Sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston

The Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal was part of a series of Catholic Church sex abuse cases in the United States that revealed widespread crimes in the American Catholic Church. The Archdiocese of Boston includes the City of Boston and several counties in eastern Massachusetts.

In early 2002, The Boston Globe published results of an investigation titled "Spotlight Investigation: Abuse in the Catholic Church" that led to the criminal prosecutions of five Catholic priests and brought the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy to national attention. Another accused priest who was involved in the scandal also pleaded guilty. The Globe's coverage encouraged other victims to come forward with allegations of abuse, resulting in numerous lawsuits and 249 criminal cases.

Subsequent investigations and allegations revealed a pattern of sexual abuse and cover-ups in a number of large dioceses across the United States. What had first appeared to be a few isolated cases of abuse became a nationwide scandal, then a global crisis for the Catholic Church.

Ultimately, it became clear that priests and lay members of religious orders in the Catholic Church had sexually abused minors on a scale such that the accusations reached into the thousands over several decades. Although the majority of cases were reported to have occurred in the United States, victims have come forward in other nations such as Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India. A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth, thus allowing the abusers to continue their crimes.

The Globe's in-depth reporting was the central subject of Tom McCarthy's film Spotlight in 2015, which won two Academy Awards including Best Picture.