Commission’s report points to more than 100 abusers still working as priests

As the nation digests the full horror paraded yesterday of 72 years of sexual deviance within the Portuguese Catholic Church, the one positive emerging has been the belief that the institution now will be ‘better’.

The Church has not only apologised profusely to all victims, it has pledged to taking concrete and concerted steps to ensure abuse on the scale laid out by the independent commission of inquiry cannot be able to happen again.

As one leader writer put it, the Church has to be praised for supporting this ‘moral apocalypse’. In spite of the shame and disgust that revelations have heaped on the institution, it was the Church that requested this independent inquiry, and it was the Church that throughout supported its various requests.

But there are still huge questions: not least how to deal with the 100-plus priests in communities whose names appear…