His own Dominican province in the western United States recently hired an outside law firm to sift through personnel records and release names of abusers stretching back to the 1930s. The Conference of Major Superiors of Men has encouraged orders to release names, but the group has no authority to force disclosures, Father Padrez said.

After the clerical abuse scandal exploded in 2002, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men adopted its own reforms following the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Orders added victim assistance offices and background screenings for candidates, and hired accrediting companies to audit their sexual abuse responses.

The fate of abusers in religious orders can differ from diocesan priests. A 2013 update on the orders’ response to the crisis says that canon law requires orders not to expel abusers if they are repentant, but to instead try to keep them within their religious communities, under close supervision and away from children.

Last January, Robert Krankvich, 37, said he was gripped with terror when he picked up the phone to report his own story of sexual abuse to the Diocese of Joliet.

Mr. Krankvich said it began when was a freshman at Providence Catholic High School, and the school’s charismatic president, an Augustinian priest named Richard McGrath, befriended him. Mr. Krankvich filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, against the Augustinians saying that Father McGrath repeatedly abused him from the age of 13 to 15.

Years later, after suicide attempts, struggles with alcohol and drugs and depression, Mr. Krankvich saw news reports that Father McGrath had left the school after a student reported seeing him look at “potentially inappropriate material” on his phone. Father McGrath could not be reached for comment.

But when Mr. Krankvich called the Joliet diocese, he said church officials referred him to a priest who was Providence’s new president.