How could Rowan Williams get this more wrong?

Rowan Williams the current Archbishop of Canterbury voiced on a radio discussion the sentiment that all rational thinking people have felt since the Catholic Church’s cover up of paedophile priests has been exposed. He said:

"I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now.
"And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society, suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland."

Well, maybe not everybody, because, even in a religious backwater like Ireland there exists a healthy community of atheists. But that aside his instinct is correct. The Catholic Church has lost all credibility, all right to moral authority (if it ever had it) and although it probably wasn’t the most diplomatic thing for the head of another Church to say, it was indisputably empirically correct.
But guess what? The wimp has now apologised. “Oops sorry, didn’t mean to offend” (shouldn’t have put that in quotes really, ‘cos that’s not actually what he said but he might as well have).
So where do the Anglicans stand now then? Maybe it is O.K with them that the biggest Christian faction in the world is a child abuser's refuge. Maybe it is more important that the peddlers of superstition stick together to defend these edifices of unreason lest their sick institutions finally fail.
To my mind the conspiracy just got wider. Sod the facts! Let religion prevail.