Era · 1950–present
Contemporary
The contemporary era in this archive runs from the post-war reorganisation of the Western religious-institutional landscape to the present. The documentary record is comprehensive: official inquiries, grand-jury reports, court records, regulatory filings, and contemporaneous investigative journalism establish the institutional record of the period in detail unavailable for any earlier era.
The period is defined, in this archive, by the public exposure of long-running institutional patterns whose existence had been internally known and externally suspected for decades. The Boston Globe Spotlight reporting of 2002 is the catalyst event for the modern public-record reconstruction of the Catholic clergy-abuse crisis. The McAleese, Hughes, Royal Commission, IICSA, and Sauvé inquiries are its formal-state analogues across other jurisdictions. The televangelism financial-fraud prosecutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s are a distinct but contemporaneous strand.
Survivors of contemporary-era episodes are, in most cases, still living. The documentary record of this era is correspondingly subject to active legal and statutory-of-limitations questions in multiple jurisdictions.
Filed
24 entriesPennsylvania Grand Jury Report on Clergy Abuse
A two-year statewide investigating grand jury in Pennsylvania identified more than 300 credibly accused priests and over 1,000 child victims across six Catholic dioceses, naming each priest individually in the public record.
FILED · 2007–2011 · PENTECOSTAL · FINANCIALThe Grassley Senate Finance Committee Televangelist Investigation
A four-year inquiry by the United States Senate Finance Committee under Senator Charles Grassley examined the finances of six major American televangelism ministries, concluding that the federal tax-exemption framework as applied to large religious broadcasters was insufficient to ensure ordinary nonprofit accountability.
FILED · 2002 · CATHOLIC · SEXUALThe Boston Globe Spotlight Investigation
A six-month investigative project exposed systematic sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston and the institutional cover-up that protected the abusers for decades.
FILED · 2000–2019 · BAPTIST · SEXUALThe Southern Baptist Convention Abuse Crisis
A 2022 independent investigation commissioned by the Southern Baptist Convention itself established that senior denominational leaders had for two decades systematically ignored, belittled, and intimidated survivors of sexual abuse while maintaining a secret internal list of credibly accused ministers.
FILED · 1997–2023 · LDS · FINANCIALEnsign Peak Advisors — SEC Sanction of the LDS Investment Arm
In February 2023, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission settled administrative proceedings against Ensign Peak Advisors and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over a 22-year scheme using thirteen shell LLCs to obscure the Church's investment portfolio, which had grown to approximately $32 billion by 2018.
FILED · 1989 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALMount Cashel Orphanage
A 1989 Newfoundland royal commission established that the Christian Brothers of Ireland had subjected boys at the Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John's to systematic physical and sexual abuse over decades, and that two previous criminal investigations had been suppressed.
FILED · 1988 · PENTECOSTAL · FINANCIALThe Jimmy Swaggart Scandals
The Pentecostal televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was defrocked by the Assemblies of God in 1988 after the public disclosure of his use of prostitutes; subsequent IRS proceedings and a second 1991 disclosure further established the institutional record of one of the highest-revenue televangelism operations of the 1980s.
FILED · 1987 · PENTECOSTAL · FINANCIALPTL Ministries and the Jim Bakker Fraud
The collapse of the PTL televangelism empire after the disclosure of a payoff to Jessica Hahn led to a federal fraud prosecution of Jim Bakker for the oversale of lifetime-partnership memberships in PTL's Heritage USA resort.
FILED · 1978–2024 · ANGLICAN · SEXUALThe Makin Review and the John Smyth Abuse Cover-up
A November 2024 independent review established that the Church of England's senior leadership had known of barrister John Smyth's serial abuse of boys at conservative-evangelical Iwerne camps since 2013 and had failed to act; Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby resigned five days after publication.
FILED · 1971–1982 · CATHOLIC · FINANCIALBanco Ambrosiano, Roberto Calvi, and the Vatican Bank
The 1982 collapse of Banco Ambrosiano, then Italy's largest private bank, exposed a network of Vatican-Bank-controlled offshore shell companies that had concealed approximately $1.3 billion in missing assets; the bank's chairman Roberto Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London weeks before the collapse.
FILED · 1956–1971 · BAPTIST · INFILTRATIONCOINTELPRO Surveillance of Black Churches and the SCLC
The FBI's *Counter Intelligence Program* conducted extensive surveillance and disruption operations targeting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr personally, and the broader American Black church network from 1956 to 1971; the Church Committee Final Report of 1976 established the institutional record on the public side of US government.
