Only weeks after Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston faced withering criticism over his repeated redeployment of a paedophile priest, Father John Geoghan, church documents released on Monday show the case was not isolated.
They have put huge new pressure on the cardinal to resign. Cardinal Law has been Archbishop of Boston since 1984 and is a close ally of the Pope.
Internal papers, released by the courts to a family suing the church over the long-term abuser, Father Paul Shanley, show that the cardinal promoted him within the diocese, and that a diocesan official gave him a clean bill of health to Catholics in California and endorsed his running of a Catholic hostel in New York, despite an awareness of a history of 30 years of abuse.
The diocese even knew that Father Shanley had in the 1970s given impassioned public defences of paedophilia.
These included a speech at what was the founding conference of an organisation that defends sex between adult men and boys, the North American Man Boy Love Association.
Father Shanley is also reported to have declared that no sexual practice, including bestiality, causes damage to the psyche.
Church officials transferred Father Shanley to California a decade ago, after telling the bishop there that he had a clean record. This even though Father Shanley's personnel records indicate that more than 26 allegations of sex abuse had been made against him. He was ordained in 1960.
"Reverend Paul Shanley, a priest in good standing and of the archdiocese of Boston, was recently granted a medical leave for one year by his Eminence, Cardinal Law . . . I can assure you that Father Shanley has no problem that would be a concern to your diocese," Father Robert J Banks, Vicar for Administration, Archdiocese of Boston, wrote to Father Philip A Behan, of the Diocese of San Bernardino, in 1990.
One memo from a bishop advises a diocesan official to ignore phone calls of complaint from a parishioner: "Let her stay hanging on the phone."
The diocese refused to comment directly on the documents but issued a statement saying: "Whatever may have occurred in the past, there were no deliberate decisions to put children at risk." The diocese insists the zero-tolerance policies now in place focus properly on the protection of children.
But the bitterness in Boston against Cardinal Law, who is now avoiding contact with the media, is huge.
The Boston Globe reports one of Father Shanley's alleged victims on Monday calling on God to punish Cardinal Law, nearly 10 years after the cardinal used similar language to call on God to punish the news media for reporting on the case of paedophile priest Father James R Porter.
"You are a liar; your own documents condemn you. You are a criminal . . . you degrade the office you hold in the church; you are an affront to Jesus Christ; and I call on Almighty God to bear witness to the foulness and treachery of your behaviour, the evil you have nurtured and condoned, and the minds, hearts, and souls you have destroyed," Mr Arthur Austin said.
Mr Rodney Ford, the father of another alleged Shanley victim, called on state officials to send the cardinal to jail.
Father Shanley (71), meanwhile, is missing from his San Diego, California, home.
Some 26 separate claims of abuse have been made about him and the church has privately settled three of them.
In Cleveland, Ohio, nine priests have been put on administrative leave over allegations going back many years of sexual abuse of minors.