There is much that remains very hard to understand about the clerical child abuse scandal. First, given the scale and duration of this abuse, it is astonishing that so few parents became aware of what was happening.
The capacity of the abusers to intimidate or otherwise persuade their child victims to keep what was happening secret from their parents is deeply disturbing.
Clearly those concerned were extraordinarily confident of their power over the children: they seemed to feel permanently safe from exposure.
This reveals a most unhealthy dominant relationship between priests or brothers and the children in schools under their care.
It is perhaps less surprising that parents to whom their children said nothing were so unsuspicious. As over successive decades no case of clerical abuse seems to have emerged publicly, parents were never put on guard about the possible danger.
If a number of such cases had been given publicity through a court hearing, all parents would have been on notice to watch for any indication of undue familiarity between their children and members of the clergy.
But in the absence of any such evidence, a normal Irish Catholic parent had no reason for any suspicion, and the abusive priests and brothers were able to play on this parental innocence and trust.
In what seems to have been a small number of cases where children told their parents what had befallen them, there seem to have been some cases where they were simply not believed.
Where they were, parents seem to have found themselves up against an impenetrable barrier of resistance to their complaints. Bishops refused to listen, health boards found they had no legal function in the matter, and gardaí investigating allegations found their submission of evidence blocked at a higher level.
It would need a Kafka or a George Orwell to do justice to the world of denial that parents found themselves faced with. Society must have seemed to them to have turned into an organised conspiracy to promote evil.
All would have been quite different if bishops to whom such cases were frequently referred had acted as morally responsible citizens, suspending priests against whom allegations had been made and referring these cases to the police for investigation.
Instead these bishops seem to have felt bound by canon law and instructions from the Holy See that were directed above all towards "avoiding scandal".
Had they acted properly in these cases, that would not merely have put a stop to the activities of the individual priests involved: the exposure of these cases would also be bound to have had a salutary deterrent effect on other potential abusers.
What led to the growing prevalence of this kind of criminal activity was the belief generated by episcopal inaction that it was safe to continue abusing children, because the worst that could happen to an abuser if he were caught would be to be sent to another parish.
The failure of bishops to recognise this inevitable consequence of their inaction is one of the most disturbing features of this whole affair, and one that is all the more surprising in view of the emphasis of Catholic theology on the moral responsibility we all carry for the consequences of our acts, and our failures to act.
The one positive comment one can now offer is that, while it has taken a long time for the episcopacy to face this issue, the responses to the report by Bishop Eamonn Walsh, administrator of Ferns, and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin on Prime Time last Tuesday were impressive and reassuring.
Indeed that whole TV programme was most heartening: Brian Lenihan, who carries political responsibility for tackling this problem; Colm O'Gorman, who has played such a consistently responsible role in this matter; and Maureen Lynott together went a long way towards restoring faith in our social, political and religious system.
A lot remains to be done. The inquiry into child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese looks like being on an even larger scale than that in Ferns. And the audit of implementation of "best practice" in other dioceses is now to be accompanied by a commission of inquiry.
Hitherto it has proved impossible to develop a uniform episcopal approach to this problem, because, of course, each bishop is the final authority in his own diocese. However, last Tuesday Archbishop Brady of Armagh said that a uniform approach was now be adopted.
We have also been told that the Vatican has approved the Irish hierarchy's policy document, Our Children, Our Church, but we have not been told whether there has been a withdrawal of the Vatican instruction to bishops worldwide in 1962 to the effect that complainants, witnesses and church officials dealing with such matters must take an oath of secrecy, under pain of excommunication for any breach of that secrecy.
And the terms of canon law do not seem to be compatible with the criminal law of the state. Will Rome now address this problem?
It would also be important to have clarification of the quite extraordinary report earlier in the week that the senior Garda officer who failed to pursue abuse cases in Wexford, and from whose office the relevant papers disappeared, was given a bene merenti award by the Holy See. If that report is unfounded, for the sake of the reputation of the church it should surely be promptly denied.
One must, incidentally, note the unhappy coincidence this week of the publication of two diametrically opposed statements on celibacy of the clergy. The unanimous view of six therapists consulted by the Ferns inquiry was that the vow of celibacy contributed to the problem of sexual abuse in the church, but at the end of the recent Synod Rome ruled once again that celibacy must be maintained.
Whatever about celibacy for priests, one cannot help feeling that, if most bishops were married and had families, the church's attitude towards child abuse might have been very different.
Finally we must remember that well over 90 per cent of all clergy are totally innocent of any involvement in child abuse and have been deeply disturbed and hurt by these terrible events. They deserve the sympathy and support of all.