UNITED STATES
The Plain Dealer

By Michael O’Malley, The Plain Dealer
on July 01, 2013

In discussions and news stories about child sex abuse at the hands of Catholic priests in the United States, attention often turns to Boston, commonly regarded as the ground zero of a crisis that has touched every diocese in the nation.

In 2002, at the height of the cascading scandal, Boston’s Catholic leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, was forced to resign after acknowledging that 80 of his priests faced charges of abuse.

That admission came under pressure from vigilant newspaper reporters and aggressive lawyers who dug through files, documents and depositions, exposing the archdiocese’s harboring of serial sex abusers and covering up of heinous crimes against children for four decades.

Boston certainly was in the eye of the national media at the time. But all this didn’t start in Catholic New England, as documented…