Lord, this could be a whole other post in itself. Basically, there's a lot of different takes. Most people I know who were honestly, truly appalled by it left the Church or just stopped going. Then you've got the reformers who want to let priests marry and have sex because they think that will stop them from abusing kids, and the revanchists who think the guilty priests should be excommunicated and put to death, and the radical centrists who think they should all be sent to therapy and then let back into the Church to preach after some arbitrary amount of time in penance.

It doesn't help that most of the abused kids were boys, which in a lot of conservative Catholics' minds only reinforces the notion that LGBTQ people are all evil pedophiles.

It's Bad and Weird. My personal take is that the Church should be abolished and all the Vatican's internal records be made public, but that's not going to happen any time soon.