Michigan Attorney General Accuses 56 Catholic Clergy of Sex Abuse in Shocking Report
350-page dossier reveals sordid details of priests, deacons, and brothers who preyed on vulnerable children
Michigan’s top state prosecutor has released a devastating report exposing a systemic pattern of clerical sex abuse perpetrated by 56 Catholic clergy in the diocese of Lansing since the 1950s.
Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office published the 350-page bombshell report earlier this week based on 1.5 million paper documents and 3.5 million electronic documents seized from seven dioceses within the jurisdiction of the archdiocese of Detroit.
Police Raid Seven Diocesan Chanceries
The report is the culmination of an investigation which began on October 3, 2018, after an eight-hour police raid was executed on Detroit and the six dioceses of Gaylord, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Marquette, and Saginaw.
Multiple police agencies, including 42 Michigan state police detectives and troopers, two Midland police officers, two Saginaw Township police officers, one Grand Blanc police officer, and 15 special agents simultaneously raided diocesan chanceries to obtain evidence against the predator clerics.
The AG’s office also received 1,172 tips from a phone tipline set up at the beginning of the investigation, as well as at least 180 victim interviews and 285 police reports.
Released on Monday, the report — titled Diocese of Lansing: A Complete Accounting — lists 48 priests, three religious brothers and an apparent former religious brother, as well as four deacons in its list of clergy who sexually abused minors in the diocese.
Nessel’s office has issued criminal charges in 11 cases statewide and secured convictions in nine of them, delivering justice for 38 survivors, the report stated.
Predator Priests Rape Male and Female Minors
Among the accused is Fr. Jacob Vellian, an Indian Syro-Malabar priest from the archeparchy of Kottayam in Kerala, India, serving at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Benton Harbor. He was charged in May 2019 with two counts of rape — one of an 11-year-old girl, the othera 15-year-old girl — and is reported to have died while awaiting extradition from India.
Franciscan friar Fr. Alphonse Boardway is accused of orally and anally raping his 16-year-old male victim after giving him rum to get him drunk in 1968. When the victim reported the abuse immediately to his parents, they told him “to shut up and not talk about it.” Boardway was murdered in Arizona on September 23, 1997.
The report cites the testimony of an altar boy who served at daily Mass and was raped by Fr. Francis Gerald Boyer when he was 12 years old, “sometime between January and April of 1961.” The victim, victim James Edward Parker, later wrote a book about how that affected him, called Raped in the House of God: The Murder of My Soul and its Lifetime Effects.
“He said that as long as I kept the secret God would forgive me. This was a way for me to serve on another level and it was part of God’s plan,” wrote Parker. “My dream of becoming a priest to make dad proud was not to be. I had lost my innocence and my new mission in life would have to be surviving this humiliating violation.”
Priest Asks to be Relieved of Celibacy Rule after Abusing 19 Victims
Fr. Vincent Anthony DeLorenzo, a priest at Holy Redeemer Church in Burton, raped and molested a 17-year-old boy at St. Pius School. The priest was sentenced to one year in jail and five years’ probation in June 2023 on one count of Attempted First-Degree Criminal Sexual Conduct.
DeLorenzo, who died in January 2024 while serving his sentence, also pled guilty to sexually assaulting a five-year-old boy following a funeral service he officiated for the boy’s deceased family member in 1987. Five victims of Delorenzo’s sexual abuse gave impact statements in court.
Fr. Terrence M. Healy, who confessed to sexually abused a 15-year-old boy between 1986 and87, was jailed for four and a half years and defrocked in 1992. He is also accused of abusing a 19-year-old male who had gone to him for counseling.
On February 26, 1992, after Healy was paroled, he asked his bishop to help him with laicization and admitted that 19 victims — the youngest of whom was 14 — had suffered as a result of his sexual addiction. “I have decided that I cannot live as a Catholic priest and be celibate. It is necessary then that I be laicized as soon as possible,” Healy wrote.
A female victim of Fr. Joseph McHugh, a priest from the Irish Province of the Spiritans (or Holy Ghost Fathers), reported that the priest groomed, assaulted, and finally raped her in 1976 at St. Gerard’s parish when she was 11 or 12 years old.
On October 22, 2018, another female victim emailed the AG’s tipline and revealed that, between 1975 and 1978, she was sexually abused by Fr. McHugh, starting when she was 16 years old. It “started with a kiss, then it went on to groping and finally rape,” she said.
On October 8, 2019, the diocesan Victim Assistance Coordinator emailed the AG’s tipline to report that a third female victim, who said she was “touched and kissed by Fr. Joseph McHugh from 13–18 years old in 1968–1973.”
Church Authorities Respond
“Having read this long and detailed report, my heart breaks for all those who have suffered due to the evil of clerical sexual abuse which is a great betrayal of Jesus Christ, His Holy Church, the priesthood, and, most gravely, those victims – and their families – who were harmed physically, emotionally, but above all spiritually when they were so young,” said Bishop Earl Boyea, who has been leading the Diocese of Lansing since 2008.
“To all those injured by such criminal and immoral actions I say clearly and without hesitation: these terrible things should never have happened to you; I am so deeply sorry that they ever did; please be assured of my prayers, penance, love and support,” he added in a diocesan statement.
Will Bloomfield, the Diocese of Lansing’s general counsel, insisted that the diocese had cooperated fully with the secular authorities.
“Six years ago, the Attorney General raided our offices expecting to find ongoing crimes and a coverup but, instead, they found a partner equally committed to eradicating abuse and files showing diocesan cooperation with law enforcement for over 20 years,” Bloomfield said.
“Since at least 2002, the Diocese has been referring all allegations to law enforcement and removing any clerics credibly accused of abuse of a minor.”
Clerical Sex Abuse Settlements Reach $5 Billion
Meanwhile, clerical sex abuse claims paid out by U.S. Catholic dioceses since 2004 have reached $5 billion and could exceed $6 billion, following the archdiocese of Los Angeles’s $880 million abuse claims settlement announced on October 16.
The settlement is the highest single payout by an archdiocese, and brings Los Angeles’s cumulative payout in sex abuse lawsuits to more than $1.5 billion.
An aggregated total from two decades of reports issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops shows the nation’s dioceses and eparchies paid some $4.384 billion to settle claims between 2004 and 2023, Our Sunday Visitor reported in November.
While data for fiscal year 2024 is still pending, the Los Angeles archdiocese’s $880 million settlement and a $323 million settlement announced in September by the Diocese of Rockville Centre total $1.2 billion within the span of less than a month. OSV calculated that “the two settlements, plus the USCCB total for 2004-2023, add up to $5.59 billion.”
The Michigan AG’s report on Lansing diocese is the fourth of what will eventually be seven separate reports, one for each of Michigan’s seven dioceses.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.