The Scandal of the Catholic Priesthood

Selected Scriptures

 
     Well thank you for coming tonight.  I'm going to put on the hat of a sort of a professor and historian tonight.  I'm so used to getting up and saying take out your Bible, but that wouldn't help since the Catholic priesthood isn't found anywhere in Scripture.  So we can't start there.

     I want to talk about the scandal of the priesthood because obviously we are all made very much aware of the tremendous tragedy that is playing out before us in the immorality of the Catholic priesthood.  And what I would like to do is give you some historical perspective to that, some sense of the bigger picture of what's going on in the priesthood.  In order to do that I have to talk a little bit about the scandal of the priesthood itself.  So it's a bit of a play on words, it's a bit of a pun, if you will, when I talk about the scandal of the priesthood.  I'm not just talking about the current scandal, I'm talking about the whole scandal of the priesthood itself as the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

     Let me give you a little bit of background.  There's a lot that could be said about Roman Catholic theology, we could expose its errors which are numerous.  We could talk about its sources of revelation or divine truth that are outside the pages of Scripture.  Or we could talk about the corruption of the Mass.  We could talk about the idea that Mary is the co-redemptrix which, of course, is really a blasphemous concept.  We could talk about the idea that God is a tough guy and if anybody wants grace out of God, it's only Jesus who could get it from Him, but you can't expect to go to Jesus because He's pretty tough Himself so you need to go to Mary because nobody can resist His mother and so she'll talk to Him and He'll talk to the Father and Mary will get you what you need...or some saint.  We could talk about a lot of those things, concepts of purgatory, concepts of the sinlessness of Mary, a lot of things about Catholic theology that we would speak about, most notably their erroneous doctrine of justification which cuts people off from the Kingdom of God.

     But what I want to talk about is the scandal of the priesthood and give you some sense of what the priesthood really is all about.  We're all very familiar with Catholic priests.  We've grown up seeing them in our society, along with nuns and we see them on the television all the time.  We read about them in the newspaper before there were any scandals.  We've been very much aware of them.  Many of you in your youth were affected or impacted by the image of the priest and his black robe going through the machinations of ceremonies in the Catholic Church that you attended as a kid.  So we all know that.  There's this sort of idea that there's a holy aura about these men that somehow they're almost unearthly and transcendent.  And we need to kind of put that in perspective.

     So, let me start by just talking about the divine origin of the hierarchy.  There is in Catholic dogma the confidence that the hierarchy of the Catholic Church is from Christ, that it is Jesus Christ Himself who granted to the Catholic Church its hierarchical structure.  And essentially what that boils down to is an office of clergy, sort of across the board, that has three categories of power.  Roman Catholics talk about teaching power.  They talk about pastoral power.  And they talk about sacerdotal power. 

     Teaching power is what you would think it is, they speak authoritatively for the Church, the Church being the only true interpreter of Scripture.  They don't speak for the Scripture, they speak for the Church, that is their teaching power.  They also possess pastoral power and the way they define that is quite interesting.  In the Catholic dogma it is refined as legislative...defined as legislative, judicial and punitive.  Their idea of pastoral work is not comfort and care and compassion, it is legislative, judicial and punitive.  They make laws to which they hold people.  They adjudicate as to whether people have violated those laws and they mete out punishment.  And through the years that punishment has been everything from excommunication to execution.  Thirdly, they possess sacerdotal power and what that simply means is the power to impart grace through the sacraments.  They would say in their dogma that these three parallel the three-fold office of Christ as prophet, priest and king.

     Now their dogmas have been crystallized very well thanks to the Reformation.  It was the Reformation that caused them to pronounce anathemas, when...we're all familiar with the whole story of the Reformation to one degree or another, when Martin Luther, and Zwingli, and Calvin, and Melanchthon all came along and assaulted the system.  The system had to respond and one way it responded was by, of course, digging its heals in the ground changing nothing and affirming what it had always held to be true, and then damning everybody who didn't believe it.  But out of that came some very clear articulation of their unchanging dogma.

