[WS:] I do not think it was their goal. Their goal was to split the labor movement and weaken it vis a vis the capitalists as well as to counter socialist organizing. You can see that by comparing countries with strong organized religion, such as the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain or Portugal, where socialists had at best a limited success, and those with weak religion (e.g. Sweden where the Catholic church was virtually non-existent, and the Lutheran church was subdued by the crown and incorporated into the state bureaucracy) were socialists were very successful in labor organizing.
The whole concept of "subsidiarity" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity that has been guided welfare policies of Western Europe and now the EU is based on the Catholic doctrine of the "primacy" of the family and organized religion in responding to social welfare needs - which was directed against the socialist demand for the direct involvement of the state.
If you conceptualize organized religion primarily as an alternative to secular organizations, such as unions, political party or even government, then you are right that religions failed to provide such as an alternative. But I do not think it is a correct conceptualization. The role of the organized religion has always been more that of a parasite or a leech that attaches itself to friendly secular structures, typically authoritarian, sponges off resources of that symbiosis, and in exchange rendering certain services to the secular structures, such as legitimating them, pacifying the populace, and subverting any organized attempts to unseat these authoritarian secular institutions.
Wojtek