast real estate holdings” in multiple states where it also opened “franchise” centers, the report said; it sold the Whitinsville mansion and an associated property for about $1 million in 2012 and 2020 transactions.
The total assets of the corporation are not listed in the report, and Bishop McManus, who serves as president of the corporation, has not returned interview requests.
Diocese Chancellor and Communications Director Ray Delisle told the T&G last week that McManus was in Rome. Earlier this year, McManus notified the Vatican of his intent to retire after more than 20 years as Worcester bishop.
The report said the corporation has, for the past seven or eight years, been using its assets to “pay directly for the treatment of victims of clergy child sexual abuse, and, in certain cases, priests accused of sexual abuse in the Worcester Diocese.”
The report said it was “laudable” for the diocese to pay for therapy for victims, though it urged the diocese to stop putting the name of the House of Affirmation on checks, saying that has been “upsetting” for victims.
Unanswered questions
The report said McManus and the corporation, “in response to this investigation,” changed the name of the corporation from House of Affirmation Inc. to Guild of St. Dymphna Inc. in 2023.
It was unclear whether the renaming rectified the checks issue; the attorney general’s office told the T&G it did not have that information.
Delisle said he could not answer questions for the corporation as he does not work for it.
The T&G has asked the diocese several questions about the corporation, including for context on what proportions of its funds were going to fund therapy for victims.
The attorney general’s report also recounts an allegation by a victim of Frobas that Frobas participated in a child sex ring at the House of Affirmation with its cofounder, Kane and, among others, notorious Boston priest John Geoghan.
“According to the victim, children were passed around among the different priests at the House of Affirmation or driven to locations in Worcester and Boston to be abused,” the report said.
The report does not state whether the victim made the allegation to its investigators. The allegation mirrors one made in a lawsuit the T&G reported on decades ago; the attorney general’s report does not reference that lawsuit or its conclusion.
Worcester lawyer Tom Vukmirovits, who represented the plaintiff, confirmed to the T&G that the case was transferred to Boston along with others and ultimately settled with no admission of liability by the church.
The man who filed the case has since died.
Future of manor in doubt
Oakhurst Manor, in recent years, was home to Estate of Mind, a collaboration of artists who screened a movie an Uxbridge survivor of priest sexual abuse produced that explored his trauma.
The manor was severely damaged in a fire in 2024 and has since been shut down. The home is still locked in litigation tying up any future sale, its owner confirmed to the T&G.