When the silver Renault 25 reversed at breakneck speed on the main road from Wexford town to Fethard-on-Sea, Patrick Bennett knew that he was in trouble.

The 13-year-old was hitchhiking home from Wexford hospital where he had been treated for burns to his face. The man who pulled over and offered him a lift home was Fr Sean Fortune, one of Ireland’s most prolific clerical sex abusers.

It was 1980 and Bennett was all too aware of the rumours that surrounded Fortune. Local children nicknamed him Batman because of the priest’s penchant for appearing ominously out of nowhere in his sweeping black cassock.

“Something inside me told me it was him. I didn’t want to get into the car but it was late and you could never say no to a priest,” said Bennett, now a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.

On their journey Fortune asked Bennett about his sexuality and his burns, and offered him a cure, a “magic cream”. After masturbating himself, Fortune smeared his semen into the boy’s wounds and then dropped him off at home.

A week later the Wexford priest tracked down the teenager at a local hotel where he worked, isolated him in a dry goods store, and buggered him. These “minor incidents”, as Bennett now describes them, marked the beginning of four years of serial rape.

“It was basically whenever and wherever he saw me after that,” said Bennett, who now owns a restaurant in Wexford. He estimates that he was raped up to three times a day, three times a week by Fortune.

“Three times a day, how can any man physically do that?” he wonders.

“I am 39 years old, and I have no control over my bowels. People might not want to read this, but I have to confront the legacy of Sean Fortune every time I go to the toilet. If I do have a solid bowel movement, I feel as if I am being raped again, because I can feel him. I can see him and I can hear him. That’s not abuse, it is evil.”

Last week the diocese of Ferns was branded the most evil Roman Catholic diocese in the world after publication of a report that unveiled a sickening catalogue of more than 100 incidents of child sex abuse by 21 priests over a period of 40 years.

The report, the first state inquiry into clerical sex abuse, detailed how predatory paedophiles, protected by their superiors, went to great lengths to “groom” young victims. They set up boy scout movements, youth clubs and introduced FAS schemes; they offered jobs and accommodation to their young targets.

The Catholic church provided a perfect haven for their crimes. Indeed many of these paedophiles were attracted to the priesthood precisely because of the unfettered access it gave them to vulnerable children.

In the wake of the report, the government has promised enhanced vetting procedures to protect children and vulnerable adults from abuse. But can paedophiles be kept out of the priesthood, and will children ever be entirely safe from clerical abuse?

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