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priest to achieve closeness with God. Appalled by the hierarchy he had once served, Father Doyle counseled abuse survivors via phone calls and e-mail. Doyle’s reflections on spiritual integrity had a huge impact on the attorney, who had never had a confessor. Anderson, in turn, gave the rebel priest a new kind of power: as an expert witness in lawsuits he could use his knowledge to throttle the hierarchy for its transgressions of canon law—and moral values. Doyle considered the power structure toxic: prelates addicted to power, sheltering the guilty. Doyle was radical, from the Greek redux, meaning roots, first things. Sober as a judge, protected by his air force status from sanctions that diocesan bishops might take, he gave testimony in cases for Anderson and other lawyers as time allowed. In 2002 he received the Priest of Integrity Award from Voice of the Faithful, an upstart reform group. In 2003 the chief military archbishop, Edwin O’Brien, engineered his dismissal as a chaplain for an obscure technicality in canon law over which the air force had no control.9 In reality, it was payback. Doyle was forced out of the military chaplaincy, after nineteen years—one year short of qualifying for a pension.

What the retribution against Tom Doyle signified in pettiness it made up for in shortsightedness: Doyle was a sure bet to fight back. He settled in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and began full-time work as an expert witness in clergy abuse cases. For that he was much in demand. Doyle was on a leave of absence from priestly ministry in 2010.

Anderson’s turning point came when two brothers, James and Joh Howard, asked him to take their case against the diocese of Stockton, California. In the early 1980s, an Irish-born priest named Oliver O’Grady had ingratiated himself with the Howard family and molested four of the seven siblings. O’Grady also befriended a woman whose nine-month-old daughter suffered vaginal scarring from his abuse. In 1984 another family reported O’Grady to police. A church attorney told police O’Grady would have no more contact with children. Stockton bishop Roger Mahony sent him to a psychiatrist. O’Grady discussed his sexual attraction to boys. O’Grady had a “severe defect in maturation,” the psychiatrist wrote. “Perhaps Oliver is not truly called to the priesthood.”

At Christmas 1985 Bishop Mahony sent O’Grady to a rural church, with parishioners unaware that the priest was a child molester. In 1993 O’Grady was convicted of lewd conduct with the younger Howard, Joh, who was then fifteen. O’Grady was in prison when the brothers contacted Anderson. The Minnesota lawyer needed a California cocounsel in order to function in the state court. He found his ally in Larry Drivon of Stockton, a highly regarded trial attorney from a prominent legal family. Drivon accepted the expensive, time-intensive preparation for a trial of this sort. Knowing that Jeff Anderson was in recovery, Drivon’s wife and sympatico friends helped him find noontime AA meetings during the trial.

Roger Mahony was by then the cardinal archbishop of Los Angeles. He traveled the 9,058-square-mile expanse of his archdiocese in a $400,000 helicopter donated by Richard Riordan, a wealthy businessman and future mayor. Los Angeles was the most populous U.S. archdiocese and the wealthiest.10 John Paul II teased Mahony gently by calling him “Hollywood,” but the needling carried a message: the pope made him give up the helicopter.

In the 1960s, as a priest in Stockton, Mahony befriended César Chávez of the United Farm Workers. He had served as the first chairman of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, a pro-labor state agency launched under Governor Jerry Brown in 1975. But Mahony’s political liberalism regarding Latinos and immigration issues never translated into theological liberalism, and his social awareness was tempered by a fealty to the church’s bottom line. As archbishop in the 1990s he scuttled an effort by the predominantly Latino gravediggers in Catholic cemeteries to organize themselves as a union. “Western Sequoia