After all that has been said and written and revealed, it might seem that the leadership of the Catholic church at least knows the truth about clerical sexual abuse, writes Fintan O'Toole.
And yet some big myths retain their hold and continue to block the kind of genuine acknowledgement without which the institution cannot survive.
The first myth is that both child abuse itself and knowledge of its prevalence within the church are relatively new phenomena, products as Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, Prefect of the Congregation of the Clergy and perhaps the next Pope, insists of "the climate of pan-sexuality and sexual licentiousness that has been created in today's world".
This is the big lie. Even in the Irish context, as far back as August 1931, the official Carrigan report noted "an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of cases of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under ten years".
The Catholic church was represented on the Carrigan committee and can be assumed to have been aware of the report, even though, as Finola Kennedy revealed in the winter 2000 issue of the journal Studies, it was suppressed by the State.
Nor is outrage at the abuse of children in church-run institutions a new phenomenon. A while back, I was roundly criticised for using the term "rape camps" in relation to some Christian Brothers industrial schools in Ireland, Canada and Australia.
Yet, as far back as 1947, one of the greatest Irishmen of the 20th century, Father Edward Flanagan, founder of Boy's Town in Nebraska, wrote of "child slavery" in Irish industrial schools and drew analogies between them and the concentration camps and gulags: "We have punished the Nazis for their sins against society. We have punished fascists for the same reason. We have been talking a great deal about communism.
"I wonder what God's judgment will be with reference to those who hold the deposit of faith and who fail in their God-given stewardship of little children."
The other myth that prevents the church leadership from getting to grips with reality is the insistence that the vast majority of men in religious life are faithfully celibate and that the deviants are a tiny minority from this norm.
By far the most credible authority on the reality of clerical celibacy is the American Richard Sipe. As both a laicised Benedictine who taught in seminaries for decades and a widely respected psychologist who has treated over a thousand clerics for sex-related problems, Sipe has both an insider's knowledge and an academic's detachment.
His carefully measured studies, conducted over the best part of four decades, blow apart the facade of celibacy.
According to Sipe, "After I was ordained in 1959, I learned that some priests had sex with adults and even minors, and to some degree this behaviour was taken for granted by church authorities. Yet, an atmosphere of crisis regarding this issue did not exist.
"The secret world of sexual activity, including sexual activity with minors, was known by the Catholic hierarchy, and though considered unfortunate and morally wrong, was accepted as an inevitable and easily forgivable failure of some priests."
Sipe's studies suggest that about 20 per cent of American priests are or have been in consenting relationships with women, and between 12 and 15 per cent with adult men.
Around another 15 per cent of priests are homosexually inclined but not sexually active. Leaving aside altogether the sexual issue of the abuse of children, the reality is that something like half of priests do not conform to the supposed norm of celibate heterosexuality. It is the existence of this secret world that has generated the furtive culture of denial that has been so disastrous in relation to the revelations of child abuse.
As Sipe puts it: "The widespread lack of celibate practice is relevant to the central issue of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy because. . . exposure of one part of the system - abusive priests - threatens to expose a whole system that supports a lack of celibate conformity within the priesthood."
The scale of the problem has been known for at least a quarter of a century. As early as 1976, Sipe concluded from his studies that 6 per cent of all priests in the US were actively abusing children. The church worldwide simply ignored his findings.
The code of silence, therefore, is so strong because it has deep roots. It has been used not just against the victims but against the heroic members of religious orders who have broken the code.
Father Flanagan was pilloried in the 1940s. Barry Coldrey, the Australian Christian Brother who has put the truth before the institution in the last decade has written that: "Individuals who work, or have worked to bring the abuse issue to the attention of authorities can find themselves marginalised, subject to continuing lying and character assassination, a sort of low-level verbal terrorism."
Until it acknowledges how deeply ingrained this mechanism of deliberate denial really is, the church cannot uproot it. And until it banishes the myth of celibacy, it cannot even begin to ask how a culture of tolerating genuine depravity took such a fearful grip.