The Revelation of CrisisIn 2002, upon learning that bish ps knowingly put children at risk and participated in public deception by moving sexually predatory priests from parish to parish, American Catholics were outraged. The bishops had been warned against this practice eighteen years earlier when Reverend Thomas Doyle, one of the Church’s top canon lawyers, delivered a report to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (henceforth referred to as the USCCB) in June 1985. Doyle had joined with a priest psychiatrist, Michael Peterson, and a Catholic civil attorney, Ray Mouton, to create the report that called child sexual abuse by priests “the single most serious and far-reaching problem facing the Church today” (Bruni and Burkett, 2002, p. 163). But bishops failed to realize the devastating implications of the DoylePeterson-Mouton report and, in June 2002, were faced with the challenge of addressing the crisis that they had kept under cover for so long. Adding fuel to fire was the discovery that very few of the offending priests known to bishops had ever been reported to civil authorities and that they were instead actively sheltered from criminal charges by their bishops.