the catholic church is like a big organisation or business.
These organisations have a vested, collective interest to preserve the business or organisation – a kind of hive mentatlity that puts the need of "the business" or "the church" or "the masons" before the needs of the individual
there was an interesting documentary a few years ago about big business , and how if you look at the behaviour of the business in the same way you would look at a human, your conclusion would be that the business is a ruthless psychopath
you can apply the same argument to large religeous organisations – like the catholic church, scientologists etc.