I have a Catholic friend who lives in an exceptionally bad diocese and who for years has been heaving rocks up mountains to keep his faith strong and his family in church. His resilience has amazed me. Yesterday, after a grand jury report revealed that bishops and other leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Pennsylvania covered up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests over a period of 70 years, my friend, a tough-guy lawyer, wrote to tell me that he wept in his office. He said, “I am at the end.”

Twelve years ago, so was I. My once-fervent Catholic faith had been eviscerated by my covering the scandal as a journalist. Leaving Catholicism was the spiritual equivalent of a trapped animal gnawing off his own leg off to save its life. It was extraordinarily painful, but if I hadn’t done it, depression would have consumed me and likely annihilated what was left of my Christian faith.

In 2001, when I first began covering the Catholic sex abuse scandal, I interviewed the Rev. Tom Doyle, who destroyed his own clerical career by defending abuse victims. After the interview, the priest cautioned me that if I pursued this story further, it would take me “to places darker than you can imagine.”

He was right. We learned from the Pennsylvania report that one priest raped a 7-year-old girl as she recovered in the hospital from a tonsillectomy. The grand jury uncovered evidence of a sadomasochistic clerical pedophile ring in Pittsburgh that photographed boys they had posed to look like Jesus Christ, then gave them gold crosses to show that they had been groomed. Those particular cases were new to me, but the satanic darkness was all too familiar from my investigative work. I have known since 2002 about Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, molesting seminarians.