Last week the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, said he was "deeply ashamed" of the Church's failure to protect vulnerable children after an independent inquiry found "systematic failures" in its attempts to stop the Very Rev Robert Waddington, the former Dean of Manchester, who died seven years ago.

Dr Sentamu lent his support to moves to limit the centuries-old principle of the secrecy of the confessional in relation to child abusers.

Archbishop Welby said: “Both the Archbishop of York [and I], and all the bishops and I regularly see survivors and listen to them.

“It is beyond description – terrible.

“When you abuse a child or an adult you mark them for the rest of their lives.

“I had a meeting with some survivors a few weeks ago and was giving a talk later that afternoon, somewhere else on a completely different subject, but someone asked, it was a theological colleague, about issues of safeguarding and to my intense surprise – I don’t normally do this sort of thing – I broke down completely.

“It was the shredding effect of hearing what we did – what we did – to those people and the sense of total failure and betrayal.

“And so we are taking it, and I am passionate about this, as seriously as we are able to.”

Asked whether the Church’s failure over child abuse was greater than that of other institutions because it is the Church, he said: “Yes, absolutely.

“Yes many institutions failed catastrophically including in the media, including children’s homes, foster parents, all kinds of areas, all kinds of areas, you find them all over the place, but the Church is meant to hold itself to a far, far higher standard and we failed terribly.”

He said it was clear that there is “more that has not been revealed” about clerical abuse.

Detailing the process of trawling tens of thousands of clergy files, he added: “We will systematically bring those transparently and openly first of all working with the survivors where they are still alive and then seeing what they want.

“The rule is survivors come first, not our own interests and however important the person was, however distinguished, however well known, survivors come first.”