In August 2018, a Pennsylvania statewide grand jury released an 884 page report on six Catholic dioceses, Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton, together serving more than 1.7 million Catholics. Convened by the state Office of Attorney General with full subpoena power, the grand jury spent two years working through internal diocesan personnel files that had never before been examined by an outside authority.
What it found was credible evidence against 301 priests and more than 1,000 identifiable victims across a roughly seventy year span, though the report itself states plainly that the real number of victims is likely higher: some records were destroyed, and many victims never came forward at all. The report's significance lies less in any single number than in its source material. Unlike the John Jay study, which counted what dioceses chose to self-report, the Pennsylvania grand jury read the dioceses' own secret archives directly, memos, personnel files and internal correspondence documenting bishops who knew of allegations and moved the accused priest to a new parish rather than reporting him.
The report described this as a pattern repeating across all six dioceses independently, which is why it carried weight beyond Pennsylvania's own borders: it was read nationally as confirmation, from primary church records rather than survey response, of exactly the concealment pattern the Boston Globe had documented sixteen years earlier and the John Jay study had already quantified. Attorney General Josh Shapiro called it the largest, most comprehensive investigation of the crisis ever conducted by a US state.