Dr. Ann Hagan Webb sat in the Rhode Island Senate gallery on Wednesday, June 3, 2026, and watched the vote that her own sister had spent years pushing toward. Abused by a priest from 1957 to 1965 while a pupil at Sacred Heart School in West Warwick, she told Rhode Island Current afterward that she was ecstatic. “It opens the door for sure,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it’s not a hard road ahead, but at least there’s an avenue now when there wasn’t before.”
The vote was 37-0. Senators approved an amended bill from Sen. Mark McKenney, a Warwick Democrat, creating a two-year “revival window” for claims that the statute of limitations had long since killed. Survivors could sue institutions and supervisors accused of enabling or covering up sexual abuse, including the Roman Catholic Diocese of Providence. The window would open on July 1, 2026, and close on June 30, 2028.
The report behind the bill
McKenney’s bill followed a 282-page report from Attorney General Peter Neronha in March, which detailed decades of clergy abuse and the diocese’s cover-up of it. McKenney made sure no senator could claim ignorance. Every member, he said on the floor, had been handed a hard copy the week before. “It’s particularly difficult to read that online at over 280 pages,” he said.
His verdict on what it showed was blunt. The church’s actions, he said, often revealed “greater concern for protecting the institution’s reputation, for protecting the corporation, than for protecting the children who are in their care.”
A deal struck two days earlier
Getting here was not quick. Lawmakers in both chambers had tried similar bills in earlier sessions, and the Senate was the sticking point again this year. Until the Monday before the vote, senators were weighing a resolution that would ask the Rhode Island Supreme Court to weigh in first. At a May 14 hearing on that resolution, Neronha and former U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith pushed back hard.
Senate leaders then rewrote the bill to stand up better against constitutional challenge. The key change preserved prior court judgments. The original version would have let people whose child sexual abuse suits were thrown out as time-barred refile them, which leaders feared would break the state constitution’s separation of powers. Neronha told reporters the changes made the bill stronger, “without giving up anything” for the core of what victims sought.
Opposition and the road ahead
The Most Rev. Bernard A. Healey, chairman of the Rhode Island Catholic Conference, had opposed the original bill at its April 30 committee hearing. He wrote that Senate Bill No. 2616 “does nothing to protect children.” He also noted that courts in New Hampshire, Maine, Colorado, Kentucky and Utah had struck down similar laws in the past five years. Sen. Matthew LaMountain, a Warwick Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, answered that those laws fell because nearly all those states’ constitutions bar retroactive legislation. A diocese spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The bill now moved to the House, which had passed a slightly different version, sponsored by Hagan Webb’s sister, Rep. Carol Hagan McEntee of South Kingstown, on April 7. McEntee said she was agreeable to the Senate’s changes. House spokesperson Larry Berman said a vote would likely come the following week, the last of the 2026 session. “Either way it will get done,” he said. “This will be a done deal.”
