In the 1970s, when I attended St. Joseph's School in Mendham, NJ, I didn't know what a pedophile priest was but I knew a creepy priest when I saw one, and that was our pastor, Father James T. Hanley.

He abused scores of boys in my town during the 1970s and 80s. He never went to jail but the Diocese of Patterson paid close to $5 million to his victims. I, like many people, didn't think the abuse was widespread and that St. Joe's was an anomaly.

But as the years went on and more accusations came from all over the world, I started to believe that the church gave the nod to this behavior, which would explain why the abuse seemed to stop at the priest level. The church had to be protecting the abusers who had been promoted to bishop and cardinal.

Those in the upper echelons of the church were only accused of insensitivity to the victims and protecting and moving the pedophile priests to new parishes. At first, I was shocked that it took thirty years for the bishops and cardinals to start falling but then realized just how hard the church worked to protect itself and keep things shrouded in secrecy.

So now, after the damning report from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York are launching their own investigations. Except to vindicate the victims, they need not bother because the story will be the same. There's going to be several hundred priests that, sadly, have raped a thousand little kids.

The Catholic Church's official story is that these problems started in the 1950s but it is well documented that they started over a thousand years ago. By the time Emperor Constantine officially recognized Catholicism as the state religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD, the Council of Elvira had already met in 324 AD to pass "Canons" regulating the sexuality of both the clergy and laypeople.

When Irish monks started hearing confessions around 500 AD, they created the Penitential Books, unofficial manuals to help with their counseling. Apparently, there were lots of shenanigans going on in the confessional because these books refer to sexual acts by clerics on young boys and girls there.

In 1051, St. Peter Damian, wrote the Book of Gomorrah in response to the depravities he saw going on in the church and the damage it was doing to the victims. But Pope Leo was more focused on getting the clerics to repent, rather than weeding them out. How conveniently self-serving.

As we've seen with recent scandals, the more powerful a person or organization gets, the more opportunity for abuse. The clergy abuse went unchecked in the last sixty years because the church became more secretive and the victims went to the church instead of the police with their complaints.

The Catholic clergy has had a long, depraved, and criminal run, which has left a lot of broken lives behind. Hopefully, they will finally be held accountable.