Jason Berry is renowned for his pioneering investigative reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood. Lead Us Not Into Temptation (1992), the first major book on the church’s crisis, is still used in many newsrooms. He has been widely interviewed in the national media and worked as a consultant for ABC News in 2002. Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (2004), published with Gerald Renner, prompted a Vatican investigation that led to the demotion of Father Marcial Maciel, one of the most powerful priests in Rome. Berry is also a cultural chronicler of his native New Orleans, in such books as Up From the Cradle of Jazz a history of popular music. The author has received Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson fellowships for his cultural and political research. In 2006 he published Last of the Red Hot Poppas, a comic novel about Louisiana politics.