More Than 300 Sexually Abusive Priests Identified In Pennsylvania Report

The clergy abuse scandal in the Catholic Church now appears to be reaching into the higher ranks.

A Philadelphia grand jury spent two years reviewing abuse allegations and has issued a scathing report detailing alleged abuse by hundreds of priests and an apparent systemic cover-up by church authorities. In all, the report identified 300 priests who sexually abused more than 1,000 victims over seven decades.

It also pointed out a lack of public accountability for church higher-ups, who have gone largely unidentified and unpunished.

Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania state's attorney general, relayed the enormity of the report at a press conference in Harrisburg on Tuesday.

As the member of the grand jury wrote in their report: We need you to hear this. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: It happened everywhere.

Some say this is the broadest examination of the church sex abuse scandal since the Boston Globe first broke the story of clergy abuse more than 15 years ago.

Terry McKiernan, founder and president of Bishop Accountability.org, an organization that seeks to identify and report sexually abusive priests.

Mitchell Garabedian, founder and principal attorney at the Law Offices of Mitchell Garabedian

Thomas H. Groome, professor of theology and religious education at Boston College