Official finding Christian institutions & contexts Catholic Manchester, New Hampshire, USA · 2003

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

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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

Archive classification

This is the archive's application of its published inclusion test. The cited record appears below.

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

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

Cited 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.

Source provenance

Source access and integrity log

This log records source retrieval and file integrity. It does not mean that an automated process independently confirmed every statement in the source.

Source and tier basis: https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2003_03_03_NHAG/ Corpus classification: official-attorney-general-report; evidentiary role: official-finding. SHA-256 5ed1adaf0d82e7bbd2e31cb4e0a618dfdfeb5dd4cddd4d464b2c30e3326ac18e
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger
Source and tier basis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_abuse_scandal_in_the_Roman_Catholic_Diocese_of_Manchester Corpus classification: tertiary-summary; evidentiary role: corroboration. SHA-256 58ec20a0269fbcb28c4e5725ba2e6afb192ec6cdfbdbbd711ab6f0b689929b73
Retrieval: 2026-07-20 · Preserved; Bound by Fear automated source-preservation ledger

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