The inquiry ran for seven years and reached back across a century. When Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced its findings on Sept. 30, the figures were of the kind a state should never have to pronounce: the investigation, begun in 2019, found evidence that more than 270 Catholic clerics abused nearly 1,000 children over several decades in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester — the most exhaustive such probe since the 2003 examination of the Boston archdiocese. Most of it happened before the scandal of the early 2000s, and expired statutes of limitation, or conduct that was no crime when it occurred, barred the courts from nearly all of it.
Out of all of it, one priest was prosecuted. His name is Martineau, and the Boston Globe identified his case and obtained the court records, which had been impounded — sealed so completely that in the public database of Massachusetts courts it was as if the prosecution had never happened. What they show, reported for the first time this week, echoes the practices that convulsed the church two decades ago: the diocese prepared to move an accused priest to another parish, the old shuffle the Vatican itself has since condemned, while the months passed and no one called the police. The church now promises to notify law enforcement proactively; Massachusetts law requires disclosure to the state within 30 days.
September 9, 2021
That is the day Bishop McManus learned of the allegations, according to the court records, in a meeting with Martineau and a second Worcester priest, Alfredo Porras. It was Porras who had heard from a young parishioner that Martineau had touched her inappropriately, and Porras who had confronted him. Now he told the bishop that Martineau had confessed, at least partially: he “agreed that he had held hands with [the victim] and might have kissed her on the forehead at some point, but denied any other allegations.” The girl was 14 the year the alleged touching began. At the time, Martineau led the parishes of St. Paul and St. Stanislaus in Warren.
On Sept. 27, Porras returned to the bishop. He had met with the girl and her father, and the account had grown: the two “had held hands, kissed, and hugged each other for prolonged amounts of time,” a police report records. The victim was nervous as she spoke; Porras “believed [she] felt guilty about what had happened.”
Eighty thousand messages
In October she put it in writing — she would not speak it aloud, so she handed Porras a note. “Hugging. Hand holding. Kissing.” The kissing, she wrote, was “usually done when parting, but sometimes randomly — only he kissed me.” Martineau “would slide his hands along my waist,” held her tightly, cradled her head, stroked her hair, scratched her face with his beard “in a teasing way.” “Our foreheads would touch, then noses, the[n] occasionally lips.” Between 2019 and 2021, the records say, the priest and the girl exchanged approximately 80,000 text messages.
Her father had confronted Martineau about the messages earlier in 2021. Then, one August night, with the parents and the girl out of town, one of her brothers woke in the living room of the family home — a house standing on church property — and found the priest moving through the dark by the light of his phone’s flashlight. Confronted, Martineau said he had come to close the windows before a predicted rain.
What followed, the parents later told police, was a campaign of retaliation. The family, in financial hardship, lived rent-free on the grounds of St. Stanislaus in exchange for labor, which made the parish administrator their landlord, their employer, and their priest at once. Martineau cut off their internet service, tried to halt their oil deliveries, and falsely accused a family member of stealing a church lawn mower. He remained the head of the parish, holding sway over the family, for months after his bishop first learned of the allegations against him.
Nearly five months passed between the Sept. 9 meeting and the diocese’s report to the authorities. The diocese’s account, offered by its chancellor and director of communications, Ray Delisle, is that the “initial concerns raised in the early fall of 2021 by the victim and her family were about boundaries and poor judgment, but not sexual in nature.” “It was finally revealed in late January 2022 to our Victim Assistance Coordinator, a licensed social worker who specializes in child abuse, that there was something sexual that took place,” Delisle said — and that, he said, triggered a mandatory report to the state and a notification to the Worcester district attorney’s office. In the intervening months, the allegations had only grown more serious. The court records add one detail: it was Bishop McManus himself who asked the social worker to speak with the victim.
A prosecution that never officially happened
The Worcester district attorney prosecuted. Martineau was first charged with indecent assault and battery on a person aged 14 or older, and pleaded not guilty. In September 2025 he accepted a plea deal under which he agreed that sufficient facts existed to convict him of assault and battery, though he did not plead guilty to that crime; after the agreement, the case was dismissed. The court imposed a year of probation and ordered no contact with the victim, then ended the probation early, in June of this year. His lawyer, Louis P. Aloise, says the charges were reduced because the prosecution could prove only that Martineau had hugged the victim. “This is the weakest [priest abuse] case I’ve seen,” Aloise said. The Worcester Telegram & Gazette had previously reported the plea agreement. Earlier this year Martineau was out of work and living with his parents, the records show; attempts to reach him were unsuccessful, and Aloise said he did not believe Martineau wished to comment. The diocese says he can no longer present himself as a priest, though per Aloise he has petitioned to be reinstated.
The Worcester diocese has long been the outlier among the three, resisting reforms the church’s own scandal made common — refusing, despite the urging of advocates and of Campbell herself, to publish a list of credibly accused priests, and drawing criticism in the attorney general’s report for how it monitors priests, including accused ones. One paragraph of that report describes the Martineau case as an example, without naming him. There is an old lesson here about institutions: they change the way rivers change course — slowly, and only where the current forces them. The church promised, after everything, to call the authorities first. In Worcester, the records show, it weighed a transfer instead, and waited nearly five months.