Denial, research shows, is a major factor in clerical culture - the dark side of the priesthood.

Because they are so insular and secluded, they're even more closed and secretive than the bishops and their clerical culture.

Some people pointed to a tight clerical culture that, like police or doctors, tends to minimize or cover up lapses and give its own the benefit of any doubt.

The lack of accountability, in turn, was fostered by a closed clerical culture that infects the priesthood, isolating some priests and bishops from the faithful and from one another.

It's about administration; it's about the structure of power within the Catholic Church; it's about the Church's insular, self-protective clerical culture.

"I'd love to show the clerical class, the clerical culture - from the inside," he added.

Indeed, the church's clerical culture is fraught with a variety of psychosexual conflicts.

We must ask hard questions about the clerical culture, about limits to priestly obedience to bishops, and about how Catholics should hold compromised bishops accountable.

Some felt an absence of any 'culture of trust and honesty' amongst the clergy, and there to be instead a clerical culture of 'point-scoring'.

There is the Black Death, which broke the back of the Middle Ages; the consequent decline in clerical culture, which did so much to provoke the Reformation.