Juliann Bortz called me the morning after the state Supreme Court blocked the release of the grand jury report on child sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania dioceses.

And she began to cry.

"This is what I wasn't going to do," she said apologetically. "This has been devastating. But we're not quitting. I will not quit."

Bortz is one of many alleged victims around the state who testified to the grand jury over the course of a two-year investigation into their abuse and the Catholic Church's lack of responsiveness to priests' crimes. They had anticipated the impending release of the grand jury report with anxiety and excitement.

In most cases, their stories never had been told in any kind of public way, in part because the state's statute of limitations blocked their opportunity to confront their tormentors in court.

Finally, the abusers and their enablers would be identified.

Then came Wednesday's court order. And anguish. Again.

State Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, who said he testified to the grand jury about abuse he and some friends suffered at the hands of his Allentown Diocese priest when they were children, told me he and other survivors he's talked to were devastated.

He was on the House floor when he got a text about the Supreme Court's shocking decision. "I literally had to get up and walk off the floor," he said. "I knew I was going to get emotional, and I did. It was just like a punch in the gut."

Although bishops from the six dioceses in the report had pledged not to block the report, he's convinced the Catholic Church is behind the requests from unnamed individuals or institutions that blocked its release until further court order.

"They [the Catholic Church] have done this from day one," he said. "Here in the very last minute before this grand jury report was going to come out and reveal their crimes, they silence the victims again.

"Shame on them."

Bortz said she learned the news in a call from Deputy Attorney General Daniel Dye, one of two officials who conducted the original interview at her Lower Macungie home. Crushed, she took to Facebook.

"I am beyond angry and devastated," she wrote. "They won again. but we will not stop fighting for the truth ..."

A wave of Facebook conversations, links and videos ensued, with abuse survivors and others expressing their outrage.

Robert Corby, another child sexual abuse survivor whom I first met at Bortz's kitchen table in 2008, is 83 years old and can't travel anymore, so he testified to the grand jury remotely. He said he was a fatherless 13-year-old altar boy when his Bethlehem priest began molesting him in the church sacristy.

He didn't tell anyone what had happened to him until the "Spotlight" revelations came out in 2002 about child sex abuse and coverups in the Boston Archdiocese. Since then, he has increasingly opened up, even in public settings.

"I'm just so upset," he said. "My only goal in life is if I could keep one child from being molested and make the church accountable for the coverup.

"What are they afraid of? Get it over with."

Bortz was one of several victims who more than a decade ago sued the Allentown Diocese and then-Bishop Edward Cullen and former Bishop Thomas Welsh, among others, for systematically covering up years of abuse, including her alleged molestation by a teacher at Allentown Central Catholic High School. The suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.

She became local coordinator for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, organizing events and fielding phone calls from victims. She told me back in 2008, when we met to talk about the way Pope Benedict XVI's U.S. visit was triggering a wave of new anger and anxiety among survivors, that the emotional burden of those calls was hard on her.

"I feel so bad, sometimes I don't sleep, " she said. "Sometimes I just cry."

She no longer serves in that role for SNAP, but last week's bombshell brought it all back.

"I was on the phone with someone last night, begging him not to take the pills," she said. "It was kind of like those early ones, where people call and all you hear is crying.

"It's not one of those things where you can roll over and just go back to sleep."

Rozzi said he's been bombarded with phone calls, texts and emails since the news broke. One call last Wednesday night was from someone in Reno, Nev., who was abused when he lived in Pennsylvania. Rozzi said, "They're all over the United States. And they're watching."

His message to all of them is that the battle continues.

For him, that includes the quest to reform Pennsylvania's statutes of limitations for child sex abuse cases, something I started writing about back when the devastating grand jury report on child sex abuse and coverups in the Philadelphia Archdiocese came out in 2005.

Even though that report called for extending statutes of limitations for these crimes and providing a window so older victims of abuse could finally name and confront their abusers in court, 2016 marked the first time legislative leaders allowed votes on these bills, which in the past remained buried in committee because of powerful opposition from the Catholic Church and Insurance Federation.

This abrupt change of heart was spurred by still another devastating state grand jury report, this one about child sex abuse and coverups in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese, and the Oscar-winning "Spotlight."

Longer statutes of limitations are needed for child sex abuse because reporting of these crimes so often is delayed. Statistics show that on average, it takes victims until around age 40 to speak up about what has happened to them. Even if they do tell their parents right away, the parents may not be receptive or the crimes may be deliberately covered up until the statute expires.

Unfortunately, despite remarkable momentum for these bills and the tireless efforts of Rozzi, Rep. Thomas Murt , R-Montgomery, and others, they ultimately failed because the Senate would not agree to allow retroactive access to the civil courts for victims who have been blocked by the state's current limit of age 30 or its previous limit of 18.