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4% of priests were accused of wrongdoing. One can only guess how many of those were falsely accused but obviously even 1% is too much.

The Bishops clearly failed these children. The bishops' decisions should be understood in the context of the era when these crimes occurred. This problem was clearly not as well understood and often the bishops were following the advice of psychiatrists. I'm sure when they heard they could do what the experts said AND avoid a scandal they were overjoyed.

The Church was widely criticized when it was discovered that some bishops knew about some of the alleged crimes committed, but reassigned the accused instead of seeking to have them permanently removed from the priesthood. In defense of this practice, some have pointed out that public school administrators engaged in a similar manner when dealing with accused teachers, as did the Boy Scouts of America.
In response to these allegations, defenders of the Church's actions have suggested that in re-assigning priests after treatment, bishops were acting on the best medical advice then available, a policy also followed by the U.S. public school system when dealing with accused teachers.
Some bishops and psychiatrists have asserted that the prevailing psychology of the times suggested that people could be cured of such behavior through counseling. Many of the abusive priests had received counseling before being reassigned. Critics have questioned whether bishops are necessarily able to form accurate judgments on a priest's recovery. The priests were allowed to resume their previous duties with children only when the bishop was advised by the treating psychologists or psychiatrists that it was safe for them to resume their duties.

Wikipedia "John Jay Report"

4-10% of all priests or of investigated priests? If two-thirds of priests transferred child molesters without alerting authorities that it amazing. 2/3rds is huge, it is institutional No I sure hope I saw those 2 posts out of context

4-5% of all American priests. 2/3 of all American bishops. I wish I could say they were out of context - but IMO they're not. I think we can all agree that some bishops tried to stop the crisis, while others perpetuated it. We know there were some bishops (Weakland in America and Vangheluwe in Belgium) who not only moved perpetrators around knowingly, but were perpetrators themselves. Despite that, the John Jay report assigns only five categories to sum up all of the bishops' responses - innovators, early adopters, early majority, later majority, and laggards. The John Jay study was commissioned and paid for by the US bishops, making it telling that no category was created for "bishop perpetrators".

[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World
"The Dublin Archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with cases of child sexual abuse, at least until the mid-1990s, were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," said the report. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities. The archdiocese did not implement its own canon law rules and did its best to avoid any application of the law of the state"....
-- from the thread Pope calls Irish church leaders to Vatican to discuss abuse report