Father Earl Bierman was an energetic young priest, popular with teenage boys and their families. But behind his charm lay a menace. For three decades, across the country, Bierman seduced students, sexually abused them, arranged trysts between them, offered young boys in sexual service to future priests. And he didn't act alone. Catholic bishops knew about Bierman's crimes and enabled him to find new victims. One of Bierman's former students, a newspaper reporter, wrote a story that led to the arrest of a priest in Cincinnati. Then he remembered rumors he had heard for years about his former teacher, Father Earl Bierman. He set out to expose the priest. The priest tried to kill the reporter. Then dark secrets from high places came into the light. Bierman's fellow priests and his bishops had kept secret files, detailing his crimes - and their collaboration. This was more than a case of a prolific sex offender. This was an organized conspiracy, conducted and sanctioned by bishops of the Catholic Church. Police and prosecutors believe Earl Bierman sexually abused hundreds of children during his career as a priest and teacher. His superiors in the church privately identified 73 different boys he had victimized. Earl Bierman's ministry led to depression, shame, divorce, suicide and murder. He used sacraments as recruiting tools to find new victims. He taught idealistic young boys to plot against teachers, helped seminarians mislead their bishops and persuaded his own victims to cover up for him. Sexual abuse is a multi-faceted pathology. But a greater sickness, an institutional cancer, is at play here. The crimes of Earl Bierman and the bishops of Covington were in sync with events across the river in Cincinnati, Ohio - and 30 years later, around the world. The author, Gregory Flannery, entered a seminary to study for the priesthood, indirectly as a result of Bierman's influence. Events there revealed a culture of depravity that manifested itself in ways that would rock the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and sink the prospects of the man who seemed destined to be the first American pope. What happened in the small dioceses of Covington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, occurred before "clerical sexual abuse" was a common phrase, as familiar now as "chemical disaster" and "school shooting." But the methodology of Bierman's crimes, the elaborate efforts to keep them hidden and the shameful response of the hierarchy presaged what is happening in pews and cathedrals aroun