At any time, the victim statements that Catholic Church employee Maureen O'Hearn read on behalf of their authors would have drawn an emotional response but coming as they did in the final minutes of eight weeks of public proceedings, it was as if a wall of resistance to the insistent horror of it all had burst, and tears were the only means of responding.

Earlier that day, Ms O'Hearn had spoken of her time as a state government welfare counsellor, and of the sexual abuse cases she encountered within families.

Although the cases she encountered were not spelt out in detail, they opened a brief door to the idea that the Catholic Church has no greater rate of paedophilia in its midst than the rest of society.

Society generally describes such acts as incest but if one party is a child and the other an adult, then it's paedophilia, and Ms O'Hearn is far from the first welfare practitioner to acknowledge its prevalence, as unspoken as it usually is.

Over my weeks covering the commission's hearings, I have heard this debate played out quite frequently among members of the public gallery - most of them, given the circumstances, Catholics - who I imagine are looking for something to help restore their faith in a battered organisation.

Despite the evidence I have seen at the commission - and recent columns I have written about the Holy See's secrecy and the role, or otherwise, of clerical celibacy in fostering paedophile priests - I am not closed to the idea that the number of paedophiles within the Catholic Church may not be higher than in wider society.

But I say that with some important provisos, the first of which is that each clerical paedophile can easily have dozens of victims, unlike even the worst of familial paedophiles.

Related to this is the control that the Church's paedophiles exercise over their victims.

The first bit of victim ABR's statement that really got to me on Thursday was when she wrote "I was so scared of him".

"I believed him when he said that if I told anyone he would know because he could read my mind and I would be in a lot of trouble."

She was 10 years old at the time.

In a very peripheral way, I know how she and other Church victims might feel about this, because I found myself the subject of a sexual assault at about the same age, and my overwhelming response was one of guilt.

I was in the council library at Parramatta, looking for books, when a man began asking me about my reading matter. Within seconds, it seemed, he had me hemmed into one corner of the library, while he slid a hand into my shorts.

It was all over in about 30 seconds and as he walked off, I was pinned to the spot unable to move, and certainly unable to tell my father, who had been standing about two metres away in a straight line, but out of sight on the other side of a tall row of books.

As an incident, it had no lasting impact that I can see, but I could never have told my parents about it because of the almost immediate feeling that I must have been doing something wrong for such an act to take place.

During the commission, I began to wonder what it would have been like for a Catholic child to know their abuser was there the next day, and the one after that, and the one after that.

And that the person you know had abused you was respected by everyone - or if not respected, allowed to operate with impunity.

"Denham's on the crawl, bums to the wall," as the St Pius X graffiti once warned.

And that's the essential difference between Church figures preying on children, and the "opportunistic" - if that is the word - paedophilia that exists in broader society.

Unless he was a priest out of uniform, the architect of my brief discomfort did not have the support of a centuries-old hierarchy, possessed of its own secretive laws, prepared to move him to another town if things got too hot.

Like everyone else, I await Commissioner Margaret Cunneen's findings.