WASHINGTON – Researchers hired by the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops to determine the causes of the sex crisis that convulsed the church dismissed all the usual suspects:

Few of the offenders were pedophiles. The abusers were not acting on their homosexuality. Mandatory celibacy did not turn clerics into molesters.

Instead, most of the priest-offenders came from seminary classes of the 1940s and 1950s who were not properly trained to confront the upheavals of the 1960s, when behavioral norms were upended and crime in the United States spiked, the researchers said.

“There’s no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society,” said Karen Terry, principal investigator for the report, at a news conference Wednesday.

The analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was the last of three studies authorized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when the scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston.

The findings contained both good and bad news for a church hierarchy beaten down by years of criticism.

Church leaders hoped to learn how dioceses could identify offenders before they acted. Researchers, however, said they could find no single cause of the abuse and said molesters generally haven’t specialized in victims by age or gender.

The study’s authors said that U.S. bishops did, in fact, begin to respond to molestation cases starting in the 1980s as they learned the scope of the problem. Yet, until recent years, after victims began their advocacy, church leaders were more concerned with rehabilitating priests than with helping victims.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as “garbage in, garbage out” because the bishops paid for much of the $1.8 million study, along with Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Terry insisted the findings were independent. Researchers spoke with victims and their advocates, conducted surveys of bishops and diocesan officials who work with victims, and reviewed thousands of records.

The authors said they found no “psychological characteristics” or “developmental histories” that distinguished guilty priests from clergy who did not molest children.

The majority of abusive priests were instead what social scientists call “generalists” – meaning offenders who did not specialize in a type of victim by age or gender or other characteristics.

Only a tiny percentage of the accused priests – less than 5 percent – could be technically defined as pedophiles, meaning adults with a primary, intense attraction to children who have not yet gone through puberty.

About 80 percent of the more than 15,700 people who said they had been abused since 1950 were male. Catholics upset by the presence of gays in seminaries blamed them for the scandal, but the John Jay researchers said that the offenders victimized boys mainly because clergy had greater access to them.

“We looked at behavior of men before they entered seminary, in seminary and once they were ordained,” Terry said. “Those who participated in same-sex behavior were not significantly more likely to abuse children than men who had not had that same-sex behavior.”

The researchers called the crisis “history.” They found abuse claims peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness about molestation. Most of the hundreds of claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago by adults who have only recently come forward.