"too much power in the hands of the wrong people for the wrong reasons."
Absolutely.
The problem of trying to lay the blame at door of one particular Pope, or Archbishop, or priest, is that it has been going on for so long. I don't know if the Ryan Report restricted itself to any particular time frame, but those who saw the film 'Song For A Raggy Boy' based on Patrick Galvin's autobiographical trilogy, will know that similar events were taking place at least as far back as the end of the 1930s, and almost certainly further back than that.
The physical brutality that took place in these institutions has hardly been touched on, though there have been several heart-rending personal accounts in the letter pages of the Irish Times.
A local singer friend here, now in her mid-eighties, was beaten so severely around the head by a priest when she was in her teens that her eardrum burst and she permanently lost the use of that ear. Her crime - she attended a house dance. Unbelieveably, the church objected to these dances - which took place in people's homes and in the open air at specially designated crossroads - on the grounds that men and women attending such events unsupervised would be open to 'temptations of the flesh'.
All of these events can be traced directly to an abuse of power and have nothing to do with sexuality.
Jim Carroll