Massachusetts — The Attorney General's Report (2026)

The Massachusetts Attorney General's September 30, 2026 report on the Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester dioceses: 275 accused clergy and 944 survivors in aggregate counts the report itself says are not filtered by any assessment of credibility, and no names published.

Issuing office

Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General (Andrea Joy Campbell)

Released

September 30, 2026

Scope

Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester — the Archdiocese of Boston is not in this report

Headline figures

275 accused clergy; 944 survivors (see the report's own caveat — printed in full on this page)

Roster

None — the report publishes no names; no roster is built from it

Posture

Aggregate counts only, expressly not filtered by any assessment of credibility

On September 30, 2026, the Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General released its report on child sexual abuse in three of the Commonwealth’s Catholic dioceses: Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester. The Archdiocese of Boston is not in this report. The investigation began in 2019, under Attorney General Maura Healey, into whether the dioceses or their leadership bore criminal responsibility for clergy who sexually abused children. The team reviewed over 300,000 pages of documents, reviewed the files of nearly 300 clergy members, and interviewed more than 100 individuals. Grand jury subpoenas were issued to the dioceses, compelling production of records, but no substantive testimony was taken before the grand jury. For the wider record this report belongs to, see The Pattern.

What the report counts

The report’s only enumeration is an aggregate table of accused clergy and survivors, by diocese:

Footnote 28 to the table states the scope of the clergy count: “This includes bishops, priests, religious brothers, deacons, and nuns.”

That caveat travels with every Massachusetts figure on this site. The report states first that the full magnitude of child sexual abuse by clergy in the Dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester cannot be determined. It then says, in full:

“These numbers are not filtered by any assessment of credibility and include allegations made against priests who were members of religious orders. Because of the difficulty in counting allegations, we present these numbers not as an exact accounting of sexual abuse in the three dioceses, but to document just how widespread the abuse was”

No names

The report publishes no roster. It contains no list, appendix, or table of the 275 accused clergy by name; its appendices are statements from survivors, resource organizations, material on the House of Affirmation in the Worcester Diocese, and a glossary. Its narratives refer to accused clergy generically, naming only a few long-public historical cases discussed as history.

This archive builds no roster from this report, and it simulates none from any other source. No Massachusetts name is added to the Directory from these counts, and the report’s scattered historical mentions are not mined into a list it chose not to publish.

Worcester: the diocese with no list

Worcester is the diocese where that absence matters most. Worcester does not maintain a publicly accessible list of credibly accused clergy — the Attorney General’s press release describes it as the only diocese in Massachusetts that does not — and the report itself records that Worcester refuses to share the names of these priests publicly in an accessible format.

For Worcester, then, this report’s aggregate — 90 accused clergy and 216 survivors — is the sole official accounting, and it names no one.

Fall River and Springfield are in a different position: each has its own diocesan list, and those lists are carried in the Directory in their own postures, on their own authority — not on this report’s.

Criminal posture

The report is explicit about the limits on prosecution. Its Executive Summary states that the Attorney General’s Office “is unable to seek criminal charges”: the misconduct newly identified by the investigation occurred outside the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution, and before Massachusetts legal reforms in 2002 that criminalized reckless endangerment of children and made priests and other clergy mandated reporters of child abuse.

The report states that the office referred any cases against individual perpetrators potentially within the statute of limitations to the applicable District Attorney’s Office. The specifics of those referrals are not in the report. They appear in the Attorney General’s press release, attributed here to the release: three cases were referred to the appropriate District Attorneys’ Offices; one, to the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office, resulted in criminal charges being issued in the District Court; and there were no new indictments arising from the investigation.

Sources

• Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General, Attorney General’s Report on Child Sexual Abuse in the Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester Dioceses of the Catholic Church (September 30, 2026) — report page: mass.gov
• Report PDF: mass.gov
• Attorney General’s press release, September 30, 2026: mass.gov