Boston ? Priests sexually abused teenage girls, used cocaine and other drugs, and one had an affair with a female parishioner, according to allegations contained in personnel files maintained by the Boston Archdiocese.

The 3,000 pages of files on eight priests were released Tuesday by lawyers representing people who claim they were sexually abused by clergy. The attorneys are seeking to show that Cardinal Bernard Law routinely transferred priests to other parishes even after accusations of child abuse or other wrongdoing.

Last week, the lawyers said they would begin releasing the personnel records of 65 priests, which they have access to via a court order. The priests are not targeted in the abuse lawsuit from which the court order stems.

Archdiocese spokeswoman Donna Morrissey said she could not comment on the specific allegations contained in the personnel files.

But she said, “Some of the information contained in those documents is truly horrible. We’re committed to helping any and all survivors.”

The files included those for the Rev. Robert Meffan, who allegedly recruited girls in the late 1960s to become nuns and then sexually abused them while assigned in Weymouth, Mass., according to 1993 letters from Sister Catherine Mulkerrin to her boss, the Rev. John McCormack, who was a top aide to Law and is currently the bishop in Manchester, N.H.

Meffan allegedly would tell the girls to perform sexual acts as a way of progressing with their religious studies. He also allegedly participated in sexual acts with four girls at the same time, one of the girls told Mulkerrin, according to a 1993 memo.

“They were all young girls planning to be nuns,” said attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr., who represents 247 plaintiffs among dozens of lawsuits against the archdiocese.

The Rev. Thomas Forry, who served in Scituate and Kingston, allegedly built a house on Cape Cod for a woman with whom he carried on an 11-year affair, the files show. The woman had gone to him seeking advice because of problems in her marriage. The woman’s son later alleged that Forry made sexual advances on him.

A 1992 memo from Mulkerrin to McCormack outlined the history of allegations against Forry. Seven years later, Law reassigned Forry from being a prison chaplain at a state prison in Concord to being a roaming, fill-in priest to cover various vacations by priests in the archdiocese. He’s currently unassigned.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys and victims advocates say the personnel files show that Law continued to transfer problem priests until recently.

“It’s not ancient history. It’s very, very recent,” said David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

The Rev. Richard Buntel, who served at St. Joseph’s from 1978 to 1983, allegedly used cocaine with boys while serving in Malden. Mulkerrin, in one memo to McCormack, said an alleged victim told her that Buntel provided cocaine to the boy when he was 15.

“He would snort it in the priest’s room ‘every time I went’ and, in a way, it seemed like an exchange for sex, which also happened every time,” Mulkerrin wrote.

As of this year, Buntel was employed in a non-ministerial position as a business manager at St. Thomas of Villanova parish in Wilmington.