Well, I am a new Catholic and, since I was raised with a protestant sensibility and I did not experience a childhood filled with reverence for the clergy, I have a few observations:
1) The Church contains all truth, and, as such, is holy and indefectible.
2) There is a longstanding homosexual subculture among the clergy in Western Europe and the United States (at least). The men who belong to, or are sympathetic to, this subculture are not being reached quickly or effectively by the criminal process, and, as long as they remain in place, they continue to protect each other and cause enormous harm.
3) The extirpation of this evil, while to some extent the job of the civil power, is much, much more so the responsibility of the Church.
4) The Church, for reasons which must seem cogent to the men of our time charged with shepherding her forward, is not doing a very good job at exposing these criminals, nor is she presenting a coherent theological accounting of their sins and the consequences thereof.
Defensiveness on the part of Catholics is understandable, in a human sense. Enemies of the Church are wielding the scandals like a club, and the desire to deflect their blows is only natural. But this natural defensiveness is both obstructing the complete removal of what the Holy Father correctly calls "filth" infesting the priesthood, and is relocating responsibility for avoiding further harm onto small children through diocesan "safety" programs, when the only safety program that needs doing is the removal from the priesthood and the episcopate of all sexually active homosexuals who desire relations with young men and boys, the identities of whom are surely known widely throughout the entire institution.
An excellent objective post.