Special agents from the F.B.I.’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime reviewed evidence collected by the grand jury, the report says, and identified a series of practices that were regularly used by the six dioceses to cover up reports of abuse.

“While each church district had its idiosyncrasies, the pattern was pretty much the same,” the report says. “The main thing was not to help children, but to avoid ‘scandal.’ That is not our word, but theirs; it appears over and over again in the documents we recovered.”

[Read: Church covered up child sex abuse in Pennsylvania for decades.]

Here is how the grand jury, in caustic terms, described the Catholic Church’s methods for covering up abuse and protecting priests: