Holy Orders
The Sacrament of the Priesthood and the One High Priest
oly Orders is the sixth of Rome’s
seven sacraments. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it “the sacrament through
which the mission entrusted by Christ to his apostles continues to be exercised in the Church until the
end of time: thus it is the sacrament of apostolic ministry. It includes three degrees: episcopate,
presbyterate, and diaconate” (§1536).
Every other sacrament depends on it. Only a priest can consecrate the Eucharist, offer the Mass, absolve in confession, or anoint the sick; only a bishop can ordinarily confirm and can ordain. Holy Orders is therefore the hinge of the whole sacramental system. If Christ did not institute a sacrificing priesthood in his church, the system has no one to administer it.
Background
Rome begins with the priesthood of the Old Testament, in which God set apart the tribe of Levi and its priests were “appointed to act on behalf of men in relation to God, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins” (§1539). The Council of Trent drew the conclusion that a sacrificing priesthood must continue in the church:
Sacrifice and priesthood are, by the ordinance of God, in such wise conjoined, as that both have existed in every law. Whereas, therefore, in the New Testament, the Catholic Church has received, from the institution of our Lord, the holy visible sacrifice of the Eucharist; it must of necessity also be confessed, that there is, in that [Church], a new, visible, and external priesthood, into which the old has been translated.1
The argument rests entirely on the Mass. Because Rome holds the Eucharist to be a true sacrifice (see The Mass), it requires priests to offer it. The New Testament, however, speaks of apostles, elders (presbuteroi), overseers (episkopoi), and deacons, and never calls a minister of the church a priest (hiereus). The English word priest is itself a contraction of presbyter, but in the medieval church the word came to mean a man who offers sacrifice.
History
Between the apostles and Trent the ministry was reshaped around the altar. By the Middle Ages Rome counted seven grades of clergy, through which a man “marked with the clerical tonsure” would “ascend through the lesser to the greater orders”: doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, and acolyte, then subdeacon, deacon, and priest.2 Even Rome’s theologians admit that this ladder was built by the church. Pohle and Preuss note that the subdiaconate “was always regarded as a minor order in the ancient Latin Church, and that its elevation to the rank of a major order, with the obligation of celibacy, is the work of the Church in later times.”3
The rite of ordination changed as well. In the Latin church the bishop came to hand the new priest a chalice with wine and a paten with bread, signifying the power to offer the sacrifice. Pope Eugene IV’s decree for the Armenians (1439) named this delivery of the instruments as the very matter of the sacrament: the priesthood is conferred “by the giving of the chalice with the wine and the paten with the bread.” Yet Pohle and Preuss concede that “the delivery of the instruments is not mentioned in any ritual composed before A.D. 900,” so that “the rite cannot have been introduced earlier than the tenth century and must be of ecclesiastical institution.”4
Clerical celibacy developed alongside. The Council of Elvira (about 300) required bishops, priests, and deacons to abstain from their wives; Pope Siricius extended the rule in 385; and the Second Lateran Council (1139) made holy orders an impediment that rendered any later marriage invalid.5 See Matrimony.
Development
The Council of Trent defined the sacrament in its twenty-third session (July 15, 1563). Its first canon struck directly at the Reformers’ doctrine of the ministry:
If any one shall say, that there is not in the New Testament a visible and external priesthood: or that there is not any power of consecrating and offering the true body and blood of the Lord, and of remitting and retaining sins; but only an office and bare ministry of preaching the Gospel; or that those who do not preach are not priests at all; let him be anathema.6
Further canons declared that ordination imprints a character, so that “he who has once been a priest” cannot “again become a layman,” and that there is “a hierarchy instituted by divine ordination, consisting of bishops, priests, and ministers.”7 The Catechism of the Council of Trent exalted the office in language that shows how far the medieval priesthood had risen above the people. Because priests hold “the power of consecrating and offering the body and blood of our Lord, and of remitting sins,” they are “justly . . . called not only angels, but also gods, holding as they do amongst us the power and might of the immortal God.”8
What Rome Teaches
The present Catechism teaches that the ordained priest “acts in persona Christi Capitis”: he “is truly made like to the high priest and possesses the authority to act in the power and place of the person of Christ himself” (§1548). His supreme work is the Mass, where “they make present again and apply, until the coming of the Lord, the unique sacrifice of the New Testament” (§1566). He also has “the power to forgive all sins” (§1461).
Rome distinguishes this ministerial priesthood from the priesthood of all believers. “The ministerial priesthood differs in essence from the common priesthood of the faithful because it confers a sacred power for the service of the faithful” (§1592). Ordination “confers an indelible spiritual character and cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily” (§1582), and the unworthiness of a priest does not prevent Christ from acting through him (§1584). Only a baptized man may be ordained (§1577), and in the Latin church priests are normally chosen from men who “intend to remain celibate” (§1579). For a point-by-point comparison, see Holy Orders — Comparison Table.
The Reformers’ Response
Luther’s chapter on orders in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church opens with a sentence that summarizes the Protestant position:
Of this sacrament the Church of Christ knows nothing; it was invented by the church of the Pope. It not only has no promise of grace, anywhere declared, but not a word is said about it in the whole of the New Testament. Now it is ridiculous to set up as a sacrament of God that which can nowhere be proved to have been instituted by God.9
In its place Luther set the priesthood of every believer and a ministry of the Word: “Thus all we who are Christians are priests; those whom we call priests are ministers chosen from among us to do all things in our name; and the priesthood is nothing else than a ministry.” It follows, he said, that “the sacrament of orders can be nothing else than a ceremony for choosing preachers in the Church.”10 This is the very view that Trent’s first canon anathematized.
Calvin noticed that Rome could not even keep its own arithmetic: “It is very ridiculous that, after affirming that there are seven sacraments, when they begin to count, they make out thirteen,” since each of the seven orders was said to confer its own grace.11 His decisive objection, however, concerned the priesthood of Christ:
It ought to be held as confessed (this we maintained when treating of the Papal Mass), that all are injurious to Christ who call themselves priests in the sense of offering expiatory victims. He was constituted and consecrated Priest by the Father, with an oath, after the order of Melchisedek, without end and without successor.12
Calvin did not despise ordination. He held that the church should set apart its ministers by prayer and the laying on of hands, as the apostles did. What he denied was that ordination makes a sacrificing priest or imprints a character that lifts a man above the people of God.
Holy Orders and Scripture
Christ is the only priest who offers sacrifice for sin. The Levitical priests “were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood” (Hebrews 7:23–24). He “needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice . . . for this he did once, when he offered up himself” (Hebrews 7:27). “There is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
All believers are priests. Peter writes to the whole church, “Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5; cf. 2:9; Revelation 1:6). Those sacrifices are praise, good works, and the offering of ourselves (Hebrews 13:15–16; Romans 12:1), not Christ upon an altar.
The ministry is a ministry of the Word. The apostles gave themselves “continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4). Paul charged Timothy, “Preach the word” (2 Timothy 4:2), and required that an elder be “apt to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2). Elders were ordained in every church (Acts 14:23; Titus 1:5) with prayer and “the laying on of the hands of the presbytery” (1 Timothy 4:14), but none was given power to offer Christ or to pronounce sins forgiven as a judge.
An elder may be married. “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2). