People said much the same thing about Pope John Paul II with regard to the homosexual invasion of the seminaries since the 60s and his 27-year papacy in which it flourished under his nose. He is said to have dismissed wanting to hear anything about it from senior advisors because during the Nazi era in the Poland of his youth, false accusations of homosexuality were enough for Communist overlords to ruin the careers of local officials and have them carted off to the extermination camps. Yet I hear no one on FR calling for him to have been jailed.
I lived in an Italian Catholic parish in Pennsylvania for a long time, and enjoyed the neighborly company of the many devout Catholic family men and grandfathers there. Given Paterno's age, I can completely understand his inability to fully grasp what he was dealing with. It is an imagery so disgusting and foul that he may not even have wanted to spend an unnecessary millisecond on it.
I have, in fact, posted for years that JPII should have faced consequences.
Absolutely, if the is declared a saint he will be the patron saint of pedophile apologists.
Groups of people who had been raped by priests as children went to him and asked for him to clean things up. It was the same as when Russians went to Stalin to tell uncle Joe about the awful things going on in Siberia...NADA.
At least the current pope is quite a bit better, though not as good as one might want.