Short answer: No, Christianity and the Catholic church are not a cover organization for child abuse.

However …

Historically and currently, Christian denominations, especially the fundamentalist ones, promote and justify abusive child rearing practices as being religiously mandated. This, in turn, allows child sexual predators to hide in plain sight because children are given no recourse to question, resist, defy, or report adults in their lives that transgress against their bodily autonomy. The transgression itself, just short of overt sexual abuse, is considered a parental and adult “right.”

I’ll give examples from my own life. My father used to physically whip me and my two siblings, citing the “spare the rod, spoil the child” biblical tenet.  When he was feeling “affectionate,” he would often tickle us past our comfort level and think it was okay because we were involuntarily laughing (though screaming and crying “No!” at the same time). Furthermore, he was often emotionally incestuous with us, demanding hugs we couldn’t say no to “because he was our father and he loved us.” Honestly, those hugs were an inappropriate salve for the adult affection he wasn’t getting after my mother divorced him.

Those hugs always felt gross because there was no option of refusing them. If my dad wanted hugs, he was getting them regardless of how we felt. When you remove children’s right to bodily autonomy, they have no real choice about what happens to them plus they are given no real tools to resist or call out inappropriate adult behavior. Fundamentalist Christianity preaches, condones, and practices the idea that children are the property of their parents. Therefore, it’s a natural place for child predators and child abusers to gravitate towards and thrive within.

But Christianity as a whole isn’t a cover organization like a mob front. It doesn’t have to be. If spanking children was put to a referendum, it would win hands down as “parental rights” in the United States (even though doing the same thing to adults is correctly identified as assault). Childism is one of the last few prejudices that is [1] currently safe to have and [2] relatively unchallenged. Some of us promote children’s human rights, regardless.