You are putting words in my mouth. I'm not saying that if someone wants to be celibate that that is wrong. I'm saying that celibacy should be optional for the priesthood. In fact I will go as far to say that to require it to enter the priesthood is immoral because you are excluding a vast amount of highly qualified individuals who would be better than the current crop of gay boys.
The point is no one is forcing a man to be a priest. That is where the choice lies. Not once you become a priest. You seem to want to define the role of priest as you want, which is not how the Church operates. You seem to admire and study history, which is good. You should then know that, before the "Reformation", it was never acceptable to presume one could know better than the Church.
Granted there wasn't preistly celibacy in the first few hundred years of the Church, but there were many other things that weren't present in the Church in early years, that is present today. The Bible is one of those things too.
We Catholics have a respect and admiration for historical precident, but we aren't bound to it. We believe that the initial deposit of faith continues to be revealed to us today, and thus, our Faith continues to grow, as a mustard plant from a seed.
So back to your original point: "celibacy should be optional for the preisthood [because] you are excluding a vast amount of highly qualified individuals [because of the celibacy rule]."
First of all there's no evidence for that. As I stated before, the fault of these scandals lies in individual people, individual men who seem to have made a wrong choice when entering the priesthood. That doesn't necessarily mean that the vocation itself is somehow wrong. Indeed, you even agree there's nothing wrong with celibacy itself, as long as it's voluntary (right?). But you actually seem to be making the claim I said you could only possibly make, that is, that celibacy is only wrong for PRIESTS! Which really makes no sense, does it? Do you think that ONLY priests should NOT be celibate? If not, then what's the problem with making it a requirement for the priesthood, the priesthood being a VOLUNTARY choice in of itself?
Secondly, there are plenty of married individuals who commit amoral sexual acts, who despite that, are "quite qualified" or "educated" in the Faith. The Reverend Haggard comes to mind.