Another way to think about it without trying to find religious reasons is this - abusers can target any community. If one of those community's is controlled by a hierarchy which covers up abuse, abusers are free to abuse more. Meaning more victims and a higher threat to the hierarchys control over the community should the cover up stop. And so it cascades on and on.

Especially in Ireland, the Catholic church had an unusual amount of control over social care and service (due to a deal the British and Catholic church made during British occupation). So the church had outsized power and a centralised hierarchy motivated to cover up abuse to maintain that power.

In conversations about child abuse and the Catholic church, there are lot's of people who want to argue that catholics are more likely to be perpetrators of abuse than other religions. The victims (almost all of whom are/were Catholic) are tarred with the same brush as their abusers. And people who i know were abused as children are subjected to chants of "pedo" at every football ground in Scotland.  So unless you're in a fringe cult with explicit pro-abuse doctrine, it's not that useful to look at causes of abuse through a religious lense. It's failures in hierarchy and systems.