A multinational bank will do.

How would we view a global bank if we knew that 40 per cent of people working in one of its units – say the loans section in one of its national banks – were the subject of child sexual abuse reports between January, 1980 and February, 2015? That's two out of every five employees.

How would we view that global bank if its Australian arm – and just its Australian arm – was the subject of complaints from 4444 people during the same period alleging they had been sexually abused as children by Australian bank representatives?

How would we view that global bank if we knew the children left at the mercy of the unit where two in five employees were alleged offenders were particularly vulnerable, and had either intellectual disabilities or behavioural problems? What about if we knew some of those children were only six when they were abused by those adult employees, in situations where the children had nowhere to hide, and noone to turn to for help?

How would we view that global bank if we knew the rate of child sex crimes within many of its units was far, far higher than the rate of child sexual abuse within the general population, higher than the rates in other comparable banks, and certainly much higher than the bank ever admitted to when its victims started speaking out.

Now consider this – how would we view any of the above if it was a global bikie gang or terrorist group committing crimes at that level against often very young, very vulnerable children?

Now think about how we should view the sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church for many decades, after those figures and many more were revealed in just the first few hours of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse's 50th hearing.

The St John of God order has received child sex allegations against 40.4 per cent of its members. The order ran the Kendall Grange residential home at Morisset from 1948 for boys with intellectual disabilities, and later boys with behavioural problems. The youngest boys were six.

Kendall Grange was closed in 2001. Since then a number of St John of God Brothers have been charged and convicted of child sex offences. Some of those Brothers, supported by their order, have aggressively fought being brought to account in secular courts.

The Royal Commission has held 15 public hearings into the Catholic Church in Australia. This final hearing will consider the governance of the church, its culture, its history, its traditions, the role of celibacy, the selection of priests, the operation of canon law, the concept of clericalism – how priests can come to believe they are not subject to the same laws as others.

Already we have heard how the church as an institution has contributed to priests leading "sex-obsessed lives of terror", in which the body is "disavowed", sexual desire is "a problem to be overcome", and the "moral authority of vowed virginity" is presumed.

And then we placed some of the most vulnerable people in the community – children – into the care of those damaged individuals, within an institution that put its own power and reputation as its highest priority.

For the next three weeks we will see the Catholic Church in Australia exposed as an institution responsible for criminality on an unprecedented scale. The tragedy is that's only what we know has occurred in Australia.

No wonder the church's representative, Truth, Justice and Healing Council spokesman Francis Sullivan, wept as he made a statement to the Royal Commission on Monday, admitting to the world what the Catholic Church has done.

And how telling that it was a layman, and not a senior Catholic cleric, who was weeping.

Newcastle Herald