You (and a good handful of others on this thread) are a decade or so behind the news curve on this issue. The cases we hear about in America are decades old. In part this is because, as most Catholics know, priests today are immediately suspended if an accusation of abuse is made—whether credible or not. The investigation follows. A priest may wait for years to be vindicated of a false accusation. One effect is that young men today do not pursue vocations to the priesthood for the glamor. Today's generation of new priests is (thank God) sincere, tough-minded, conservative, and utterly normal.
Laymen today who work with children in the Catholic church have to go through certification, which involves very exacting rules and procedures designed to ensure the safety of children, including that no child is left alone with an adult.
Measured as a percentage of their numbers, Catholic priests have had a smaller proportion of accusations of child abuse than public school teachers and coaches have had of convictions. Catholic priests also are under-represented among abusers compared to Protestant clergy. (For the record, I believe abusers should be hanged, regardless of denomination.)
We have the spread of promiscuous, 1960s ideas to thank for most sexual abuse of both adults and children over the past decades. The irony is that it is mostly Leftists, such as atheists, aging hippies, and homosexuals, who look to attack the Catholic church for (allegedly) practicing the morality that Leftists themselves have long supported. Alinsky preached that Leftists should accuse their enemies of the sins they themselves commit, to pre-empt any criticism of the Left. This is also what Leftists, being childish, do by inclination.
Conservatives, who are used to de-coding anti-Christian media narratives, should not be confused by willfully ignorant and dishonest reporting in this area, either.
Do not forget that politics makes for strange bedfellows (misquoted? Sorry), and that the Left finds allies on the right for all sorts of issues, one of them being the so-called “racism”, a 20th century invention of the Left, some say of Leon Trotsky himself, which has taken ethnocentrism present in every human society since the dawn of time, and transformed it into a mortal sin, and a kind of cultist obsession. But here, I suspect the motives and alliances with the Left stem from some 19th century “Christian” sects, which have evolved into today’s respectable Protestant Churches and their obsession with the Catholic Church which obsession is an integral part of their theology and message to the world. The bigots posting here won’t identify their sects, of course, but you can bet they are not Lutherans or Calvinists, but more likely members of some obscure Holy Roller congregations or something close to them.
Point of common ground.
I will NOT go into detail, but what you claim is simply not always the case. In my geographical location, the holy man when told ignored ‘evidence’ and it took an outsider to get help for innocent victims. This took place in the past couple of years.
There is this instant response by the overwhelming majority to any and all accusations of criminal behavior against our young as everybody is doing it. Well granted abusing our young does increasingly appear to be ‘mainstream’ but only one bunch makes the claim they are the first and oldest ‘church’ that represents Mary, ah, I mean God.
Who do Catholics think fund these criminal buyouts?