The priest is usually an exceptionally good thinker/reasoner/philosopher – maybe 4-7 standard deviations from the mean.

That's a fairly bold claim to make - you're saying that a priest is somewhere between a 1 in 15,000 and 1 in 400 billion thinker/reasoner/philosopher. My feeling is that that 4 standard deviations from the mean is an upper bound on how good a thinker/reasoner/philosopher you could be in the modern world and still be a priest.