The searing grand jury report issued Tuesday in Pennsylvania that accuses bishops and other Roman Catholic Church leaders in that state of covering up child sexual abuse by more than 300 priests has prompted growing calls for justice, while leaving Americans wondering about the broader impact of the revelations on the church and other institutions.

But a web of legal barriers stands in the way of prosecuting most of the cases, and efforts to ease those barriers have repeatedly run into political opposition and fierce lobbying by the church and other groups. Pennsylvania lags behind many other states in coming to grips with the problem, despite a series of grand jury investigations stretching back 15 years.

[Read about the grand jury investigation and the church’s ‘playbook for concealing the truth.’]

What happens next?

Not much, legal experts and victims advocates say.

The nearly 900-page grand jury report is unlikely to lead to any new criminal charges or civil lawsuits over the abuse that it catalogs, because the statute of limitations has expired on those cases. Current state law allows victims of abuse as children 12 years to sue after they come of age at 18, meaning they must do so by age 30. Criminal complaints must be filed by the time the victim is 50. Those rules leave the vast majority of abuse survivors, who came forward later in life — the grand jury said they include people as old as 83 — with no legal recourse. Only two of the cases in the report have so far led to criminal charges.