The Reports

The official and commissioned investigations — state attorney-general and special-master reports, the federal investigation of the Indian boarding schools, and the reports religious institutions commissioned on themselves — each in its issuing body's own terms, with its posture, its caveats, and its limits printed beside its figures.

Between 2018 and 2026, state attorneys general (and, in Colorado, an independent special master) opened the files that dioceses had kept to themselves. Their reports are the closest thing the United States has to an official record of clergy abuse inside the Catholic Church — and no two of them use the same standard. One determines men “credibly accused” itself; another prints allegations while stating, in terms, that it has determined nothing. This section takes each report on its own terms: what it investigated, what it found, what its words do and do not mean, and how the names it publishes are carried in the Directory.

The same discipline governs the rest of this section: the U.S. Department of the Interior’s investigation of the federal Indian boarding school system — an institutional record that names no accused individuals, carried here as exactly that — and the investigations religious institutions commissioned on themselves, from a denominational inquiry that names offenders to school reports whose public texts withhold every name. A leadership failure is printed as a leadership failure, never as an abuse finding; a redaction is printed as a redaction, never filled in.

Read the posture before the number. A figure in this section is always its report’s own — quoted with the caveat the report attaches to it — and a name carried from a report is carried at that report’s posture, never upgraded. Where a report publishes no names, this section says so and builds none. Where a report has not been released, this section says that too, and counts nothing.