Free Republic

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — Attorney General Peter Neronha released a sweeping report Wednesday detailing decades of child sexual abuse and systemic coverup within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence, identifying 72 clergy members as “credibly accused” of misconduct. The report is the culmination of a yearslong investigation stemming from a 2019 agreement between the state’s top prosecutor and former Bishop Thomas Tobin. The agreement granted state investigators unprecedented access to the church’s “secret archives,” personnel files and internal records dating back to 1950. “Generations of Rhode Island victims, their families and others who have suffered the impacts of this trauma...

A.W. Richard Sipe was a former Benedictine monk and Catholic priest, trained as a psychotherapist to deal with the mental health problems of the clergy. However, over the years, his work with the records of over six thousand patients uncovered a pattern of behavior within the Church that eventually led him to exit the clergy and reveal the truth behind the sexual abuse of minors.

Ever since the sexual-abuse crisis erupted in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church in the mid-1980s, with allegations of child molestation by priests, commentators have regularly compared the problems faced by the Church to those it faced in Europe at the start of the sixteenth century, on the eve of the Protestant Reformation—problems that included sexual laxity and financial malfeasance among the clergy, and clerical contempt for the interests of the laity. Calls for change have become increasingly urgent since January, when revelations of widespread sexual misconduct and grossly negligent responses to it emerged prominently in the Boston archdiocese. Similar, if...