The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston: A Report by the Attorney General

A 76 page report released in July 2003 by Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, closing a sixteen month investigation into how the Archdiocese of Boston handled child sexual abuse by its clergy. Built from more than 30,000 pages of the archdiocese's own personnel and legal files and around 100 hours of grand jury testimony, gathered through a single justice grand jury mechanism that let the Attorney General make his findings public despite ordinary grand jury secrecy rules, the same legal shape the atlas's existing Pennsylvania grand jury report used fifteen years later. It identified 789 alleged victims in the archdiocese's own records naming 237 accused priests over six decades, and concluded that archdiocese leadership knew of the abuse and moved known abusers between parishes rather than removing them. It also stated plainly that no criminal charges could be brought against archdiocesan officials, because the child protection statutes in force during the relevant decades were too narrow to reach what the investigation had found.