Archbishop Wim Eijk said the report filled him with "shame and sorrow."

The Dutch investigation uncovered some of the most widespread abuse yet from a slew of inquiries around the world into corruption in the world's largest church.

Catholic officials had failed to tackle endemic abuse - from "unwanted sexual advances to rape" - and had connived at a conspiracy of silence in order to prevent scandals, it found.

The government-appointed commission responsible for the report received over 1,800 complaints concerning abuse at Catholic schools, seminaries and orphanages.

The institutions suffered from "a failure of oversight," it said - but it denied that there was "a culture of silence in the church as a whole."

However commission head Wim Deetman has said that church leaders had known about the problem and done nothing.

"The idea that people did not know there was a risk is untenable," he said.

Abuse victim Bert Smeets said that the report did not go far enough.

"What was happening was sexual abuse, violence, spiritual terror, and that should have been investigated," he said.

"It remains vague. All sorts of things happened but nobody knows exactly what or by whom. This way they avoid responsibility."

The report broke new ground in following up its investigation into the church with a more comprehensive analysis of the scale of sexual abuse of minors across the country.

It found that 10 per cent of Dutch children had suffered "some sort of abuse" - and the figure rose to 20 per cent of those who had been brought up in orphanages or attended boarding school.

However abuse levels among those attending Catholic institutions were no higher than for other establishments.

Around 800 priests, monks, pastors and lay people working for the church were named in complaints submitted. Of these 105 are still alive but the commission referred only 11 cases to prosecutors, saying others did not contain enough detail. The Netherlands Catholic church has set up a fund to pay compensation of between €5,000 (£4,200) and €100,000 (£84,000) to victims.

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