I don’t know the answer and have asked it before.
When was the decision made that Catholic Priests are to be celibate and not allowed to marry or have a family, when damn near every other religion allows their ‘clergy’ to do it?
I had heard it was during the Plague or something like that.
The tradition of clerical continence developed into a practice of clerical celibacy (ordaining only unmarried men) from the 11th century onward among Latin Church Catholics.
The universal requirement to celibacy was imposed upon the clergy with force in 1123 and again in 1139. But those decrees reflected a much longer tradition in the Church in which the self-imposed discipline of asceticism – including sexual continence, poverty and abstinence – became the defining characteristics of piety, and of the priesthood.
Note that this was in response to the high middle ages question of the latter Anglicans “vicar’s wife must be held to a higher standard “