Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills

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Forget about the possibility of female priests in the Roman Catholic Church, said Kevin Madigan in The New Republic. In his “provocative, historically rich, and slightly quixotic” new book, Catholic scholar Garry Wills suggests that the church he grew up in would be healthier if it had no priests at all. Wills, who repeatedly points out that many of his friends are Catholic priests, argues that Jesus never intended to establish a priesthood and that the early Christian church operated without one. Of course, an end to popes, bishops, and priests “will never be seriously considered, either by Catholic priests or many parishioners.” Still, it would be a shame if Wills’s historical analysis were ignored, because it’s “crucially enlightening.”

Yet Wills has committed “a fundamental error” here, said the Rev. John F. Baldovin, a fellow Catholic, in Commonweal. He claims that the entire justification for priests resides in the New Testament’s Letter to the Hebrews, when in fact the church’s establishment of an ordained ministry rests on Jesus’s decision to surround himself with 12 apostles. Wills is even more bothered that priests long ago assumed various exclusive powers—including the capacity to transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. But while he’s probably right that priests didn’t claim this ability during the church’s first 1,000 years, his “angry and bitter tone” about church practices doesn’t do his argument much good.

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“If some elements of Wills’s thesis sound familiar, they are,” said the Rev. Randall Balmer, an Episcopalian, in The New York Times. When Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation, he too blasted priests for setting themselves apart from other men. But Wills, who still counts himself a Catholic despite his unorthodox views, is uninterested in starting his own breakaway church. “I just want to assure my fellow Catholics,” he writes, “that as priests shrink in numbers, congregations do not have to feel they have lost all connection with the sacred.” Lay worshippers may, in fact, wind up moving closer to the spirit of the church that Jesus imagined.