Posted by Kelly Fincham at 7/21/2009 11:01 AM EDT
 
So finally, the Catholic Church is moving to the end game in Ireland.
 
The new report being released today threatens to reveal what must have been an enormous cover-up inside the Catholic Church.
 
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin is to be commended for taking this very brave stance.
 
Irish journalists have been trying - and failing - for years to throw light over the dark culture of power in the Church.
 
We've heard the rumours but were never able to prove them.
 
It was never just the actions of the individual priests or nuns, appalling and all as they were.
 
There had to be a culture there that protected the name of the church at all costs. A culture that was tied up in the religious and legal circles.
 
A single newspaper couldn't take on the power of the church, a church that wielded its power with brute efficiency.
 
In 1999, Brian Quinn, the former editor of the Evening Herald in Dublin, described how the newspaper was forced to spike an investigation into the Artane Boys School.
 
"As for journalists," he said in 1999. "We failed in our basic duties in the 1940s and 1950s. We allowed a strident Christian Brother to burst into the office of the manager to demand that a District Court case involving Artane be 'spiked' and not used in the Evening Herald."
 
Quinn didn't fail so much as the entire culture of power in Ireland failed to protect its own citizens.