The Australian Royal Commission’s verdict on the Catholic Church in Australia is truly damning. The Commission was set up after a series of individual scandals suggested that a number of institutions were incapable of protecting children from sexual abuse by paedophiles, and they wanted to see whether there were common elements leading to a more general diagnosis. And in the case of the Catholic Church they found what they were looking for. It would be true to say, in summary, that almost the entire culture of Australian Catholicism had contributed to a dire situation in which countless children, probably far more than the known cases, suffered indescribable harm at the hands of those they were entitled to trust.