Roman Catholicism Part II: Authority and Priesthood

In my previous article on Romanism, I began by noting that during this time of great spiritual and cultural crisis in the West, with many people looking once again to the resources of Christianity for answers, some are wondering if Rome, with its papal authority, magisterium, and venerable history in Europe, holds the answers to the civilizational calamity of the moment. In this short series of articles, I am exploring this question and some of the problems that arise for the peoples of the Anglosphere when dealing with Rome’s conception of socio-cultural and political order – that is, of the nature of society, church, and state, and the Christian teaching concerning the kingdom of God.

In Part One, I looked at Rome’s conflation of the church with the state and the identification of the church institute with the Kingdom of God. In this article, I want to explore the related issues of authority and mediation as they are thought to adhere in the Roman view of priesthood.

Certainly, before we can begin to understand the idea of an infallible authority accorded to the office of the Pope when speaking ‘ex-cathedra’ (a subject I will address in the next article), it is necessary to first grasp something of the Romanist view of priesthood, since the term ‘Pope’ is simply the name for the most senior bishop in the sacerdotal hierarchy of the Papist church. The received Romanist view of priesthood was defined by the Council of Trent and reiterated at the Second Vatican Council, and so, in order to fairly represent the position, I interact with the writings of Pope Benedict XVI on the subject.

Sacred and Secular

Although the Roman church recognises that all Christians are, in an important sense, servants of God, it does not acknowledge the fullness of the biblical teaching concerning God’s people as a ‘kingdom of priests’ unto God and therefore equivocates regarding a genuine priesthood of all true believers (1 Peter 2:9; Rom. 12:1). This is because the Romanist worldview draws through all of reality a definitive secular-sacred divide in the name of a philosophical and theological distinction between nature and grace. On this dualistic view, there is a radical disjuncture between the sacred and profane, between the cultic rites and functions of the instituted church and all other areas of life. The priest’s ministry essentially operates within the realm of the sacred (that of grace), whereas everybody else who serves God outside of Holy Orders operates within the secular realm (that of nature). As such, the so-called ‘layperson’ is not a true priest in the Roman church except in a metaphorical or figurative sense, since they have no power or anointing for celebrating the rite of Mass – a power conferred only by Roman bishops in supposed continuity with the apostle Peter.

By contrast, within the reformational Christian tradition, all true believers constitute a holy priesthood offering the spiritual ‘sacrifices’ of their own bodies (1 Pt. 2:4-5; Rom. 12:1), works of mercy (Heb. 13:16; Phil. 4:18), and praise and prayer (Heb. 13:15; Ps. 141:2; Rev. 8:3-4), along with the spreading of the good news of Christ in all of life (Rom. 15:16). Within Roman Catholicism however, priesthood is a special kind of mediatorial position existing through the institutional life of the church. This intercessory function is held by a select few through whom an ongoing ‘sacrifice’ is being offered on behalf of the people during the rite of Mass, and in whom a unique authority is vested within a strict hierarchy.

Authority and Priesthood

Ordination to this role, accordingly, is itself considered a sacrament whereby the ordained priest becomes a living instrument of Christ. Pope Benedict XVI draws out the implications:

For this reason, no human being can declare himself a priest; for this reason, too, no community can promote a person to this ministry by its own decree. Only from the sacrament, which belongs to God, can priesthood be received…

…Any community that would set itself up as church or as ecclesial community would thereby destroy the dialogical mystery of revelation and the gift of grace, which is always received from an “other,” from outside.[i]

This is vital for understanding both authority and priesthood in Romanism, just as it helps us see why Rome both misunderstands and delegitimizes the ministers of Protestant churches that are heirs of the Reformation and are appointed to the pastoral office by their communities. For Rome, no Protestant minister has received the Sacrament of Holy Orders, which, they claim, confers priesthood from God and thus cannot rightly celebrate the Eucharist (communion). For the papacy, they stand outside the apostolic succession. But consider that the heirs of the Reformation do not recognize their church office-bearers as ‘priests’ in any way other than the manner in which every true member of the Christian church is to be considered a priest. This is because from the evangelical standpoint, the pastoral calling in the body of Christ is not mediatorial for the imparting of grace, ‘For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5). Here there is only one ‘high priest of our confession’ (Heb. 3:2) and it is not the Roman Pontiff claiming a dialogical mystery of revelation and gift of grace to confer priesthood.

For Pope Benedict and the Romanist tradition, the priesthood is another sacrament and thereby a necessary institution for man’s relationship to God and reception of grace. The internal logic of the position is that, since the apostles were directly associated with Christ and his mission (whose cross was ‘sacramental’) and were commissioned by him with power and authority, their role and function were also ‘sacramental’ – that is, for imparting divine grace. They, in their turn, directly passed this alleged sacrament of priesthood to the presbyters in the early church. And so, only those within the ostensible apostolic succession (in which Rome includes the Eastern Orthodox tradition) truly receive the sacrament of priesthood from the apostle who received it from Christ. One can easily see how this view of priesthood, amongst other things, seeks to proscribe and delegitimize all churches outside of Romanism (and Eastern Orthodoxy), whilst granting unique prestige and authority to the papacy as the agency of divine grace – especially as communicated within the ‘Host’ (i.e., the bread) consecrated by the priest in a hierarchy of bishops.

