There are some who seemingly believe that a priest is a “sacred person” rather than one to whom is given a sacred charge. If the priest is a sacred person, all the priest need to do is keep some sense of piety about himself or herself, and perform the prescribed rites. The sacred person does not need to actively lead, guide, direct, facilitate, nurture, foster, heal, or anything else. The sacred person, having been made the very vessel of God, brings God’s presence to others simply by being there. There are some who may well find this idea of priest comforting, for here, in a person, as for some in a book, is the “the answer”, here another’s being resolves the problem of having to do something.
I grant you the idea of priest does traditionally carry with it the idea of sacred person. In scripture the title of priest is applied only to Christ himself. Unlike the terms deacon, presbyter, elder, and bishop it is not a term used for an officer of the church in the Christian scriptures, and was accordingly dropped by most reformers precisely because of this and its overtones of exclusivity and ritual sacrifice. I grant you also, Christian theologians, usually being priests, have had a lot to say about priesthood’s special character, graces, and status, but what they have said is merely variation on what is properly said about the character, grace, and status of being a baptized person, of belonging to a priestly people, a people called to minister, to serve and enfold the world to God. I am not about to create a dissertation on the topic. Suffice it to say the notion of priest as a sacred person bifurcates the community of the baptized, exalting the cleric, discounting the laity. It obscures the church (wherein all, by baptism, are called to be the good news according to the gifts given) by creating professional Christians opposed to part-time, Sunday Christians. It prevents the manifestation of the church as a communion of saints by reducing it to a pious body politic. If anyone ought to be treated distinctly, it is not by virtue of the office given but because of the use made of such office. There are some who in the sweeping of floors have consecrated nations to God, while others wearing miters have profaned altars in the mere reading of prayers.
Look at the practical ramifications of considering a priest a sacred person. If a priest is sacred, what is accomplished here and now in the world or the church is, at best, of secondary importance. God’s presence is already provided. If some by the hardness of their hearts and the dimness of their minds cannot see it, the problem is theirs. If the priest is sacred, the church or any of its subset organizations can be left to dysfunction forever. Despite the pain, injustice, and spiritual peril inflicted on others, all that ill is only something accidental to the situation. The history of western civilization is filled with, littered with, examples of such “blessings” of hopelessness and oppression. The sacred person cannot error, cannot be held to be in error. The Roman claim of infallibility is merely a doctrinal manifestation of the attitude.
Today, when churches are in decline, the managers and executives of the churches are not held to blame as they would be with the failure of any other organization or operation. When people turn away from religion, the clergy ask not what they have failed to do, but a more amorphously phrased question: “what have we failed to do?” Only in failure and defeat does collegiality appear, as it must, for the sacred person is spared of error. It is an attitude more general than acknowledged, and attitudes, because they pass without examination, are dangerous. The rules of discernment have always held that anything that claims—as opposed to manifests—a link with the divine is suspect.
The charge to do the work of God renders no one anything but charged to do a job. The doing of God’s work renders one, at best, worthy of recognition as a faithful servant. There is no mystery to it. A priest is merely a member of the community of the baptized who is called and ordered to attend to the spiritual welfare and well-being of others. It is not in the person that any special dignity or honour resides; it is in the work that the sacred is to be glanced, and that work is to bring the people to the fullness of human potential, a potential that cannot easily be delineated into compartments of body, mind, spirit, soul. Only to the degree that a priest is free from self-delusions of sacredness and otherness is the priest free to be truly servant, friend, mentor, companion, free to be at once activist and contemplative, one whose soul is no stranger to resting in silence in God that in his or her labours justice, peace, and understanding might ever more dispel the reign of political posturing, compromise by force, and blind obedience.
Wheresoever and whensoever such faithfulness is found, there ought to be, indeed, reverence.