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Notes -
There’s Marcial Maciel, but he’s an outlier.
I was going to leave well enough alone, but I want to partly push back on your post and partly on FtttG’s. I am working from memory and partial understanding here, and I welcome corrections.
It’s important to note that a supermajority of Roman Catholic sex-abuse cases were sexually active gay priests canoodling with underage teenage boys. There were other cases and other victims, but those set the tone. So part of the coverup came from networks of sexually active gay priests, and some sexually active straight priests, who were already accustomed to covering for each other, and whom an investigation might implicate in adult but compromising sexual activity.
The other factor I can see is the social mores downstream of Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Rome teaches that, ordinarily, salvation is mediated by the church defined by properly ordained hierarchs in communion with Rome. To their credit, many of the hierarchs seem to take this seriously; it’s not just an excuse to gather power. One of the consequences of this is that anything with the potential to alienate someone from that hierarchy is a threat to his soul; even the R.C. bishops not involved in sexual immorality sought to lesson the scandal, in both colloquial and theological senses, and that often looked like a coverup. When Pope Benedict tried to restrict Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s public activities, McCarrick defied him, because – well, what could Benedict do without exposing his misconduct?
To be clear, this does not contradict R.C. ecclesiology, which would take a biblical or theological argument and not a pragmatic one. But I think the scandal is a strong practical argument against clerical celibacy, which led to such an overrepresentation of gay men in Catholic ministry, and which is a discipline imposed by a decision of the Roman Catholic church and not a dogma it is bound to.
It would be straightforwardly consistent with R.C. doctrine for pope and councils to allow the ordination of married men, as is routinely done in the Eastern Rite Catholic churches and occasionally done for married Lutheran and Anglican pastors who convert. I suspect that Rome could also allow already-ordained priests to marry without any change in doctrine, although I am not certain of this, and it may be unwilling to accept the hit to ecumenical relations with the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches. (To my outsider’s eye, Counter-Reformation statements on marriage played pretty fast and loose with the distinction between illicit and invalid, and I am hesitant to draw too many conclusions.)
Before he was revealed to be an abuser, my response to that name would have been, "Who? Quien?"
Otherwise I largely agree with your post, except I think there is good reason to give primacy to celibate priests. The fact that abuse has gone down dramatically since 1985 while the church has kept celibate priests seems to indicated that changing the practice is not needed to reduce molestation.
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