It's true that high-up officials in the catholic church covered up for incidents of paedophilia multiple times, but if you think they're the first religion to have authorities do shady shit to cover up friends you are sorely mistaken. At the very least, it isn't the religion itself that encouraged those incidents to happen but shitty practitioners of it, we don't use the ISIS imams, the worst Imam to the western imagination, as the example of note when describing islamic practitioners most of the time. And I've heard some terrible things about what corrupt Sikhs are able to accomplish in india with the devout nature of the followers blinding them to their wrongdoing.
The truth is, no matter what institution, religious or not, the more power it accumulates the more liable corruption is to appear, because power appeals to the corrupt and corruption appeals to the powerful. Although I will say, that Islam is particularly liable to attract corruption because it is a combination of church and state. Authority in politics, much like authority in religion, appears to attract corruption and corrupt people, when combined together it seems to me like the effect is massively exacerbated.