Tell them they have their facts wrong. Less than 2-4% of priests since 1970 have been accused of sexual misconduct, and not everyone who was accused actually did something. The fact of the matter is that you have a greater chance of being molested at a public school or even a protestant Christian school than you do by a Catholic priest.
But that does not excuse the priests that did commit these terrible acts. They need to repent and seek counseling, serve time in prison, and the people who were molested need to seek counseling and healing.
I also think people need to realize that child molestation has been going on for many decades–especially in Hollywood–and people didn’t seem to care all that much until very recently. I mean, look at the laws in the 60’s and 70’s. People actually had a very short sentence if the molestation was committed within one’s family, even though that is the case the majority of the time. So all these pedophiles would go to jail for something like 24-48 hours and then go back home and molest their kids again. And even the non-familial cases had short sentences, like maybe a month in jail and then they’d get to go home.
Now we need to put these secular laws into perspective when it comes to the church. The clergy have been accused of “covering up” sex abuse cases when they moved people around. Well, according to the secular law at the time, they’d only be in jail a month or so and then they’d be back. So the church did the best it could given the circumstances by moving priests away from their evil temptations, and doing their best to avoid allowing priests to be alone with children. Have the priest who sinned do a different job than youth ministry/kids’ confessions/etc.
I think society has come to better understand pedophilia. How damaging it is to victims. And the fact that there is no “easy fix” to pedophiles. You can’t just send them to jail to make them stop. You can’t just force them to take one class and expect them to be cured and never want to molest kids/teens again. It is a very deep wound and many of them were themselves molested as children. Something in their brains is wired incorrectly, in a horrible way. Although we don’t have a cure yet, we do know more things to help make it so they aren’t able to molest more children (like keep them locked up longer, probably permanently because many of them said they’d just do it again if they were let out).
We also need to note that pedophiles target jobs and volunteer positions that allow them to do what they want. The Boy Scouts had a problem with sex abuse and they recently (sometime in the last decade?) changed the rules so that nobody is allowed to be alone with another person’s child. I think that the Church should change the rules to follow these same practices so that the number of abuse cases approaches zero.
And last but not least, it takes a molested person years of healing before they feel they can come out and tell what happened. The cases we’re hearing about now happened in the 70’s, 80’s, early 90’s… they are 20+ years old. So the new practices that the Church is implementing to help prevent sex abuse, we won’t see the results for several years to come.
. . . it really is a puzzle how someone would somehow be able to do something like that a first time - let alone a second, what with all those parents present . 
