Less than two percent??? At it's apex, the USCCB's John Jay Study reported that 4% of all (US) priests serving from 1950 until 2002 were accused of abuse. The John Jay study puts real numbers on that percentage:
The study said that 4,392 clergymen—almost all priests—were accused of abusing 10,667 people, with 75 percent of the incidents taking place between 1960 and 1984. During the same time frame there were 109,694 priests, it said........68 percent of the allegations were made against priests ordained between 1950 and 1979, while priests ordained after 1979 accounted for 10.7 percent of the allegations.
For the entire 52-year period "the problem was indeed widespread and affected more than 95 percent of the dioceses and approximately 60 percent of religious communities," said the study.
[Faithful Departed author Philip] Lawler points out that while less than five percent of American priests have been accused of sexual abuse, some two-thirds of our bishops were apparently complicit in cover-ups. The real scandal isn't the sick excesses of a few dozen pedophiles, or even the hundreds of priests who had affairs with teenage boys -- the bulk of abuse cases. No, according to Lawler, it is the malfeasance of wealthy, powerful, and evidently worldly men who fill the thrones -- but not the shoes -- of the apostles. In case after case, we read in their correspondence, in the records of their soulless, bureaucratic responses to victims of psychic torture and spiritual betrayal, these bishops' prime concern was to save the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar and mortgages. Ironically, their lack of a supernatural concern for souls is precisely what cost them so much money in the end.
-- from the thread Kneeling Before the World
1. The statement in the article that "......sexual abusers in general account for less than 2 percent of Catholic priests" makes no reference to the USA. It could be a global figure. The figure of 4% cited in the John Jay report pertains to the US.
Is it possible that clerical abuse was more widespread in the US than in other parts of the world? Not only possible, but likely.
2. The John Jay figures document accusations of abuse. Not the same thing as guilt.