Nearly 1,000 children were abused at three Massachusetts dioceses, state probe finds. BOSTON: More than 270 Catholic clerics sexually abused nearly 1,000 children across three Massachusetts dioceses over decades, according to an investigative report the state’s attorney general released on Wednesday. The report provided what Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell called the first full public accounting of the abuse and institutional failures that allowed it to proliferate for more than half a century at.