I'm personally not convinced by the often exerted narrative that celibacy leads to pedophilia. It seems to me that a more likely explanation is that someone with a certain inclination would seek out a job (perhaps even subconsciously) that may offer him a chance to get closer to living out that inclination.

On the priest side the celibacy requirement probably attracts a certain type. Then there is the power over others angle which isn't limited to churches. The combination of factors stack on each other.

On the institutional side its the well known and agreed upon siege mentality where the church tries to protect itself out of arrogance and a probably accurate assessment that its enemies want to use and manipulate this for political gain.

Also much less talked about is the church's former policies were partially due to a misguided sense of mercy. If the church really did come down as hard and preemptively as people now want it to from the very beginning the world would probably be whining about how intolerant and cruel they were to potential and defrocked priests.

It's probably a bit of both. Homosexuality is, at least stereotypically, more common in environments where there are no other options, like sailing ships and prisons, even in cultures where it is strongly taboo. It's a small leap to say the same could apply to paedophilia.

I wonder if there's value in seperating homosexuality, the sexual preference/identity, from the act - I feel like in many of those "no other options" scenarios there probably wouldn't be a lot of identifying as homosexual, nor a preference for homosexual acts, but instead as acts of sexual pragmatism.

There are other options. It's a public secret that "kitchen helpers" of priests in Poland are often also their lovers. As long as they are adult and agreed voluntarily to such relationship I don't mind, even if it's highly hypocritical.

Religion has no bearing in this, it's the church who has been the facilitator, and the church is made of regular people.

Priests have sexual needs, that's understandable, but they could satisfy them without victimizing others. The line is harming someone, specially if they are defenseless. The beliefs of the perpetrators don't enter the equation.

You can't say religion has no bearing in this, as it quite literally says that Priests can't have a wife.

It seems entirely predictable to me that this drives selecting folks for these positions that don't want wives, but want something else.

You could apply the same reasoning to scientology.

I'm not saying it's relligion's fault. It's just that things rarely have a single clearly defined reason. Some correlations exist.