Child sexual abuse is both morally repellent and a criminal offence. It has ruined the lives of many of its victims and done significant damage to those communities and institutions in which it has been prevalent. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has been the site of many instances of serious child sexual abuse. Moreover, members of the Catholic Church failed to report many instances of serious child sexual abuse to the police. The case of the convicted, and now defrocked, priest Gerard Ridsdale is particularly damning for the Catholic Church in Australia. Ridsdale was convicted of abusing 65 children, including the charge of rape. These offences are heinous – two of the victims were abused only hours after their father’s funeral. There is evidence to suggest some members of the Church knew of Ridsdale’s crimes but did not contact the police and ensure that children were protected. The victims suffered tremendously from Ridsdale’s abuse at the time and later in life when many suffered from relationship problems, drug and alcohol abuse, lost opportunities because of the disruption to their schooling etc. Furthermore, it has been argued that Ridsdale’s crimes contributed to the suicides of ex-altar boys. There are thousands of harrowing cases of  child sexual abuse committed by church workers, including priests, in the UK, the USA, Australasia and Europe – the areas dealt with by the commissions of inquiry that this work is primarily concerned with. Accordingly, the fundamental fact that needs to be acknowledged at the outset of this work is that during the second half of the twentieth century, in particular, a not insignificant number of the Catholic Church’s priests, church workers, bishops et al. in the UK, USA, Australasia, and Europe were responsible for an unacceptable level of child sexual abuse, either as perpetrators or as, in effect, protectors of perpetrators. What the actual scale of this child sexual abuse was, and over what exact period of time (including in more recent times), is the subject of this present work, as is the actual response of the Catholic Church to child sexual abuse. In answering these questions, we rely on what we will refer to as (respectively) the Irish Inquiry, IICSA (the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (England and Wales), the John Jay Inquiry, the Pennsylvania Inquiry (United States), the Canadian Inquiry, the Australian Inquiry, the New Zealand Inquiry, the French Inquiry, the Spanish Inquiry and the Italian Inquiry. We acknowledge the importance of these inquiries in shedding light on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and rely on these inquiries for their statistical data, in particular. However, we also critically analyse their methodologies and findings, and identify their shortcomings as appropriate. Official inquiries ought not themselves to be exempt from scrutiny. The importance of this point is graphically illustrated by what have turned out to be deeply flawed inquiries. One such inquiry is the Pennsylvania 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. This report was deemed to be in breach of the Investigating Grand Jury Act by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 2019. Indeed, some of its findings were ordered to be sealed permanently. Of particular concern, the Supreme Court justices argue that the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report did not protect people from the harm of unproven allegations. For example, “…it is not “in the public interest,” as contemplated by the Act, to utilize an investigating grand jury report to mete out punishment or provide relief for specific victims of unproven, albeit serious, crimes when the traditional means of bringing an individual to justice – e.g. – criminal prosecution – are otherwise unavailable” (Baer 2019, 10). We have chosen to analyse the aforementioned inquiries for the following reasons. The Irish Inquiry was the most prominent inquiry into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and influenced later inquiries. This book analyses three component inquiries of what is referred to as the Irish Inquiry, namely, the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Ryan Report), the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation (Murphy Report) and, the Report into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne (Cloyne Report). The Irish Inquiry’s influence on later inquiries has been beneficial in a number of respects. However, its influence has been detrimental in other respects. For example, the Irish Inquiry accepted at face value all allegations of child sexual abuse as true. We discuss the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (England and Wales) because some of its findings call into question the findings of other inquiries. For example, most inquiries take the view that male-on-male abuse is situational in nature and is not connected to an underlying sexual preference. However, the child sexual predator’s self-reports in various inquiries taken together with new knowledge obtained in the IICSA inquiry (knowledge of pornographic websites that predator monks were viewing), adds weight to the alternative, commonsense, view that sexual preference played a significant role. In these IICSA cases the websites that the predator monks accessed reveal a certain sexual preference, e.g, for boys, that is consistent with their choice of victim. T he John Jay Inquiry into the Catholic Church in the USA was chosen because of its significant impact in this area of research and because subsequent inquiries often reference its conclusions. The John Jay Inquiry is comprised of two reports: The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States 1950-2002; and the Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010. T he investigation of the Pennsylvania 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury is included for the reason provided above (it was deemed to be in breach of the Investigating Grand Jury Act). We discuss the Canadian Inquiry in less depth as child sexual abuse is not the main focus of this inquiry. However, it is an important inquiry to discuss given the gravity of the claims it is making, including that workers in church-run residential schools were responsible for the deaths of children on a large-scale. Whilst acknowledging that there was an unacceptably high deathrate at the schools (principally due to disease), we also discuss the sensationalistic media reports that claim that workers in the schools committed murder2. The ensuing rage by some Canadians has manifested itself in arson attacks causing the destruction of hundreds of churches in Canada. This false media reporting and wanton destruction in the wake of unsubstantiated allegations is entirely unjustified but graphically illustrates aspects of the contemporary setting in which the Catholic Church finds itself that are relevant to this work. T he Australian Inquiry, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, was selected because of its detailed and relatively comprehensive character (the final report is 17 volumes). Moreover, it was chosen because the UK Inquiry, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and the NZ Inquiry, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions both worked in consultation with the Australian Royal Commission. These two inquiries have imported not only some of the strengths but also some of the weaknesses of the Australian Royal Commission. For example, the NZ Inquiry utilised speculative estimates from the Australian Royal Commission to justify its own speculative estimates. More specifically, it used a crime multiplier to create an exaggerated estimate of unreported cases of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in New Zealand; a multiplier that was, in part, based on the speculative estimates from the Australian Royal Commission.