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“... But in any case, priest (sic) are not Scripturally worthy of being called “father” even as a formal title, any more than Mormon elders are worthy to be called that...”

Oh, yes they are.

They have chosen a life like a eunich as Jesus mentioned.
They have SACRIFICED the pleasures and beauty and blessings of Matrimony for the sake of fathering SPIRITUAL children in Christ.

That is unique far beyond the Jewish leaders whom Jesus was referring to as well as far beyond various priesthoods and elders of false religions.

They have chosen a life like a

eunich as Jesus mentioned.
They have SACRIFICED the pleasures and beauty and blessings of Matrimony for the sake of fathering
SPIRITUAL children in Christ.

And here I thought that it was The Father (who is) in Heaven who adopts us as His own.

Paraphrasing here amplification of the part of John 3:5, the portion in which Jesus himself provided indication any who would enter His Father's kingdom, concerned with about just where "our father" HAD TO BE located at, in order to enter into that Kingdom;

"...born again/from above/from the top/..."

These other guys (not the Father in Heaven) you were talking about...
Did they kill Kenny, too?

The [........!] (oh, nevermind...)

but thanks for the prayers, anyway...

Oh, yes they are.

Rome left this in the BOOK just to cause fights between us:

Matthew 23:8-10
But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ.

Oh, yes they are. They have chosen a life like a eunich as Jesus mentioned. They have SACRIFICED the pleasures and beauty and blessings of Matrimony for the sake of fathering SPIRITUAL children in Christ.

THAT does not make a person more holy or more worthy than any other person on the planet.

Sex is NOT bad that *giving it up* is something admirable.

Being a eunuch was always considered a curse in Scripture.

NOTHING to brag on.

That is unique far beyond the Jewish leaders whom Jesus was referring to as well as far beyond various priesthoods and elders of false religions.

So what? It proves nothing.

OTOH, we have Scripture that tells us about forbidding to marry.

1 Timothy 4:1-5 Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.

Oh, yes they are. They have chosen a life like a eunich as Jesus mentioned. They have SACRIFICED the pleasures and beauty and blessings of Matrimony for the sake of fathering SPIRITUAL children in Christ. That is unique far beyond the Jewish leaders whom Jesus was referring to as well as far beyond various priesthoods and elders of false religions.

Wrong:

Due to her erroneous understanding of the Lord's Supper (“Eucharist”), Catholicism (by the end of the 2nd century or later) came to consider NT pastors to be a distinctive sacerdotal class of clergy, distinctively called “priests” (which the RC Douay Rheims Bible inconsistently calls them: Acts 20:17; Titus 1:5), and sometimes “episkopos,”), but which the Holy Spirit never does. For the word which the Holy Spirit distinctively uses for priests *, is “hiereus” or “archiereus (over 280 times total, mainly as the latter)” (Heb. 4:15; 10:11) and is never used for NT pastors. Nor do the words presbuteros (senior/elder) or episkopos (superintendent/overseer) - which He does use for NT pastors (over 60 times) - mean "priest." Neither the Hebrew word, "ko^he^n," nor the Greek word "hiereus," or the Latin word "sacerdotes" for priest have any essential connection to the Greek word presbyteros. It follows that the Latin word "sacerdos" which corresponds to priest has no morphological or lingual relationship with the Latin word for “presbyter” (for which statements and certain others I rely on the knowledge of others, by God's grace). Nor are presbuteros or episkopos described as having a unique sacrificial function, and hiereus (as archiereus=chief priests) is used in distinction to elders in such places as Lk. 22:66; Acts 22:5.

Jewish elders (Hebrew "zaqen") as a body existed before the priesthood of Levitical priests (Hebrew "kohen"), most likely as heads of household or clans, and being an elder did not necessarily make one a Levitical priest (Ex. 3:16,18, 18:12; 19:7; 24:1; Num. 11:6; Dt. 21:2; 22:5-7; 31:9,28; 32:7; Josh. 23:2; 2Chron. 5:4; Lam. 1:9; cf. Mt. 21:13; 26:47) or a high priest, offering both gifts and sacrifices for sins. (Heb. 5:1) While elders exercise could some priestly functions such as praying and laying hands on sacrifices, yet unlike presbuteros and episkopos, elders and priest were not the same in language or in distinctive function. Like very young Samuel, one could be a kohen/priest without being an zaqen/elder, and one could be a elder without formally being a priest, whose primary function was to offer expiatory sacrifices for the people.

