I think you’re right on. I will never forget the day when a bishop who was referred to me for counseling for depression proceeded to tell me about his sexual relationship with one of his priests. This was years before this bishop reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 and so he continued to ‘lead’ his diocese under this cloud. I remember thinking: “Your being depressed is an appropriate response to what you have told me; you’re not clinically depressed, you are experiencing a normal reaction to sin.”
I think something that has gotten virtually no attention - but was very involved with this crisis in particular - is the "Freudianization" of the Church after Vatican II.
One of the open windows seems to have allowed Sigmund Freud to blow in on a passing zeitgeist. I'm not referring, to Freud's actual thought, strictly speaking, but to the sudden tendency to rely on a psychological approach to things that were actually moral issues. Granted, it was a pop-psychology approach, about 99% "Freud said don't stifle yourself, if it feels good, do it, if you're not happy, it's because you're not doing it enough..."
But one thing that is a constant in the sexual abuse crisis is that neither the bishops nor Rome treats it as a moral crisis; the concept of sin is rarely if ever mentioned. The offending priest was sent to a therapist of some sort; he was never told he was going to hell and given a choice between being sent to one of the prison monasteries certain orders used to run (no longer in existence) and being kicked out of the priesthood. It was no longer a grave moral crisis.
But I think you're right and that deep down inside, some of these men still knew it was a moral issue. In some ways, I think some of them were even scandalized by the failure of Church officials to treat it as such.