BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: A prosecutor in Springfield, Massachusetts revealed this week that he has convened a grand jury to consider criminal sex abuse charges against retired Bishop Thomas Dupre. The 70-year-old bishop retired last month after being accused of sexually molesting two altar boys in the 1970s. If indicted, he would be the first bishop charged in the sex abuse scandal.

The news comes as American Catholics are still reeling from the results of two reports last week that examined the extent and causes of the Church's sex abuse crisis. According to those numbers, over the last 50 years, some 4,000 U.S. priests, 4 percent, were accused of molesting more than 10,000 children. Kim Lawton has more on the continuing implications for the Church.

KIM LAWTON: Analysts have spent the past week poring over the hundreds of pages of information in those reports. One of them was Peter Steinfels, columnist for THE NEW YORK TIMES and author of A PEOPLE ADRIFT, a book about the Catholic Church. Peter, you've been covering this crisis. Was there anything in those reports that surprised you?

PETER STEINFELS ("Beliefs" Columnist, THE NEW YORK TIMES): Well the big thing, of course, was the figure of 4 percent. We had an impression from previous studies that it was about 2 percent of the priests who had served who were abusers. But this figure, which amounts to one out of every 25 priests who served over that period of time, was a bit of a shocker. The other thing that surprised me was the fact that the criminal justice system didn't really take care of this problem. About 15 percent of the substantiated cases were actually reported to the criminal justice system, mostly by victims. But only in about a third of those were the offending priests ever charged. And most of them seemed to have got off lightly in terms of sentences.

LAWTON: Well, many Catholics have been asking over the past two years, "How did this happen? How did the Church get to this place?" Did this report, did these reports, answer those questions?