     One of the primary things that they stood against with regard to the Reformers was the priesthood.  The Reformers rejected completely the idea of a special priesthood and with it they rejected the Catholic hierarchy which essentially is the Pope, and then the Bishops from whom the Cardinals are chosen and then the priests and under them the deacons.  The Reformers rejected that in favor of the general priesthood of all believers.  The Council of Trent said that anybody who rejects the special priesthood, let him be anathema and pronounced the curse of damnation on that.  They had to preserve their hierarchical structure, that was critical to them in order to preserve the power.  Their view is that Christ, of course, is ultimately the divine head of the Church, but He mediates His real authority through one man who is the Pope who disseminates that down through the Bishops and the priests carry out the functions determined by that hierarchy. 

     The Pope is where you start in the hierarchy and the Pope is supposed to be the direct successor to the apostle Peter.  Christ appointed the apostle Peter to be the visible head of the Church and then determined that that succession would pass down through Peter to a line of apostles, if you will, who would bear that same authority.  The Council of Trent said if anybody says the blessed apostle Peter was not constituted by Christ our Lord, prince of all apostles, and visible head of the Church, a primacy of honor and true jurisdiction, let him be anathema.  So you're damned if you assault the priesthood and you're damned if you assault the papacy of Peter.  According to Christ's law in their dogma, and I'm drawing most of this from a book by Ludwig Ott, it's called Catholic Dogma, it is one of their own systematic theology books which I've read through the years...but according to Christ's law, Peter is to have successors in his primacy over the whole Church for all time, and the Council of Trent says if anyone denies that, let him be anathema.  If anyone says the Roman Pontiff is not the successor of blessed Peter in the primacy, let him be anathema.

     So the Council of Trent pronounced a hundred or more damnations on anybody who questioned anything about the Catholic Church.  They were particularly concerned about anybody questioning the hierarchy because if you questioned the hierarchy you can...you can literally bring down the system.  The Pope, according to Catholic dogma, possesses full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, not merely in matters of morals, and I'm reading, and faith, but also in matters of discipline and government.  The Council of Trent says if anybody says he doesn't, let him be anathema.  The Pope, I'll read it again, possesses full and supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church.  They would even look at the Protestant as disenfranchised brethren who should be lining up in submission to the Pope.  Supreme power is his, says Catholic dogma.  There is no greater power than his, and there is no equal power.  His power transcends both the power of each individual Bishop, or Cardinal and also of all Bishops put together.  Collectively they are not equal to the Pope, singularly they are not equal to the Pope.  The Pope can rule independently on any matter under the Church's jurisdiction.  The Church rejects all attempts by the state to rule over the Pope and the Church.  That's why they created their own state, the Vatican, so that the Pope would be the king of his own empire.

     Quoting from Catholic Dogma, "The Pope is judged by nobody."  Now that gives you a pretty clear idea of the role that he plays.  He is unilaterally responsible to have jurisdiction over all matters of Church life.  The Dogma says the Pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra.  Have you ever heard that expression?  It simply means "out of the chair."  All that means is when he speaks, and it's not some kind of formal occasion, it means when he speaks in the discharge of his duties as pastor and doctor over all Christians, he defines doctrine regarding faith and morals to be held by the universal Church and is possessed of that divine infallibility and therefore definitions by the Roman Pontiff are irreformable.  He never makes a mistake and nothing he says therefore can ever be altered.  The source of his infallibility, says the Dogma, is the supernatural assistance of the Holy Ghost who protects the supreme teacher of the Church from error.  God in heaven will confirm the Pope's judgment, he is preserved from error, quote.

     So you have this leader who has total power over the entire Church, not in their view, just those who are faithful Catholics, but anybody else who claims to be a Christian and has wandered astray, he has total power to judge over all matters of faith, that's doctrine, and morals, that's conduct, all matters of discipline, all adjudications in the life of the Church.  And when he makes any such judgment at any point, he is infallible and God Himself in heaven confirms the Pope's judgment because he is preserved from error.  Therefore, whatever he says stands permanently as the truth of God and cannot be reformed, or changed.

