Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Other Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Manchester, New Hampshire, USA · 2003

New Hampshire attorney general publishes 9,000-page investigative file naming 35 New Hampshire priests

Record class

Institutional event

Evidence status

Official finding

Authority role

priests of the Diocese of Manchester, diocesan leadership responsible for personnel assignments

Organization

Diocese of Manchester

Spiritual nexus

The report concerns child sexual abuse committed under Catholic clerical and pastoral authority in the Diocese of Manchester, and the internal diocesan record-keeping and reassignment practices that concealed the pattern from law enforcement and the public for decades.

  • Pastoral or clerical authority
  • Institutional obedience or isolation

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 2003-03-03 · investigative report and document release

    Office of the New Hampshire Attorney General. Following its criminal investigation of the diocese (which produced a child-endangerment agreement in December 2002), the Attorney General's office publicly released a 154-page report and roughly 9,000 pages of diocesan documents. The material named 35 New Hampshire priests, 19 Massachusetts priests and five members of religious orders whose files the diocese had held, documenting the diocese's decades-long pattern of internal knowledge and non-disclosure.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • clerical and pastoral authority
  • parish and school access to children
  • internal diocesan documentation withheld from public and law enforcement for decades

Primary record

Sources

official attorney general report official finding Peter W. Heed, N. William Delker and James D. Rosenberg, Report on the Investigation of the Diocese of Manchester (Concord, N.H.: Office of the Attorney General, Mar. 3, 2003).

The official report and accompanying document archive, hosted in full, detailing the diocese's internal handling of abuse allegations against the named priests.

tertiary summary corroboration Wikipedia, 'Sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Manchester' (accessed 2026).

Summarizes the report's release, the prior December 2002 child-endangerment agreement, and the scope of priests named in the released documents.

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