Compared to the damage he did to so many vulnerable young lives, the trouble Brendan Smyth gave the Catholic Church is relatively unimportant. But it was, nonetheless, momentous. The most ferocious anti-clerical agitator, the most committed atheist, could never have wrought so much havoc as this ostensibly faithful servant of God.
In one sense, the disclosure of Brendan Smyth's offences against children could be seen as one of a series of scandals, which had begun with the affair of Bishop Eamon Casey and Annie Murphy, and continued with the revelation that Father Michael Cleary had also fathered children.
But in another, it made those so-called scandals seem like nostalgic reminders of the good old days when a loving and consensual adult relationship was regarded as shocking. This was something darker and much more damaging.
In November 1994, after the scandal around Brendan Smyth had become the centre of an extraordinary political drama, the then head of the Irish Catholic Church, Cardinal Cahal Daly, told RTE radio's This Week programme that the affair had brought him beyond the brink of tears.
For a man who carried such a weight of public authority, and who had learned over many years in the cockpit of violent confrontation in Northern Ireland to be guarded in expressing his feelings, the sudden revelation of those emotions was dramatic.
But the Cardinal's tears were for the church as well as the victims. The trauma for the church was immeasurably deepened by the fact that the Smyth case itself revealed little. A revelation is stunning and unexpected. It alters the known shape of reality. But the Smyth case was more a confirmation than a revelation. It named a nameless truth: that there have always been individuals willing to use the church as a cloak for their distorted desires, and able to abuse the power and trust which clerical status gave them in a deeply religious society.
Smyth's actions attacked the very heart of the long relationship between priests and people. His crimes and his clerical standing were not separate worlds - he used the latter to help him to perpetrate the former. He broke a sacred trust. Such trust, once shattered, is not easily repaired.
Yet, if the case of Father Brendan Smyth had been isolated, the church would have dealt with it effectively and quickly. But because it was a tangible symptom of a much larger malaise, there seems to have been a sense that it was best not to make an issue of it, lest the issue become unbearably big.
This reluctance in the end did more damage to the church than even Smyth's crimes. It became clear that his own order, the Norbertines, had turned a blind eye to his activities over many years. Chris Moore's television documentary on Smyth revealed that his career of crime had lasted since the 1950s, and that he had been shielded by the church authorities.
But, perhaps more seriously for the public perception of the church, Cardinal Daly had known of some of Smyth's offences before his arrest, but failed to call in the police. In a letter to the family in Belfast of one of Smyth's victims, before the latter had been brought to justice, the Cardinal wrote: "There have been complaints about this priest before, and once I had to speak to the superior about him. It would seem that there has been no improvement. I shall speak with the superior again." The attitudes shown in those words betrayed a vast distance from the values and expectations of many ordinary Catholics.
When the scandal broke, moreover, the Cardinal gave a defensive account of his stewardship in the affair, relying on bureaucratic explanations about the chain of command, and his own inability to intervene in the affairs of the Norbertine Order.
Again, the response to the crisis made it far greater than the crimes of one individual. It raised questions about fundamental things: power, exploitation, authority. It showed what happens in any institution - political, religious or social - where people are taught to obey without question, to accept orders, to do what they are told out of fear and shame and to keep their mouths shut. With that broader revelation of the Smyth affair, the church will have to struggle long after his death.