     Under him are the bishops and they possess divine rite.  But theirs is called an ordinary power of government over their dioceses, an ordinary power rather than an extraordinary power such as the Pope has of infallibility.  They have an ordinary power, as their dogma says it, of government over their dioceses.  Only Popes and Bishops possess this power by divine rite.  All others possess it by the churches granting it.  It is therefore that the Pope and the Bishops are like the apostles, appointed personally by Christ and the priests and deacons appointed by the Church.

     Bishops are seen as successors of the apostles who receive their power not from Christ directly but from Christ mediated to them through the Pope who once was one of them.  The Pope then acts for Christ infallibly in all matters of the Church, including appointing and empowering the Bishops.  The clergy, as they're called, the priests come along to obey this hierarchical structure.  The Bishops do not determine the dogma in the end it is the Pope and the collected council affirmed by the Pope that determine the doctrine.

     So you get down to the priests.  The dioceses are broken down into parishes and you're familiar with that, I think.  And in the parishes are the priests.  They have a responsibility to conduct seven sacraments.  This is basically what they do.  By law there are seven sacraments...and only seven; Baptism, Confirmation which is something that happens around the age of twelve when you're baptism into the Kingdom of God, your Baptism which is an expression of divine empowering grace, is confirmed.  Then Eucharist which is the communion, the Mass.  Then Penance, which is the process by which you atone for your sins by the payment of some price, or some act.  Extreme Unction which is what you give somebody when they're dying and you see the priest rushing in.  Holy Order and Holy Order, one of the seven sacraments, is that sacrament by which the priests and Bishops are set apart.  The other one is Matrimony, or marriage.  So the responsibility of the priest then fall into those seven sacraments.

     I want to pull out of that the Holy Order because here we begin to see more into the priesthood.  Priests are consecrated by this sacrament.  It is a sacrament, that is that it is a sacred ceremony, sacramentum ordinis its called, the sacrament of ordination is what officially puts priests into their positions of ministry.  Below them are deacons who also have their own sacrament of ordination, but we're talking about the priests.  Ordination confers, this is quite interesting, sanctifying grace on a priest.  You have to understand this because this is critical.  You've got the infallible Pope, you've got the nearly infallible Bishops.  And coming down the food chain a little bit you've got the priests and the priests at the sacrament of sacramentum ordinis of ordination are literally spiritually invested with sanctifying grace and I'll quote from the Dogma.  "By the sacrament of Order the priest receives a new and special grace and a particular help by means of which he can cope in a worthy fashion and with unfailing courage with the high obligations of the office he has assumed and fulfill the duties."

     Now they believe a sacrament dispenses grace.  We have baptism, we don't think it dispenses any grace, we think it's a commemoration, a public affirmation, public testimony.  We have communion, the Lord's table, we don't think it dispenses any grace, any justifying grace or even sanctifying grace.  We see it as a memorial, a remembrance of the death of Christ.  But for them a sacrament dispenses grace and the sacrament of ordination dispenses a certain grace to the priest.

     What is that?  The Dogma says, "The Sacrament of Order imprints a character on the recipient, a new character...and I'm quoting...the character of Order enables the possessor to take an active part in Christ's priesthood.  It obliges him to dispense the saving treasures of Christ and...here's the key...and to lead a morally pure life."  At the time of his ordination which can never be repeated, can never be reverted or rescinded, it is once for good.  That's why they don't know what to do with priests who abuse people.  Furthermore, the Sacrament itself is to infuse them with a sanctifying grace to enable them to lead a morally, pure life.  One statement in the Dogma that struck me was, "The Sacrament of Order confers a permanent spiritual power on the recipient."  So the system teaches that this individual has received grace, permanent spiritual power in which he is literally entered into the priesthood of Jesus Christ, is then obliged to dispense the saving treasures of Christ.  He mediates the treasures of Christ to people and he is empowered to lead a morally, pure life.

     Now this priest then has taken on really almost an aura of holiness.  When it comes down to his duties, let me just kind of read you something.  John O'Brien has a popular work called The Faith of Millions and in that he has written this, I think it's really fascinating.  "When the priest anno