The Massachusetts Attorney General's Office released findings this week that nearly 1,000 children were sexually abused by clergy in the Catholic Dioceses of Fall River, Worcester, and Springfield.
To learn more, CAI's Gilda Geist spoke with Terry McKiernan, founder and president of BishopAccountability.org, where he's been archiving documents and first-hand accounts related to the Catholic clergy abuse crisis for more than 20 years.
Gilda Geist What is on BishopAccountability.org? How is that organized and what is the scope?
Terry McKiernan BishopAccountability.org has a database of all the accused priests that we know of in the United States, organized, if you want, by diocese. We started out with 2,000 back in 2005, and there are now over 8,000 records, and those records include a description of the priest or religious sister or brother, seminarian, deacon; links to all of the sources that we've been able to find that are public about that person; description of what diocese he or she was in when they were ordained—basic but extensive information on every accused person that we've been able to find in the United States. And then we have collections of documents from a lot of dioceses. Those give people who visit the site an opportunity to see what the record keeping was in the church itself, and honestly, to look over the shoulder of the bishop as he signs the letter that sends a priest to another parish or diocese, even though the bishop knows that the priest is abusing children. There's almost nothing like seeing the bureaucracy in action by reading these documents. We also have a news blog. Every day it collects articles about the abuse crisis, not only in the United States but also internationally, and not only Catholic articles but ones about abuse in other denominations. We have a page of survivor accounts. where survivors have themselves described what they experienced. And that, in a way, is really the heart of the site.
GG What was your reaction to this latest report from the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office about the abuse that happened to almost 1,000 children in dioceses across the state?
TM This report was long awaited. We knew that it was coming because we had met with the AG's team way back in 2021, and one of our board members, Phil Saviano—who's the gentleman in the Spotlight movie who arrives at the Boston Globe with a box of sources for them to look at and really causes their investigation to happen—Phil was really, really sick at the time, and while he was in hospice, he was willing to sit down and talk with two of the investigators from the AG's team. That was, I think, a very impactful interview for him, and I think it was really, really important for the AG's people as well. So, we've got some history with this report, and honestly, we had been getting really impatient to see it. It was going on five years that we talked with them, and we knew that the report had been done long ago, and we were waiting pretty impatiently for it to appear. Not for ourselves so much, and not for Phil because he died soon after that interview, but for all the other survivors who had agreed to speak with the AG and her team. It was a long wait for them, so we were really relieved to see this report appear. There are ways in which it's really helpful and ways in which, honestly, it's pretty disappointing. The helpful ways are basically that it does a really good job of explaining the many different techniques that the three dioceses had of putting survivors off, keeping these reports of abuse confidential, moving priests around. That part of the report is really good, and the report is also really good at describing the various ways in which, even though things have improved, the three dioceses still have a lot of work to do. That's the kind of information about current stuff that is really hard to come by, and it's really helpful that the report does that. On the other hand, almost every other AG report [on clergy sex abuse in other states] goes through each diocese priest by priest and describes the priest's story, describes the abuse that he did, talks about the survivors of each of those priests—and that doesn't happen in this report. We don't know, honestly, whether that's because Massachusetts law limits the ways in which the AG could use the information that she got from her grand jury, or whether this is just a stylistic decision that's kind of similar to the one that was made when the AG's report was done back in 2003 on Boston. But whatever the reason, people have not learned as a result of this report about the priests that the AG was able to discover that have never been reported on. That is really a shame because the AG knows the names of offending priests in Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester that nobody else knows, and that information really needs to be public, and it was not made public in this report.
GG I want to move to talking about the oral history project. Can you tell us some more about that?
TM Yeah, so the oral history project has been going for a couple years. We have done interviews so far with over 50 people. That's a small fraction of the total, of course, and we're eager to do more. Some of the interviews that we've done are long-form interviews that are two or three hours long. Some of them are briefer. Some survivors also are interested in asking us to preserve materials that they've collected about their cases. It's really interesting that survivors are often archivists of their own abuse experience. They collect clippings about the priest who abused them. They may have correspondence. If survivors get to the point where they're moving on or they're concerned about their legacy as they get older, we're very willing to preserve the survivor's story, if they would like to talk with us, and/or the materials that they've collected that are often a much more comprehensive picture of what they've been through than is going to appear in sound bites, in newspaper articles, or in any other way. Something like this report or newspaper articles or this conversation that we're having today—all the information that we have about this terrible problem in the Catholic Church ultimately comes from the survivors themselves. And so, our oral history project in a way is an effort to make sure that the original accounts, which are where all of this comes from, are preserved. Survivors are very welcome to send an email to the email address in the back of the report [staff@bishopaccountability.org], and the report is easy to get on the AG's website, or call me and my number is there. We can do an audio interview, we can do a video interview, we can simply have a phone conversation and agree to preserve materials that the survivor might have because those materials are precious. I'll give you an example. There's a survivor in the Boston Archdiocese who shared with us a little suitcase of documents that he had collected, and one of the documents in there was a copy of the flyer that he put on the windshields of cars in the parking lot of the church where he was abused when he was first beginning to get active back in the 1990s. That is a precious relic, really, of activism that turned out to be very, very significant in this whole story. We're honored to preserve them.
GG The Attorney General's Office is not going to be able to press charges because of statute of limitations and other legal issues. And now I'm going to read a quote from your website: "If the facts are known, the causes and remedies will become clear." So, I'm wondering if you can tell me more about that idea and the value you see in archives and documentation, especially in a situation like this where there's not really any known legal recourse.
TM You know, one thing that strikes me is that this report, unlike some others—those reports quote a lot from the documents—in the case of this report in Massachusetts, it wasn't possible for the AG to do that. We know that the documents are behind this report, but the report doesn't give us a lot of access to them. What are we to do in a situation like that? Fortunately, one thing that the AG did do was to come out strongly in favor of statute of limitations reform in Massachusetts. And if statute of limitations reform is passed on Beacon Hill, and survivors who are [currently] timed out from being able to actually file suit and get some kind of justice are able to do that, all kinds of documents are going to become available. They'll be filing suit and their complaints will be public. The documents that come out, if there is a window open, are going to reveal this situation in a way that we've never seen it before. People figure out how to get on with their lives. They don't necessarily want to revisit the terrible experiences of their childhood. That's a totally valid way to approach what they've been through. But many people probably want to come forward but haven't been able to because the law didn't allow them to. And so, if a window is opened, survivors will be empowered and everyone will learn a lot more about the situation. People may feel with the Spotlight movie and all of the Spotlight reports during the investigation that Boston is pretty well known, and there's a sense in which that's true. But in Fall River, Springfield, Worcester, so much needs to be known still. There are many priests, I'm confident, that haven't been identified yet. There are thousands of accounts that we do not have from survivors about what happened in those dioceses, and there's value for the survivors themselves because there's consolation in sharing your story and discovering that you're not alone and finding that people really care about what you went through. But there's also value for Catholics [and] citizens of the Commonwealth, because I think we deserve to know what really happened. And if we know, we can prevent it from happening again. This is also not simply a Catholic problem, and there's a lot to learn about what's happening in your denomination by learning about the Catholic story. It's painful information, but it can be useful information.
The Attorney General's Office did not respond to request for comment about why the names of some of the offending clergy were not in the report.