The Catholic use of "priest" for what Scripture calls presbyteros/elder is defended by the use of an etymological fallacy since "priest" evolved from "presbyteros, if with uncertainty," with presbyteros being considered and called priests early on, based on Latin biblical and ecclesiastical language, and who were later referred to in old English (around 700 to 1000 AD) as "preostas" or "preost," and finally resulting in the modern English "priest," thereby losing the distinction the Holy Spirit provided by never using the distinctive term of hiereus for NT presbuteros, or describing as them as a distinctive sacerdotal class of believers.

However, etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and evolving changes in form and meaning. over time, but etymologies are not definitions (examples: "cute" used to mean bow-legged; "bully" originally meant darling or sweetheart; "Nice" originally meant stupid or foolish; "counterfeit" used to mean a legitimate copy; "egregious" originally connoted eminent or admirable). The etymological fallacy here is that of erroneously holding that the present-day meaning of a word or phrase should necessarily essentially be the same as its original or historical meaning. Since presbyteros incorrectly evolved into priest (and were assigned an imposed unique sacerdotal function) therefore it is erroneously considered to be valid to distinctively use the same title for OT priests as for NT pastors, despite the Holy Spirit never doing so and the lack of unique sacerdotal distinction for NT presbyteros.

All believers are called to sacrifice (Rm. 12:1; 15:16; Phil. 2:17; 4:18; Heb. 13:15,16; cf. 9:9) and all constitute the only priesthood (hieráteuma) in the NT church, that of all believers, (1Pt. 2:5,9; Re 1:6; 5:10; 20:6). But nowhere are NT pastors distinctively titled hiereus, and the idea of the NT presbuteros being a distintive class titled "hiereus" was a later development, with an imposed functional equivalence, supposing NT presbyteros engaged in a unique sacrificial ministry as their primary function.

Catholic writer Greg Dues in "Catholic Customs & Traditions, a popular guide," states, "Priesthood as we know it in the Catholic church was unheard of during the first generation of Christianity, because at that time priesthood was still associated with animal sacrifices in both the Jewish and pagan religions."

"When the Eucharist came to be regarded as a sacrifice [after Rome's theology], the role of the bishop took on a priestly dimension. By the third century bishops were considered priests. Presbyters or elders sometimes substituted for the bishop at the Eucharist. By the end of the third century people all over were using the title 'priest' (hierus in Greek and sacerdos in Latin) for whoever presided at the Eucharist." (http://books.google.com/books?id=ajZ_aR-VXn8C&source=gbs_navlinks_s)

And R. J. Grigaitis (O.F.S.) (while yet trying to defend the use of priest), reveals, "The Greek word for this office is ‘?e?e?? (hiereus), which can be literally translated into Latin as sacerdos. First century Christians [such as the inspired writers] felt that their special type of hiereus (sacerdos) was so removed from the original that they gave it a new name, presbuteros (presbyter). Unfortunately, sacerdos didn't evolve into an English word, but the word priest [from old English "preost"] took on its definition." (http://grigaitis.net/weekly/2007/2007-04-27.html)

In response to a query on this issue, the web site of International Standard Version (not my preferred translation) states,

No Greek lexicons or other scholarly sources suggest that "presbyteros" means "priest" instead of "elder". The Greek word is equivalent to the Hebrew ZAQEN, which means "elder", and not priest. You can see the ZAQENIM described in Exodus 18:21-22 using some of the same equivalent Hebrew terms as Paul uses in the GK of 1&2 Timothy and Titus. Note that the ZAQENIM are NOT priests (i.e., from the tribe of Levi) but are rather men of distinctive maturity that qualifies them for ministerial roles among the people.

Therefore the NT equivalent of the ZAQENIM cannot be the Levitical priests. The Greek "presbyteros" (literally, the comparative of the Greek word for "old" and therefore translated as "one who is older") thus describes the character qualities of the "episkopos". The term "elder" would therefore appear to describe the character, while the term "overseer" (for that is the literal rendering of "episkopos") connotes the job description.

To sum up, far from obfuscating the meaning of "presbyteros", our rendering of "elder" most closely associates the original Greek term with its OT counterpart, the ZAQENIM. ...we would also question the fundamental assumption that you bring up in your last observation, i.e., that "the church has always had priests among its ordained clergy". We can find no documentation of that claim. ( http://isvbible.com/catacombs/elders.htm)