Seventy-five Catholic clergy in Rhode Island molested more than 300 victims since 1950, according to a sweeping report released Wednesday by Attorney General Peter Neronha. Officials stressed that the actual numbers are almost certainly higher.

The report caps a multiyear investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Providence, the spiritual home for a state where nearly 40% of residents identify as Catholic. According to NBC News, only 20 people ever faced criminal charges. Just 14 were convicted. A dozen others were laicized or otherwise dismissed.

Most accused priests avoided accountability entirely.

A System Built to Look Away

The diocese opened a "spiritual retreat-style facility" for accused priests in the early 1950s, framing predation as a disorder to be treated rather than a crime to be punished. By the 1990s, accused clergy were sometimes placed on sabbatical leave, a bureaucratic euphemism that let abusers vanish quietly while victims lived with the wreckage.

Consider the case of Robert Carpentier. A victim came forward in 1992 describing abuse that occurred in the 1970s. Carpentier resigned and acknowledged the abuse. The diocese sent him to a treatment center, then he went on sabbatical at Boston College. He retired in 2006 and received financial support from the diocese until he died in 2012. A 13-year-old victim's suffering, processed through institutional machinery, produced a comfortable retirement.

Or consider the late Monsignor John Allard, pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in Cranston. A survivor described being groomed for more than a year before the abuse began in 1981, when he was in ninth grade. One detail from the survivor has the clarity of a scar:

"His comment to me was always, 'You need a hug,' and that's something that I can hear him saying very clearly to this very day."

The Vatican, at the urging of then-Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin, let Allard retire rather than be defrocked. Retirement, not removal. Dignity for the predator, silence for the victim.

The Fox on the Review Board

In at least one case, the institution designed to hear abuse complaints was itself compromised. The Rev. Francis Santilli sat on the diocesan review board while being accused of abuse himself. He stepped down after the complaint, but remained in active ministry even after other complaints surfaced in 2014 and 2021. He was not removed until 2022.

A message left for Santilli on Wednesday was not immediately returned.

That timeline deserves a second look. A priest accused of abuse sits on the board that adjudicates abuse claims. He's removed from the board but continues in ministry. New complaints arrive in 2014. More in 2021. He stays. Seven more years pass before anyone acts. The system did not fail to catch this. The system absorbed it.

Cooperation, Up to a Point

Neronha launched the investigation in 2019, a year after the landmark Pennsylvania grand jury report revealed that some 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 children since the 1940s. Because Rhode Island law does not allow grand jury reports to become public, Neronha forged an agreement with the diocese to access 70 years' worth of records on clergy sexual abuse.

The diocese now points to that agreement as proof of its good faith. Its statement after the report's release leaned into the framing:

"The very existence of the Attorney General's report is the result of the Diocese of Providence's unprecedented and voluntary agreement to extraordinary transparency."

But the cooperation had clear limits. Neronha said the diocese's help was limited at times and directly obstructed parts of the investigation:

"It repeatedly refused my team's requests for interviews of diocesan personnel responsible for overseeing the diocese's investigations."

Hand over the documents, but don't let anyone ask questions about them. That is not transparency. That is controlled disclosure.

The diocese also pushed back on the report's framing, insisting in its statement that the findings should not suggest an ongoing problem or new revelations. It acknowledged the gravity of abuse in broad terms:

"Any abuse of children is an abhorrent sin and a terrible crime."

True enough. But institutions are not judged by what they call a sin in press statements. They are judged by what they tolerate in practice.

The Accountability Gap

Neronha's office has charged four current and former priests with sexual abuse for allegations stemming from 2020 to 2022. Three are still awaiting trial. The fourth priest died after being deemed incompetent to stand trial in 2022.

Of the 75 clergy identified in the report, about a quarter faced criminal charges. The rest did not. Some died. Some disappeared into retirement or transfer. The legal system, constrained by statutes of limitations and the slow grind of institutional obstruction, caught a fraction of the men responsible.

Mitchell Garabedian, the attorney made famous by the Boston Globe's "Spotlight" investigation, put it plainly after the report's release:

"To trust the Diocese of Providence to now protect children after decades of abusing them is akin to trusting seasoned bank robbers to become bank tellers. It makes no sense morally or otherwise."

What Comes Next

Neronha said he agrees with victims who say not enough has been done and expressed hope the report will spur legal reforms in Rhode Island. His stated aim extends beyond the diocese itself:

"Not until now has there been a comprehensive review of this painful chapter in our state's history, with a view toward offering transparency, accountability, and systemic reforms that will, I hope, lessen the likelihood of future child sexual abuse, not just within the Diocese of Providence, but in our community as a whole."

Conservatives have long understood that institutions, especially those shielded by cultural deference, require accountability structures with teeth. The Catholic Church is not unique in housing predators. It is unique in the scale and duration of the concealment, and in the degree to which the institution's own moral authority was weaponized to silence victims. No family that trusted a parish priest with their child's spiritual formation imagined they were handing that child to a predator who would be quietly reassigned when caught.

The question now is whether Rhode Island's legal framework will change to match the scale of what happened. Statutes of limitations shielded most of the 75 identified clergy from ever seeing a courtroom. Reform means nothing if the law continues to run out the clock on justice for children.

Three hundred victims. Seventy-five years. Fourteen convictions. Those numbers tell the story of an institution that chose its own preservation over the children in its care, and a legal system that let it.