It established that the default position of many in the Church today, when confronted with evidence of clerical child abuse, is to cover it up; to sympathise with the accused priest and to treat the formal guidelines agreed by the Church as if they are not really binding at all.

It may be that the disclosures in the Cloyne report bring us to a tipping point in relations between the Irish people and their largest church.

In the past, there was always the excuse that abuse had not been understood; the acceptance that many of the offenders were old men dying out; the promise that a church had taken the crisis to heart and was gearing up to make sure that children would be protected and abusers dealt with.

The Cloyne report dismisses all that as so much hokum.

Bishop John Magee, the trusted fixer of three popes, had been sent to Ireland to help manage this very crisis and he mouthed the right platitudes while maintaining the old culture of secrecy and protection of offenders.

And the Vatican even backed him up in this by assuaging the fears of those who doubted the guidelines, assuring them that they amounted to a 'study document'.

All complaints, we were told, would be referred to the Garda. Two-thirds were not.

And yet we have the assurance of Cardinal Sean Brady that the report affirms that the Church stuctures for the management of abuse work.

In the light of what Cloyne reveals about the culture of secrecy and conspiracy and deceit within the Catholic Church, the sensible response to all that is said now, affirmed by decades of precedent, is to trust none of it.

And that, in effect, is the response of the Dublin Government, moving now to establish practical measures to ensure that bishops behave and are conscious of legal responsibilities.

The next bishop caught wheedling his way through Vatican protocol to find an excuse to defend a paedophile priest will have to work out a line for the judge as well.

This is as it should be. We are long overdue the pleasure of seeing these sleekit and conniving, bumptious and arrogant prelates brought low.

The sorry fact is that we still live with a Catholic culture in which many feel that the abusive priests and the bishops who covered up for them have been wronged. I saw this in Armagh when the 'Visitators' of the Vatican came to hear the complaints of the laity.

Cormac Murphy O'Connor walked into the hall with all the presumption that he was meeting adoring faithful Catholics who would give him an easy ride. Indeed, a clutch in the audience stood to applaud him before he had even spoken.

Murphy O'Connor felt comfortably entitled to give no answers at all to the questions raised. Yet many of those who spoke had come to speak in defence of the priests who were being suspended from office in the face of accusations raised against them - they were there to attack the bishops for being too severe.

It may be that part of the problem in cleaning the filth out of the Catholic Church is that many who remain loyal to it refuse to see that it is there.

There have been waves of disaffection from the Church going back to the 1960s. Some left because they wanted the freedom of conscience it couldn't provide; others, ironically, left in revolt against the Church's own liberalising. Then more left in contempt at the Church handling of abuse.

It can, perhaps, be assumed that those who stayed with the Church through all these upheavals are so demoralised and defensive that they can never rally against the bishops and call them to order. They are there still because they are compliant and have been tested by appalling humiliation already.

They know that their own cardinal, Sean Brady, swore abused children to secrecy and helped create the climate of secrecy within which the loathsome Brendan Smyth could go on raping children for decades, in Ireland and in the United States. The only hope now is that a church that can not be trusted can be policed.

So the Republic's Justice Minister, Alan Shatter, will legislate to make it a criminal offence, as it always should have been, to behave as Brady and Magee and probably every other bishop in the country has, and protect abusers.

That declares finally that it is the state's responsibility to judge the integrity of the Church in these cases and to deal with them. No words of the Church now can counter the obvious: that the Church's reflexive response in the face of charges of abuse is to defend and protect its reputation. This means that the Church, when it says otherwise, simply can not be believed.

We have to assume, for safety's sake, that priests are still abusing children and that bishops are still covering for them and that the Vatican is still more concerned with its reputation - such as it now is - than with children.

The responsibility of the state must be to watch these bishops like hawks and to treat the Church as a criminal conspiracy until evidence - rather than eloquence - says otherwise.