A 56-year-old Newport man sued the Diocese of Providence on Friday, alleging that former Bishop Louis E. Gelineau and two priests sexually abused him while he was an altar boy, The Boston Globe reported.

The complaint in Providence County Superior Court is the first to accuse Mr. Gelineau publicly of sexual abuse, said Steven Kelly, a lawyer at Grant & Eisenhofer. It joined more than 100 suits filed against the diocese since July.

The plaintiff, identified in court as John Doe, confirmed the allegations in an exclusive interview. The newspaper does not identify alleged victims of sexual abuse without permission. “I’d say all the time, ‘I wish I had spoken up.’ But I couldn’t,” he said. “Who’s going to believe a 13-year-old? Or, are they going to believe the esteemed ‘Pope of Rhode Island’?”

Mr. Doe said he became an altar boy around age 10 in the early 1980s at St. Luke’s Church in Barrington, where he served under the Rev. Oscar Ferland. The lawsuit says Mr. Ferland began abusing him in the sacristy, rectory and church basement, starting with fondling and later raping him throughout his teens. It also accuses the Rev. Clifford J. Cabral of molesting Mr. Doe during altar-boy trips to Rocky Point Amusement Park.

A white liturgical robe hangs on a wooden wall peg in a stone Gothic interior, illuminated by sunlight casting arched window shadows.

The complaint calls St. Luke’s “the center of a ring of pedophiles led by Bishop Gelineau himself.” It says that when Mr. Gelineau visited in 1983 or 1984, Mr. Ferland told the boy that the bishop wanted a tour of the rectory. Mr. Gelineau picked up a jar of Vaseline outside the priest’s upstairs bedroom and sexually assaulted him there, the suit says. About a year later, according to the complaint, Mr. Gelineau asked the boy to join him in the same room before Mass and assaulted him again.

After the first assault, Mr. Doe said, he took a long shower and cried himself to sleep, but told his mother nothing. “I couldn’t ask for help,” he said. “I was brought up in a super-strict Catholic family, where the church is almighty.”

Mr. Gelineau became Rhode Island’s sixth bishop in December 1971, when roughly two-thirds of state residents identified as Catholic. For 25 years, he presided over 157 churches and 62 schools in its only Roman Catholic diocese. He retired in 1997 and died in 2024.

A giant wooden throne holding a bishop’s mitre overlooks a coastal town dotted with churches, wooded islands, and distant mountains beneath a cloudy sky.

He also used the office to exert political pressure. He led the excommunication of a Planned Parenthood leader, opposed a gay-rights ordinance in Providence and in 1984 forced Arlene Violet, a Sister of Mercy, to leave religious life after she sought permission to run for state attorney general. “In retrospect, the ultimate irony was the church was always in politics,” Ms. Violet said.

Ms. Violet won the election, and her office prosecuted four priests accused of child sexual abuse. In 1990, Mr. Gelineau issued the diocese’s first written policies on misconduct complaints. They held that abuse admissions made in confession were protected and, according to the state attorney general’s March report, kept other allegations confidential under an “Internal Forum” policy. In 1997, a judge ruled that Mr. Gelineau could not be forced to testify about a conversation with a priest charged with rape.

The March investigation found that Mr. Ferland was on the diocese’s list of credibly accused clergy, with complaints dating to 1964. Mr. Ferland died in 1998. Mr. Cabral, who was not on the list, died in 2023.

An antique wooden cabinet with one drawer open and papers inside stands on a stone floor, with a large ornate key lying nearby.

Mr. Doe said watching the film Spotlight during a flight several years ago persuaded him that he might finally be believed. A lawyer first told him the time limit for a suit had expired. Rhode Island then passed a law this year allowing people to sue institutions that enabled childhood sexual abuse.

The diocese declined to answer questions about the three clerics. “Claims like those recently asserted, on average from 50 years ago, present many challenges for courts and litigants including lost evidence, unavailable witnesses, altered memories and the opportunity for spurious claims to enter the court system,” Michael F. Kieloch, its communications director, wrote in an email Monday.

Attorney General Peter F. Neronha has said the actual scale of abuse in the diocese was probably larger than investigators could establish. His office’s report said child sexual abuse was not routinely recorded in priests’ files, and investigators suspected the diocese had not turned over all documentation.