I really don't want to get involved in this debate, but I feel compelled to add some comments.
I was reared in the Ireland of the fifties and sixties. I witnessed the phenomenon that was the Irish Catholic Church at that time. The clergy were almost exclusively the sons of the middle classes and wealthy farmers. The victims were almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the working and rural poor. The RC church was extremely powerful, they controlled the education system and the health system and many institutions that were properly the responsibility of the Social Welfare system. The Church and the clergy was fascist in nature, antidemocratic, paternalistic, misogynistic, sectarian and believed that the Irish State should be a Catholic State for a Catholic people.
Many of the politicians of the time (including Eamon DeValera the prime-minister and later president of the state, and many members of his cabinet and government) held similar views, and took a diffident stance when it came to questions regarding "moral authority" and they actively colluded with the RC church when it came to questions regarding the rights of citizens of the state.
The Catholic Church in the Republic of Ireland were not answerable to the authority of the state, on the contrary the state was answerable to the Catholic Church, (for those who are sceptical of the truth of this assertion, let them Google Noel Browne and the Mother and Child Act or just go HERE).
The clergy had immense power and position (for instance it was almost impossible for a person to get any meaningful employment without the imprimatur of the local parish priest or curate), and they abused that power over and over. They infiltrated every aspect of civil life and ensured that they themselves or some self-serving and obsequious lackey was appointed to every civil committee and organisation in the land, everything from local football clubs, youth club, cultural festival etc, etc, etc. many of the men (and some women) that were attracted to "religious life" were drawn by the obvious power and prestige that came with the collar or the veil. Many evil people were aware that they could perpetrate their "deviances" without fear of exposure if they could operate behind the collar or veil and they joined the ministry in their hundreds, where they had access to children in many institutions, schools, orphanages, hospitals, industrial schools, choirs, sports clubs, etc. etc.
To be a child, especially a Catholic child from a working class or from a poor background in the Irish Republic in the fifties and sixties was a dangerous thing to be, for you were at the mercy of these predators.
To be beaten in school by some sadistic bastard of a brother, priest or nun was the daily experience of tens of thousands of Irish children, (I was one of those children), to be subjected to daily criticism and humiliation for the quality of your home or your clothes or your father occupation was your daily experience (I was one of those children) to be branded a fool, ignorant, worthless, dirty, sinful, unworthy and shameful (I was one of those children).
But I was one of the "lucky" ones for I never suffered the pain, degradation and anguish of sexual abuse. Yet I know many, many children that were groomed for and sexually abused and raped by these predators that covered their crimes behind a collar, because they knew that the authorities (both clerical and civil) would never take the word of some working class brat over the word of a respectable middleclass ordained man of the cloth.

The abuse was widespread within the church. As children we knew what was going on and some of us knew which priests and brothers to avoid. The vast majority of clerics also knew what was going on but they choose to ignore it and to do absolutly nothing, the arch bishops, the bishops, the canons, the parish priest and the clergy, along with some police officers, politicians, social workers and medical staff, lied, covered up, and protected the perpetrators and branded the innoccent victims and their parents who dared to speak out as liars and guilty sinners.
Please read the report, you can find it in all its harrowing details here
Murphy Report part 1

Part 2 Here

Joe, did you ever hear of the concept of "mental reservation"? Well I never did until I read this report, It seems it's an RC doctrine which allows you to tell "untruths" without being guilty of telling lies. Below is Cardinal Connell's explanation of how this piece of bullshit works and how he justified his cover-up and protection of the clerical filth (ten percent of priests in the Dublin dioceses) that spent half a century defiling the children that they were entrusted to protect.

Read it and weep for the Catholic Church

"Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be - permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying . . . So mental reservation is, in a sense, a way of answering without lying." Cardinal Connell

Personally I divorced myself from all this RC hypocracy a long time ago and I hope that I will be followed by droves of the congegation as they begin to realise how they and their children have been utterly betrayed by their church and their clergy over decades.

Fergus Russell