That is just flat out not true. Are there instances where that did happen? Probably. But it was certainly not the norm.
It is quite true.
Sure, folks whose crimes became public would be prosecuted, but most of these cases were hushed up by most segments in society, whether it was church (not just the Catholic Church), law enforcement, the medical establishment, the therapeutic establishment.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was studying to become a clinical psychologist. Laws were just then changing to require that psychotherapists report confessions of child sexual abuse on the part of clients to law enforcement. This was very controversial. I remember that my professors were pretty much all universally horrified at the idea that they would be required to report these cases to the police. Previously, this sort of thing was usually handled therapeutically.
The Catholic Church actually ran a center in suburban Maryland in part to treat molestor priests. This was out in the open. No one was hiding this fact. Everyone in the community knew what was the subject of therapy at St. Luke's. Including the police. I promise, the police never raided the place to gather up all the molestors in residence who were being treated.
I remember at the time that it was the universal opinion of folks that this was the best, most effective way to treat molestors. I remember that the views in my then-chosen profession were just beginning to change. Previously, it had been thought that pursuing criminal charges against molestors was damaging to the VICTIMS. It was often concern for the VICTIMS that caused different institutions in our society to come to confidential agreements, to avoid open, public criminal trials, to divert offenders to therapy.
Remember that it wasn't so long ago that to have been sexually assaulted was to have imposed on oneself a great mark of deep shame. Even today, newspapers don't usually publish the names of folks who have suffered sexual assault. It was a common belief that it was best for the victim to put the abuse behind him or her, and not expose victims to publicity or long, drawn-out proceedings that would daily remind them of their abuse.
That was the norm.
sitetest
There are many instances. If you look at sentencing, particularly in California, parts of the Pacific Northwest, and some of the Northeastern states, you will find totally trivial sentences for pedophiles who had even gone so far as to murder their victims. In the Idaho case of a few years ago, where a man kidnapped and sexually assaulted two children, torturing them and killing one before he was caught, it turned out that he had already raped and killed another child only a few years before. He had received “therapy” and a trivial sentence for this.
It is hardly the only case. It is only in recent years that even therapists are acknowledging that therapy does not cure pedophiles; and nobody is even discussing the real problem in most of the cases in the Catholic Church, which is not pedophilia but the pursuit by homosexual men of adolescent boys - something that is not even punished if the boy is technically over the age of consent, and generally ignored even if he isn’t. Remember Obama’s recent candidate for a schools position, who had even come out endorsing male adult/child sexual engagement. This was his public position during the 1970s, and was the position of many others at that time.
The real problem was that the Church ceased to rely on its defnition of sin and and substituted psychological definitions of morality. And at the time that most of the worst of the cases happened in the Church, it was governed by the psychological approach to child molesters (and no approach at all to homosexual males who chased teenage boys).