WALTHAM (MA)
Searchlight New Mexico [Santa Fe NM]
February 19, 2025
By Alex Heard
Last week, we published a major story by Searchlight investigative reporter Joshua Bowling, who examined the legacy of sexual abuse of children by priests in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe. In a companion story, I wrote about an important new archive at the University of New Mexico’s special collections library, which will house thousands of pages of clergy abuse records that were generated as part of the archdiocese’s 2018 bankruptcy. This week, I added one more: a brief essay about the importance of archival collections that preserve unvarnished material from painful parts of American history. They’re especially vital now, when there’s a political counterreaction — with teeth — against sharing information that presents the darker aspects of our shared past.
During our research, Bowling and I benefited from the deep knowledge of a group of people in Waltham, Massachusetts, who know the subject of clergy abuse as well as anyone in the world: the four-person staff at BishopAccountability.org, an archive that has set the standard for keeping track of this sprawling topic, and sharing that information with the public.
BishopAccountability.org was founded in 2003 by Terence McKiernan, a Catholic parent who was shaken by the landmark reporting on abusive priests published in 2002 by The Boston Globe. “I knew a family whose son had been abused by one of the prominent abusers in Boston,” McKiernan told me in a phone interview. “It was that connection, and just being a dad — it really hit me and I wanted to do something about it.”
As a first step, he helped found Voice of the Faithful — an organization of lay Catholics that exists in large part to provide help to abuse survivors — and followed that the next year by starting BishopAccountability.org. McKiernan, a former consultant, serves as co-director of this nonprofit alongside Anne Barrett Doyle; they’re joined in their work by Suzy Nauman (database manager) and Stephen Sheehan (researcher).
The volume of information they’ve amassed is incredible. Approximately 600,000 files are accessible on their web site, which run from single pages to priest personnel files and other documents that can be hundreds of pages long. The group owns the largest existing collection in existence of official documentation about clergy abuse — for example, state attorney general reports and church-commissioned reports — which total hundreds of thousands of pages in all. They archive news stories, maintain a continually evolving database on accused priests in the U.S. (which at this point contains descriptions of nearly 8,000 people), and record video interviews with survivors. There’s also a physical archive in Waltham that holds 3.5 million pages of information — church documents, pleadings, depositions, clippings, and other sources — that is available to visiting researchers and scholars.
BishopAccountability has agreed to assist in a project that will involve Searchlight spreading the word about the new archive at UNM. I’ll provide more details about that in a future High Beam.