By Nate Raymond
BOSTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) - More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over decades, according to an investigative report the state's attorney general released on Wednesday.
The report provided what Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the first full public accounting of the abuse and institutional failures that allowed it to proliferate for more than half a century at the Catholic dioceses of Fall River,
Springfield and Worcester.
The investigation found that for years those dioceses knew that children were being abused by priests, but "too often they protected the reputation of the church rather than protecting children," she said.
"Behind every one of those numbers is a child whose safety was violated, a family that was changed forever, and a survivor who carried the trauma of that abuse for years and, in many cases, decades," Campbell told reporters.
The Diocese of Worcester in a statement said it would study the report "to identify any additional improvements that can be made to respond to victims of past abuse and to continue to strengthen efforts to keep children safe." The other two did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The majority of the abuse occurred before 2002. The clergy sex abuse scandal burst onto the international stage that year when the Boston Globe published its Pulitzer Prize-winning report on how officials at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston routinely covered up sex abuse by priests.
The newspaper's reporting set off a global wave of investigations that found similar patterns at dioceses worldwide and prompted Massachusetts' legislature to pass a series of reforms in 2002.
In 2019, then-Attorney General Maura Healey, now Massachusetts' governor, launched a criminal probe into the Roman Catholic Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester to determine if they or their leadership bore responsibility in connection to their supervision of clergy who abused children.
Campbell, who said she herself was a victim of child abuse at the hands of a relative, said her office made three referrals to local district attorneys during the probe, leading to charges in one case in Worcester.
Her office did not pursue any prosecutions due to some conduct not being illegal at the time it occurred or because the statute of limitations had expired, she said.
Campbell said the report demonstrated the need for the dioceses to institute reforms and for new state laws supporting abuse survivors, including eliminating the statute of limitations for civil claims involving childhood sexual abuse.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; editing by David Gaffen)