This sacramental authority of the Roman priest to impart and dispense grace is unequivocally asserted by Pope Benedict:

This means that now the servant can, under the sacred sign, give what he could never give on his own. In fact, he can give the Holy Spirit, absolve from sins, make present the sacrifice of Christ and Christ himself in his sacred body and blood, which are all rights reserved to God that no man can acquire by himself or by delegation from any community.[ii]

For Rome, the priest enjoys a mysterious ontological union with Christ, transcending that of the ordinary Christian.[iii] Again, the unequivocal implication is that outside of the hierarchy of Rome, reformational churches exercise an illegitimate authority – though again, the reformational and evangelical tradition does not claim for its ministers the inherent power to absolve from sin or make present Christ’s body, blood and sacrifice, since the Protestant tradition reserves all those mercies to the Lord Jesus Christ himself, through the person of the Holy Spirit, who made his sacrifice for sin once for all as our High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek and forever lives to intercede for us (Heb. 7:24-27).

Temple and Synagogue

Consequently, for the papacy, the Romanist priesthood is a theological continuation of the Aaronic order of the Older Testament, with the Roman church functioning as the new Temple in which its priests serve. Though affirming that, because of the resurrection, Christ is the living Temple and new sacrifice, Rome insists that this sacrifice continues today in the Roman church by its priests, week after week, in the rite of Mass. As Pope Benedict writes:

The fullness of the Christian “yes” counters any attempt to reduce the church to the synagogue. This is the only way to understand fully and in depth the ministry of the apostolic succession. In this way, we should not feel ashamed or make any excuses for affirming that, yes, the priesthood of the church continues and renews the priesthood of the Old Testament…[iv]

Thus, as far as the papacy is concerned, the Reformation sought to reduce the church from this status of a temple with weekly sacrifice, to the image of a synagogue – that is, simply meeting, Word, and prayer. For Rome, this is an historicist reading of scripture that banishes priesthood and sacrifice to the past.[v] This is a false claim insofar as the reformational churches unequivocally affirm that God’s people are being built together, by the Holy Spirit, into a new living temple in which Christ is the chief cornerstone (1 Pt. 2:3-10). Because God is very present with His people by the Spirit, Christ having gone through the curtain (Heb. 6:19-20), the gathering of the church as an assembly of believers is more than simply meeting for Word and prayer – indeed, we are His sanctuary individually and corporately (1 Cor. 3:16-17) as we minister in worship in the very presence of Christ himself. This includes hearing God speak through his Word, entering his courts with prayer and praise, and participating in communion where, in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice till he comes, we renew covenant with God in repentance and faith.

The key difference is that, for the reformational churches, Christ alone is our high priest and mediator, enabling us to approach the throne of grace directly and with boldness (Heb. 4:16). No man can stand between us and God as priestly mediator except the man Christ Jesus. And his sacrifice is not reenacted week after week by a new priesthood authorized to dispense grace on Christ’s behalf, but has been made once for all, and Christ himself ever intercedes for us (Heb. 7:24-27; 9:23-26).

The old priesthood that required men to ‘stand in’ for other men in the presence of God has aged and vanished away through fulfillment in Christ (Heb. 8:13). As such, the Newer Testament uses different words for elder (presbuteros) and priest (hiereus). And the book of Hebrews is clear throughout that only Christ exercises a mediatorial priesthood before God for man’s salvation. Moreover, the Apostles were sent out to preach, baptize, and teach (Matt. 28:16-20), but nothing is said about offering sacrifices or establishing a sacerdotal ministry. The altar of sacrament simply does not exist in the New Testament.

Bishops and Authority

The mediatorial authority and power claimed by the Romanist priesthood exist and function within a strict hierarchical structure in which the bishops play a key role because Rome’s sacramental vision of the Christian life is an essentially ecclesial reality. Pope Benedict describes the nature of the bond of the priest to their bishop:

They [the priests] represent him [the bishop], act in his name, and receive their mission from him. The great Christological obedience, which reverses Adam’s disobedience, is concretized in ecclesial obedience, which, for the priest, means obedience to his own bishop…obedience to one’s bishop always transcends the local church: it is a catholic obedience. The bishop is obeyed because he represents the universal church in this specific place…To obey Christ means to obey his body, to obey him in his body.[vi]

The force of that statement is vitally important for our understanding of Romanism. The claim here is that Christ’s obedience, which reverses the results of the fall, is only made effectual for man in obedience to the Roman church as the true body of Christ, expressed by the priest in obedience to the bishop, who in turn submits to papal authority. If this is true for the priest, how much more for the ordinary Christian! By asserting that obedience to Christ is obedience to the bishop, which is to say to the church institute, the ecclesiasticization of life is complete and the foundation laid for the creation of an infallible authority to govern men other than the Word of God.

This is entirely logical if there remains a high priest on earth, a vicar of Christ, who sits on the ‘throne’ of Peter atop a priestly hierarchy mirroring that of the Older Testament – an institutional priesthood that mediates man’s relationship to God himself. No wonder that in the medieval world, even kings and rulers were terrified by the threat of excommunication from the Roman church, for by its rites alone and shielded within its fold, could man be saved from sin by the administrations and sacrifices of the agency of grace in the fallen world of nature.

 

[i] Pope Benedict XVI, The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His Central Writings and Speeches, ed. John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 297, 299

[ii] Ibid., p. 311

[iii] Ibid., p. 315

[iv] Ibid, p. 318

[v] Ibid, p. 317

[vi] Ibid, p. 313-314