Nearly 1,000 children were abused at three Massachusetts dioceses, state probe finds

BOSTON — More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over decades, according to an investigative report the state's attorney general released on Wednesday. The report provided what Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the first full public accounting of the abuse and institutional failures that allowed it to proliferate for more than half a century at the Catholic dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester. Most of the abuse detailed in the report occurred before 2002, the year the clergy sex abuse scandal burst onto the international stage due to a Pulitzer Prize-winning report by the Boston Globe on how officials at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston routinely covered up sex abuse by priests. The state attorney general's investigation documented years of similar issues at the three dioceses in other parts of Massachusetts, which Campbell said knew children were being abused by priests and other clerics. "Too often they protected the reputation of the church rather than protecting children,"