At last, one of Pope Benedict's closest aides uses the word "conspiracy" in relation to the systematic global cover-up of child abuse by paedophile Catholic priests. Unfortunately, Cardinal José Saraiva Martins believes the conspiracy is against the Catholic church, which is its victim.

"We should not be too scandalised if some bishops knew about it but kept it secret," he this week told reporters of the sexual abuse, on the same day the Vatican newspaper opted to blame the media for "ignoring the facts". "This is what happens in every family, you don't wash your dirty laundry in public." Though Saraiva Martins declined to spell out who was behind the conspiracy, he informed his listeners darkly: "There is a well-organised plan, with a clear aim."

For those who imagined church-related conspiracies as involving psychotic albino monks, easily decipherable holy grail puzzles, and some guff about the sacred feminine, this all comes as something of a shock. I suppose a cryptex that falls open if you align the letters N, O, N, C and E may yet surface, and x-ray analysis might discover the words "perhaps he could teach at a girls' school next time?" concealed in the rural backdrop of the Mona Lisa.

But for now, if we are to extrapolate his eminence's meaning correctly, the situation seems to be that some shadowy organisation deputised innumerable priests to abuse innumerable children down the decades (and, it seems fairly reasonable to assume, down the centuries). These same obscure evil masterminds then contrived to manipulate the most senior church figures – possibly Calvinist sleepers. Let's not rule anything out – into sweeping the lot under the carpet, frequently allowing priests to be relocated and begin their reign of unbearable horror anew. Then, many years later, our secretive society of conspirators would marshal a co-ordinated global attack by survivors of the abuse, whistle-blowing priests, and the media. This attack would also expose the paper trail of several of these cover-ups, and by some awesomely fiendish orchestration, paths would increasingly lead to the office of the pontiff, who would by that time be the very bloke who had headed the Vatican morals watchdog for the two decades from which some of the highest profile cases date.

It's quite a conspiracy, isn't it? By comparison, hiding the existence of a bloodline stemming from the issue of Jesus and Mary Magdalene for 2,000 years seems about as challenging as falling off a log located three foot from the earth's centre of gravity. Clearly, a plot this complex would be beyond even the capabilities of Spectre. In fact, rather confusingly, one of the only non-governmental international organisations powerful enough to perpetuate any sort of enduring global conspiracy – apart from the Illuminati, Colonel Sanders and whichever lizards David Icke is currently warning against – is the Catholic church.

That is merely one of the many ironies to this growing scandal, though considering the hideous wrongs done to generations of children at the heart of the matter, it is by no means the most revolting. Considerable more distasteful, for instance, is the Vatican's firefighting strategy. When confronted by this week's revelations from Wisconsin, where it emerged that as a cardinal, Benedict appears to have chosen not to discipline a priest accused of abusing up to 200 deaf boys in one school alone, the response of the Vatican newspaper was to accuse the media of acting ignobly.

Meanwhile, instead of insisting on the resignation of Sean Brady, the Irish cardinal who was complicit in two abuse victims being made to sign an oath of silence, Benedict last week responded by sending Irish Catholics an open letter (the paucity of the response rather grimly underscored by the fact that a few days later, West Ham chairman David Sullivan fell back on the same device to excuse a run of poor football results).

Right up there with the most iniquitous church attitudes on display, however, is Cardinal Saraiva Martins's implication that the abuse – or more pertinently the ongoing discovery of it by outsiders – is not a horror of the Vatican's own making but a trial sent to test it. As for who sends such tests, one can only speculate, remembering that of his apparently reluctant elevation to the papacy, Benedict once revealed: "I prayed to God 'please don't do this to me'." How distressingly easy it is to imagine almost that precise prayer being offered up by countless desperate, terrified children. Yet as the abuse scandal closes in on his own involvement, the question is whether Benedict will have the brass neck to extend the logic and yet again cite that odd abnegation of ultimate responsibility to his unseen boss.

It's not the sort of argument that tends to stand up in court, admittedly. But then, that's hardly relevant, as you'll have noted the absence of police chiefs in the scandal-hit dioceses pulling in any suspected coverers-up for questioning, let alone the righteous emergence of anyone approaching a pan-continental Yates of the Yard figure. Indeed, given this is hardly the time to joke that a keen applicant's hobbies should include taking riverside strolls with bricks in their pockets, we might as well accept that the compensation lawyers are our best hope.