Rhode Island Uncovers Decades Of Clergy Abuse 🪶 And A Church That Still Won’t Fully Cooperate

Friendly Atheist ⛨ Attorney General Peter Neronha says missing records, rebuffed interviews, and destroyed files hide the true scale of abuse

After a nearly seven-year investigation, the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office has released a report detailing its findings of sexual abuse in the Catholic Diocese of Providence—in a state that boasts the highest proportion of Catholics anywhere in the country. Attorney General Peter Neronha said his office examined over “250,000 pages of documents held by the Diocese dating back to 1950.“

But even that won’t tell the whole story because the Catholic Church refused to help him any more than he was legally permitted to go.

According to the report, which can be read in full here, Rhode Island doesn’t have a law regarding a grand jury reporting statute. You may recall that this whole ball got rolling after a Pennsylvania grand jury report came out in 2018, but that’s because, in that state, the law allowed the state to force the Catholic Church to produce certain documents and testify about what had happened. In Rhode Island, however, there’s no such law, which meant Neronha could only work with the documents the Catholic diocese chose to give him. And that left huge gaps in their knowledge.

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