All scandals
The full index.
13 documented episodes on file. Each entry carries a verification status; contested items are flagged in the entry itself.
- 2018 Pennsylvania 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.
- 2002 The 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.
- 1989 Mount 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.
- 1987 PTL 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.
- 1956–1971 COINTELPRO 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.
- 1950–1989 Stasi 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.
- 1948–1989 Securitate 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.
- 1945–1989 SB 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.
- 1943–1991 KGB 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.
- 1922–1996 The 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.
- 1692 The Salem Witch Trials A nine-month panic in colonial Massachusetts produced more than 200 accusations of witchcraft and the executions of twenty people — nineteen by hanging and one pressed to death — before the colonial governor halted the proceedings.
- 1633 The Galileo Affair The Roman Inquisition tried Galileo Galilei in 1633 for advocating Copernican heliocentrism, sentenced him to indefinite house arrest, and required him to publicly recant. The Catholic Church formally acknowledged the error of the verdict in 1992.
- 1478–1834 The Spanish Inquisition A 356-year ecclesiastical tribunal system established by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain in 1478, with papal authorisation, to enforce religious orthodoxy. Approximately 150,000 cases survive in the tribunal records; estimates of executions range from 3,000 to 5,000.