A ringing defense of priesthood

Sohran Ahmari has a piece today at the Catholic Herald into which he launches by describing a Catholic men's gathering at Cape Cod that went like this:

They kicked things off with some hiking, they relaxed by a fireplace, they lunched. Then they read the Bible and “headed into the kitchen and gathered around a table, a processional provided with some liturgical oomph as Peter opened his mobile phone [and] played the ‘Glory Be’ he created by layering multiple recordings of his own voice”. But oops: “We forgot to plan a sign of peace. Vincent reminded us, and there followed 72 hugs.” Eventually, they performed a pseudo-consecration and took something like Communion. Then they went home.

After some more fleshing out of the contour of his argument, he makes this point:

Many faithful Catholics would no doubt agree that clericalism, in the pejorative sense of a privileged and unaccountable ecclesiastical class, bears some of the blame. But it doesn’t follow that Catholic priests should be “abolished”, any more than parents, teachers and the other population groups that include abusers.

Why is priesthood such an indispensable feature of Christianity?

Jesus’s main business is sacrifice, giving up his body and shedding his blood on the Cross for the redemption of humankind.

Sacri-fice (literally, “sacred work”) by definition requires a priesthood. Pagan civilisations the world over, seeking divine favours and expiation of sins, designated priests to carry out this important work, often in unspeakably gruesome ways. The people of Israel, to whom the one God first made himself known, also performed sacrifices. All those rams and heifers and lambs and turtledoves of the Old Testaments didn’t offer themselves on the altar; someone had to do it, a class of people set aside for God, the descendants of Aaron and the tribe of Levi.

Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled all sacrifice by making of himself the everlasting offering. As St Paul puts it in the Letter to the Hebrews (2:17), “he had to be made like his brethren in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and high priest in service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people.”

Before making his expiation, Jesus Christ designated a class of people, all of them men, to commemorate his sacrifice and allow us to participate in it (Matthew 26:26-28). He also charged these men to teach and baptise all nations (Matthew 28:19) and granted them authority to forgive or retain sins (John 20:23; Matthew 16:19). A male priesthood, one that depended totally on the one high priesthood of Jesus, thus took form while he was still fulfilling his public ministry on earth.

It’s thus error bordering on dishonesty for Carroll to claim that the origins of “clericalism” – by which, again, he means the priesthood itself – “lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organisational charts of the late Roman Empire”. Yes, the Catholic Church inherited some of the governance structures and forms of imperial Rome, but there is nothing inherently Roman about the celibate priesthood. And those Roman structures which the Church appropriated she transfigured and repurposed, as she always does, redirecting them to the salvation of souls.

Why has the Church survived countless splinterings and scandals for two millennia? Because, as Sohrabi says, there's always been a critical mass of priests who understood the real nature of their authority and bravely safeguarded it.

This isn't just a Catholic concern, by the way. The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an evangelical organization, focuses much of its energies on defending the role of preacher as necessarily being filled by a man.

It's bracing, to be sure, to take an unflinching look at orthodox Christian doctrine. But it doesn't go away just because a given culture mocks and belittles it and tries to stamp it out. That's impossible to do to the Truth.