That's not really the cause. It is more like grease to ease the egress when someone already looking for the exit for other reasons needs an easy excuse. Ireland's Catholicism was already weakened by various ideological currents and social engineering that swept across the country, many facilitated by powerful, shall we say, American corporate interest and investment. Living the Catholic faith is demanding and utterly unappealing to those who've been made slaves to their deranged passions. Not so coincidentally, those who are slaves to their passions are easier to control. I leave the inference to be made here as an exercise for the reader.
The British colonization of Ireland was brutal, but it was corporeal. The spiritual colonization today, materially prosperous and comfortable, destroys the soul.
I think it's probably got something to do with it. Plenty of non-Catholic denominations and other faiths have had similar abuse scandals, and in the public consciousness the crimes of Catholic priests get filed under "why religion is bad" as much as "why Catholicism is bad".
Well, it's certainly not helping with the recruiting of younger people into that particular religion... Today's 80 year olds in the church probably joined 60-75 years ago.
Synagogues are giving the Catholics a run for their money. Ask yourself why the shorim are allowed to completely cover up all the abuse inside the orthodox community?
What? Comparing the size and scale of the Catholic church, and the centralized system of protecting known sex abusers, to a small fraction of a tiny religious group is absurd.
Yes, but it also is besides the point. People gladly attack the Catholic Church and they do so with a kind of seething hatred or blind ignorance that allows them to assign to the Church a unique status in this regard. But the fact is that child abuse[0] is or was present in all institutions that deal with children, both religious and secular. In fact, the rate of abusive priests in the Church (estimated to be about 4%) is average or below the rates elsewhere, especially public schools where it is something like 10% among staff, last I checked.
And I wonder if the parent above knows how protective these Jewish communities are of their own. They do not like to involve the state in their affairs.
So none of this is unique or even extraordinarily present in the Catholic Church.
[0] And by "child abuse", certainly in the Church, it is best described as a homosexual ephebophilia scandal. That is, 80% of abuse victims were post-pubescent teenage males.
Ireland used to be the most Catholic nation in the world; not anymore. Their faith was obliterated by the sex abuse scandal.