FILED · 1950–2020 · CATHOLIC · SEXUALCIASE — The Sauvé Commission on French Catholic Abuse
A three-year independent commission established by the French Catholic episcopate estimated in October 2021 that approximately 216,000 minors had been sexually abused by clergy in France between 1950 and 2020, with an additional ~114,000 abused by lay personnel of Catholic institutions.
FILED · 1950–2023 · CATHOLIC · SEXUALJean Vanier and the L'Arche Disclosures
A 2020 internal investigation commissioned by L'Arche International established that its founder, the celebrated Catholic spiritual writer Jean Vanier, had sexually abused at least six women under his spiritual direction; a 2023 follow-up study documented at least 25 victims and revealed Vanier's lifelong concealment of L'Arche's origins in the abusive theology of his mentor Père Thomas Philippe.
FILED · 1950–2015 · JW · SEXUALJehovah's Witnesses — Australian Royal Commission Findings
The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse established in 2015 that Watchtower's internal records identified 1,006 alleged perpetrators of child sexual abuse within Jehovah's Witnesses congregations over six decades, none of whom had been reported to police.
FILED · 1950–1989 · LUTHERAN · INFILTRATIONStasi Infiltration of the East German Lutheran Churches
The East German Ministry for State Security operated extensive agent networks within the EKD-bloc Evangelical-Lutheran churches throughout the 1950–1989 period; the BStU archive opening after 1990 made the operation publicly documentable down to individual *Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter* identities.
FILED · 1948–1989 · ORTHODOX · INFILTRATIONSecuritate Operations Against the Romanian Churches
The Romanian Communist secret police (Securitate) operated agent networks within both the Romanian Orthodox Church and the suppressed Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church from 1948 to 1989; CNSAS file openings after 1999 documented both extensive clergy collaboration and the imprisonment-deaths of resisting bishops.
FILED · 1945–1989 · CATHOLIC · INFILTRATIONSB Operations Against the Polish Catholic Church
The Polish Communist secret police (*Służba Bezpieczeństwa*, SB) operated agent networks within Catholic clergy ranks from 1945 to 1989, surveilled the institutional church continuously, and killed several outspoken priests including Father Jerzy Popiełuszko in 1984; the IPN file openings after 1999 documented both the operations and the scale of clergy collaboration.
FILED · 1944–2006 · CATHOLIC · SEXUALMarcial Maciel and the Legionaries of Christ
The Mexican Catholic priest Marcial Maciel Degollado founded the Legionaries of Christ in 1941, served as its director until 2005, and over six decades sexually abused at least sixty seminarians and an unknown number of other minors, fathered at least six children by at least two women, and embezzled substantial sums; Benedict XVI imposed canonical sanctions on him in May 2006.
FILED · 1943–1991 · ORTHODOX · INFILTRATIONKGB Co-option of the Moscow Patriarchate
After Stalin's 1943 rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church, the Soviet state operated the reconstituted Moscow Patriarchate as a controlled institution; KGB infiltration was documented in detail by the post-Soviet Russian Supreme Soviet inquiry and by the Mitrokhin Archive published in 1999.
FILED · 1930–2025 · CATHOLIC · SEXUALTheodore McCarrick — Vatican Report and Laicization
Theodore Edgar McCarrick, formerly Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, was laicized by Pope Francis on 16 February 2019 — the first US cardinal so laicized — following the substantiation of decades of sexual misconduct allegations; a 449-page Vatican-commissioned report published November 2020 documented the institutional failure to act.
FILED · 1922–1998 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALIrish Mother and Baby Homes
An Irish state Commission of Investigation — established in 2015 and reporting in 2021 — established that approximately 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children passed through 18 Mother and Baby Homes and County Homes between 1922 and 1998, with approximately 9,000 infant deaths in those institutions and substantial documented incidents of forced family separation, illegal adoption, and unmarked burial.
FILED · 1922–1996 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALThe Magdalene Laundries
For most of the twentieth century, four Catholic religious orders operated commercial laundries in Ireland that held women and girls in unpaid, indefinite confinement under conditions formally acknowledged by the Irish state in 2013.
FILED · 1831–1996 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALCanadian Indian Residential Schools
For 165 years, Catholic, Anglican, United Church, and Presbyterian institutions operated a network of federally-funded residential schools in Canada that separated approximately 150,000 Indigenous children from their families; the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report concluded the system constituted "cultural genocide."
FILED · 1819–1969 · CATHOLIC · INSTITUTIONALUS Federal Indian Boarding Schools
United States Department of the Interior investigative reports released in 2022 and 2024 established that the federal government had operated, or funded religious institutions to operate, 408 Indian boarding schools across 37 states between 1819 and 1969, with at least 973 documented child deaths confirmed across both volumes of the investigation.
