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Notes -
Many Roman Catholic high schools were almost exclusively staffed by priests back in the day, so for the age range in which most of the abuse occurred, their level of access was identical. It was also common for priests to help run orphanages, institutions for troubled youth, boarding schools, youth camps, etc., giving those priests 24/7 access to kids. Most priests also have regular contact with child and teen altar servers still to this day, and it used to be unremarkable for priests to go on unsupervised trips and retreats with select male altar servers in order to help groom them for the priesthood. There were also plenty of cases of priests unofficially adopting youth from unstable homes—in some cases legitimately and in others just to abuse them. All that to say, while any individual priest might not have had as much access to kids as teachers do, there were plenty of cases where they had as much access or more.
But that's my point. Even pre 2004 the Catholic school systems I'm aware of had between 0-1 priests as teachers.
The only way to compare this is per capita hours/year with children. It's very popular on this forum to say "Public School Teachers!" As a rejoinder every time this is brought up, and it's not convincing at all.
I think the problem there is that you’re looking at the number of priests who worked closely with children in the early 2000s when the scandal broke, but you should be looking at the numbers in the 1960s and 70s when the abuses were most common. Many people don’t realize this, but the number of cases began dropping significantly already by 1985, even though it took another two decades for the coverups to become common knowledge. It was far more common for priests to work full-time outside the parish (as teachers, principals, missionaries, directors of orphanages and charities, etc.) back then, as the church wasn’t suffering from any sort of priest shortage in those days.
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