A Melbourne archbishop has admitted that church leaders have helped cover up clerical abuses in a three-hour interrogation by a Victorian parliament inquiry, The Australian said in a report.

"The church was too keen to look after herself and her good name and not keen enough to address the terrible anguish of the victims," Archbishop Denis Hart told the formal inquiry.

Archbishop Hart also revealed that his predecessor, Archbishop Thomas Little, who led the Melbourne archdiocese from 1974 to 1996, had treated complaints with confidentiality, saved no documentation of sex-abuse activities and kept all the records to himself.

He also said that the former Melbourne archbishop simply moved the sex offenders to new clerical jurisdictions, which he referred to as "innocent parishes and innocent children."

Archbishop Hart agreed during his interrogation that the events constitute a cover-up. "I'm not making excuses for any of my predecessors," he told MP Frank McGuire, who was conducting his inquiry.

It was also revealed that Hart had warned the Vatican last year of "a scandal of the faithful" if it failed to defrock reported pedophile priests, including convicted ones like Desmond Gannon.

Gannon was sentenced five times from 1995 to 2009 for sexual crimes against children. But due to old age and unwillingness to be secularized, Gannon was issued a penal precept instead of spending the remaining years of his life in jail and getting defrocked.

One of Gannon's victims, Patrick, who surfaced in 2007 but didn't press charges, told church sex-abuse watchdog Broken Rites Australia, "I understand the church attempts to deny these pedophilic offences until they are exposed by victims such as me. This is tantamount in condoning such behavior."

"It is not my intention to see Gannon suffer, but it is incumbent on the church and its credibility that offending clergy be indentified and removed from their positions of trust," he added.

Archbishop Hart said the Gannon case had been "an onerous process" and that he was "resolute" in his mission of getting the known pedophile defrocked.

Archbishop Hart was not the first church leader in recent news to have admitted to the cover-ups. The Bishop of Chichester in West Sussex, England said in a personal letter of apology to a child abuse victim that there has been "deception and cover-up" at his diocese. The letter, which also laments the parish's "ineptitude and irresponsible lack of professionalism" was revealed by BBC South East in April.

In March, The Telegraph reported that Scottish Archbishop Philip Tartaglia, who was named temporary administrator of the Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St. Andrews after Cardinal Keith O'Brien's resignation last week, laments the incidences and the consequences of recent scandals.

The most stinging charge which has been leveled against us in this matter is hypocrisy, and for obvious reasons," he told the evening mass at St. Andrew's Cathedral in March.