Thomas P. Doyle, a canon lawyer and inactive priest, has long been an expert for lawyers representing victims of clergy sex abuse. In an essay for NCR, he outlines the recent history of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, starting in 1984 when revelations of multiple cases of sexual abuse of male children and young adolescent boys surfaced about Thomas Adamson in of the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Gilbert Gauthe from the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana.

Over the next three decades, he writes, hundreds of books and scholarly articles have appeared contributing to the search for "what this phenomenon is all about."

But, only a small part of the crisis has been exposed, and the search for answers may come in extensive research by Dyan Elliott, a medieval scholar from Northwestern University. The results of her research are in a new book, The Corrupter of Boys, which Doyle says is "nothing short of remarkable, stunning and most importantly, authentic."

"I will readily admit to having been obsessed with discovering and exposing every historic layer of the key elements of the systemic causes of the sexual abuse phenomenon," Doyle writes. "This requires plumbing the church's legitimate and unrevised history to its depths. Elliott has done this, and her work changes the conversation in dramatic and invaluable way."