[edited]
My back-of-the envelope calculation for the number of children abused only by Catholic priests comes out to be around 500,000 children worldwide, annually.

If anyone's interested I'll post how I arrived at that, and we can perhaps refine the number.

It may well be a factor of 5x too low, since research on sexual abuse of minors in general shows that greater than 80% of such abuse goes unreported. Here we can use a datapoint provided by TheresaTallis that abuse rates in society at large are about the same as those in the church. She justifies this assertion by stating that legal insurance rates for the laiety and the priesthood are comparable. I disagree with this statement for a couple of reasons, but I'll post my theory as to why, but again only if anyone's interested. For now I'll assume that it's also >80% unreported in the RCC. That's where the 5x comes from.

Here's another datapoint. The chances are approximately even (50/50) that any group of 16 Catholic priests contains at least one paedophile. Wonder how many are in the Curia? - lots!! and lots!! and lots!!

Hmm - poor Benedict. Trying to pass anti-paedophile measures with that lot hanging around your neck must be tough sledding. I'm beginning to see Theresa's point. Wolves guarding henhouses.

Time for a spring-clean, obviously. But where's the janitor?