This morning, I woke up to a story in The Washington Post, Page 1, above the fold. The headline reads: "300 priests in Pa. accused of abusing children."

Although I had read stories of sex abuse (ad nauseam) for years, this number grabbed me. And so did the geography: I taught in the dioceses of Erie and Pittsburgh for years back in the late 1960s. The school in Erie where I taught was an all-girls Catholic high school. Scarcely a priest was ever seen, except to say Mass about once a week. But the school in Pittsburgh was a high school — with both boys and girls — and it was a parish high school. (Yes, those kinds of institutions existed in the 1960s.)

And so, I was left wondering about the priests I knew then, and about other priests in the Pittsburgh Diocese. If there was any abuse of any kind at the time, I did not know about it.

But I continue to be shocked at such stories: how frequently they appear and the numbers of victims they talk about. And it's important to underline: This story is only about Pennsylvania. What about other states across the country? Could similar stories be written about them?