DUBLIN - Investigations into child sex abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland should be extended nationwide, a leading campaigner said Friday a day after a damning study condemned a decades-long cover-up.

The call came as one Irish newspaper branded the abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church, which was covered up for more than 30 years by senior clergy, as "satanic," blasting the "rampant evil".

"We are looking at this commission's report as the end of its work," said Marie Collins, a campaigner and survivor of abuse by a serial deviant priest named as Father Edmondus in the report.

"What I would call for, straight away, is for the remit (of the commission) to be extended to all of the dioceses in the country," she told the RTE state broadcaster.

Following a three-year investigation in the Dublin Archdiocese, the country's largest, a report Thursday concluded that four archbishops routinely protected abusers and failed to inform police of the allegations.

The revelations, by judge Yvonne Murphy, follow other horrifying reports about rape and abuse by clerics in the diocese of Ferns in the south-east of the country.

The Murphy commission is continuing to investigate the church's handling of abuse allegations in the diocese of Cloyne in the south of the country.

Ireland's most senior Catholic, Cardinal Sean Brady, and Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin responded by publicly apologising to all the victims of abuse, and promised that it would not happen again.

But commentators voiced outrage at the findings, which come just six months after a landmark report detailed widespread sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in Catholic-run institutions dating back to the 1930s.

The Examiner newspaper, describing the abuse as "satanic", said Thursday's report uncovered a "litany of horror" that could "only be described as an active evil, a pervading darkness that poisoned lives."

"Some years ago, the history of the sexual and physical abuse of children was described as the Irish Holocaust. At that time, that description seemed extreme. Sadly, time has justified it," it added.

The Irish Times said that the "corruption of power and the fundamentally rotten nature of relations between the Catholic Church and the state has been laid bare" in Dublin by the damning report.

A "studied silence by Vatican authorities and by the Apostolic Nuncio" (papal representative) to requests for additional information "will feed suspicion that the church remains fixated on protecting its tattered image."

Thursday's damning study found that the archbishops did not report abuse to police until the 1990s as part of a culture of secrecy and an over-riding wish to avoid damaging the reputation of the Church and protecting its assets.

"All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities," the report said.

One priest admitted to abusing over 100 children, another was an active paedophile -- raping children of both sexes -- for over 25 years.

One victim told the commission: "The Church failed us. They failed us as Catholics. They failed me as a human being. They took my soul."

The report said the volume of revelations of child sexual abuse by clergy over the past 35 years was described to it by a Church source as "a 'tsunami' of sexual abuse".