Maryland
Md. Code, Family Law §§ 5-704, 5-705 — Maryland Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Law
- Clergy named as mandatory reporter?
- No
- Confessional exemption?
- Yes
- Statute
- Md. Code, Family Law §§ 5-704, 5-705
- Clergy named
- All-person
- Pending
- —
Maryland runs a two-track mandatory-reporting structure. Section 5-704 names four professional categories (health practitioners, police officers, educators, and human service workers) and opens with a privilege-override clause: reporting is required notwithstanding any law on privileged communications. Clergy are not on that list. Clergy reach the reporting duty through § 5-705, which sweeps in 'a person in this State other than' the § 5-704 professionals. That all-person provision is broad, but it carries a carveout for clergy that the professional track does not have. Section 5-705(a)(3) provides that a minister, clergyman, or priest is not required to report when doing so would disclose a communication described in the Courts Article § 9-111, Maryland's clergy-penitent privilege, and when the communication was made in a professional religious capacity, in the course of discipline the church enjoins, and the clergy member is bound to maintain confidentiality under canon law, church doctrine, or practice. All three elements must be present. The gap this creates is real but bounded. Outside that triple-element confessional zone, clergy are required reporters. The 2023 Maryland Attorney General report on child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore (156 clergy and Archdiocese personnel documented, more than 600 known survivors since the 1940s, decades of institutional cover-up) made plain what decades of legal ambiguity had protected. The civil statute of limitations has since been eliminated by the 2023 Child Victims Act, upheld by the Supreme Court of Maryland in February 2025. The mandatory-reporting statute has not moved. Maryland illustrates a pattern UCO tracks across the country: states where the law reaches clergy through a broad catch-all rather than an express enumeration, and where a privilege carveout quietly exempts the disclosure contexts most likely to involve institutional cover. Giving § 5-705 the same privilege override § 5-704 already carries would close it, one of the concrete fixes UCO carries from one state to the next.