Depressing though it is, this website contains what should be required reading for anyone who still carries a torch for the Catholic Church. But this saga goes way beyond the church. An entire nation switched off its brain and sold its soul to the church's brutal, arrogant and manipulative religious.

And not just once or twice, but for generation after generation. As far back as the 1940s, government inspectors knew that children in the care of the religious orders were malnourished and were having their bones broken by people who had the stupendous hypocrisy to preach "suffer the little children to come unto me." Brainwashed families fell over themselves to outdo their neighbours with the cruelties they inflicted on any daughter who fell short of Catholic morals - the greatest cruelty of all being to put such sinners into the hands of the nuns. But the most extensive abuses seem to have been those inflicted on boys, many of whom were consigned to the church's "care" because they had made the mistake of being orphaned.

In 1951 Dublin's archbishop, John Charles McQuaid, forced a government minister (Dr Noel Browne) from office and, in effect, brought about the collapse of the whole government. Browne's offence had been to start implementing a degree of healthcare and state support for families and children. It is perhaps clearer now than it was then why the Catholic church was so hostile to state interference in its own responsibilities.

Now again the Catholic church can breathe a sigh of relief. Neither the abusers, nor senior members of the hierarchy behind whose raiments they hid, will be held to account. That's because religious orders, notably the Christian Brothers, at the same time as wringing their hands and expressing their deep sorrow, took court action to keep the identities of their paedophile members out of the commission's report.

Has any civilised nation in modern times ever sunk as low in peacetime?