[Xantar]

Game, I think you're contradicting yourself a little bit. As you pointed out, at least part of the problem here is that the Catholic Church has a huge (international) power structure. And that's also the reason why it's better at covering up scandals than any other religion. In my own Buddhist practice, if the monk that my family works with abuses children, no elder monk will come by to hide him away in a monastery or swap him out with another monk because there is no elder monk at all. I'm not not going to claim to have a comprehensive knowledge of religions, but of the ones I know of, none has a central command authority whom everybody is supposed to answer to. Religious practice is generally very local.

If you look through the news, you can actually find plenty of cases of priests or monks of various religions being caught going to strip clubs, driving while drunk, having affairs and all kinds of other things. I repeat: they are caught. Because there is nobody to hide them away. And when something like that happens, it's considered notable but not a huge scandal because there has been no conspiracy to cover up the crime.