@flozen I'm not at all defending Ratzinger as Benedict XVI. While he might have been a "theoretical theology liberal" in the 1960's, when he put on a white dress in 2005 he permitted and/or caused a great deal of damage. He certainly had lots of help within the hierarchy in doing this, but as with any bureaucracy, the buck stops at the top.
The whole pedophilia mess is scandalously bungled at every level. (Side note: I have friends who were molested by clerics, and a high school classmate of mine became a priest-pedophile and is now living in Costa Rica or some some place outside of extradition.) One aspect of the social tragedy is that the RC church had/has no monopoly on child molestation--it might be the most public face of it, but some studies (and I don't have a handy reference) say that the most prevalent situations of molestation are schools and families.
In a more perfect world, the RC church could have tried to come clean and say, essentially, "yes, we fucked up, and we're going to clean house. We also want to help the other institutions in society clean their houses." That's obviously not what happened, and the disaster continues. I don't know how it will get fixed. I will say that if I had a child who was being molested by a priest/teacher/scout-leader, etc., I would probably take some rather direct action.