This is the story the tradition would not have preserved on its own; survivors and journalists forced it. Statutory and church inquiries in Ireland, Australia, the United States, Germany, France and elsewhere have documented decades of sexual abuse of children by clergy and, as damningly, of bishops and superiors moving offenders between parishes rather than reporting them. The French independent commission, CIASE, estimated in 2021 around 216,000 victims of clergy since 1950 and around 330,000 including lay church staff. The Australian Royal Commission found that seven percent of Catholic priests in that country between 1950 and 2010 had been accused. No branch is clear: Southern Baptist churches faced a comparable reckoning in 2022, and cases exist across Orthodox, Anglican and Pentecostal bodies. The Catholic record is the largest and the most thoroughly documented, partly because its centralised structure produced the paper trail. Financially the American dioceses alone have paid out several billion dollars and dozens have filed for bankruptcy protection.