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Because, due to age, they were disproportionately in charge when it went down, for one thing. Priests molesting children in the post JPII era is pretty rare; most sex abuse scandals today are ‘it has been revealed in an audit of diocesan archives that another predator priest was transferred from parish to parish in the seventies and eighties’. The people in charge from 1965-1990 were progressive within the RCC by today’s standards, and given the length of time senior clerics serve for, the current progressives are frequently direct protégés or even literally the same people(albeit they were at a lower level in 1985) of those who made object level decisions at the time. The sharply limited amount of progressive ‘new blood’ has also prevented turnover in a way that gives many more conservative factions a bit of distance from the scandals.
Also, by happenstance, senior conservatives made up most of the internal opposition to the policy of coverup and reassignment, and Ratzinger(the future Benedict XVI) personally went out on a limb to laicize predatory priests at a time when that was not the general practice. This is especially strong in recent days because pope Francis just keeps using his authority and connections to protect Fr Marko Ivano Rupnik, who molested nuns. That pope Francis seems to like senior clerics with a worse record on sex abuse issues is a common accusation; while there’s not nothing to it, I think it’s mostly happenstance and generational issues+typical South American corruption in the spotlight. The fact of the matter is that Benedict had a much better record at addressing sex abuse cases than Francis does.
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