Generous settlements have assuaged much of their pain and that of their lawyers; entire dioceses have been bankrupted over this.
There has been explanation after explanation, new policy after new policy, apology after apology...and nothing is ever enough because the whole point is not to deal with the problem of child abuse, but to destroy the Church.
There is no way to go back in time and change things. Many of the responses of the Church were, unfortunately, just the same as the responses of the secular world at that time(therapy and a way too trusting treatment of offenders with children, and nearly complete tolerance of gay ephebophiles). The Church should have been different from secular society, but it wasn’t.
Curiously, I see no cry for apologies over Board of Ed policies that left sex offenders teaching in schools (because the unions protected their employment records), no apologies from courts that for years in the 1970s and 1980s gave laughably light sentences to child molesters and sexual psychopaths, no demand for apologies from people like Obama’s education administration candidate who was in favor of child sex...the people who are so “concerned” about child molestation are curiously selective in their outrage.
If my perception of the drift I am seeing from the faithful side is correct, it wouldn’t seem out of place for Benedict to make a personal statement that he did not knowingly enable any pedophile priest at any point in his career in the church, but that if what is known today was known then, the scrutiny would have been heightened. And that the scrutiny level is very high today. He might add, just to tweak the liberals, that most of this is due to gay priests which he is working hard to purge.