Most right-thinking people have always seen this defence of the indefensible actions of adults against particularly vulnerable children for what it is: rubbish. They may have been harsher times, but people hadn't lost all moral compass. They knew as clearly then as they know now that sexually abusing children is wrong, that beating children with canes and leathers is wrong, that sending them out barely clad to work on farms in freezing weather is wrong, and that humiliating children in order to break their spirits is wrong.

That's why there were laws against it . . .laws such as the 1908 Children's Act that specifically outlawed physical and sexual abuse of children.

Still, it was an argument that the Catholic Church, particularly, liked to use as it sought to obfuscate and defend the priests and brothers who, from their positions of power within the institutions it controlled, assaulted children. That argument is, thankfully, being eschewed by Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin in his drive for a new openness in the church's policy towards past child abuse. But its use by some church figures makes contemporaneous reports into the harsh regimes of some of the insitutions under church control all the more important. They underline that, even at that time, there was a recognition that children were being damaged by the behaviour of those in charge of their welfare. They also underline that those in charge were perfectly aware that their regimes were being fundamentally criticised from within . . . and that they chose to ignore those criticisms.

Last week, to his great credit, Archbishop Martin decided to publish a key report into conditions in Artane Industrial School. The controversial report, written in 1962 by a young chaplain, Fr Henry Moore, at the request of the then Archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid, has lain undisclosed in the diocesan archive for decades. It makes for distressing reading, detailing a regime we are now all too familiar with but which, because its conclusions were largely ignored, meant that the suffering of the 450 young boys who had to endure life in Artane continued.

The report was passed on to the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse by Dr Diarmuid Martin in 2006 and has been considered along with many other official reports into conditions there. Some of these were condemnatory; others, including a report by Department of Education inspectors in response to the Moore criticisms, were supportive of the regime which was being run by the brothers under its auspices.

SOCA, the Survivors of Child Abuse, has long campaigned for the publication of the Moore report because of its value as a contemporaneous document. The Archbishop's action may yet demonstrate how powerful a tool for healing such openness can be. He will win a lot of respect for the courage he has shown. But the reaction of the Christian Brothers themselves has been extraordinary.

The intemperate response of of their head, Brother Edmund Garvey, in expressing "shock and dismay" and describing its publication as "unconscionable" shows just how far some church members need to travel, even today.

Nothing is ever simple or clear in the murky world of abuse within the church.

Archbishop Martin visted Artane himself in the 1960s as a young priest. "It was a no-go area in society, the children were forgotten, " he has said. He strongly believes that full disclosure of what, for the church, is an inconvenient truth about its history is the only way to regain the trust of its victims, whose pain never goes away.

It's also the only way of earning the respect of the wider community who, as the Primate of Ireland Monsignor Sean Brady noted earlier in the week, are turning to all sorts of alternative mythologies and hocus pocus to fill their spiritual needs.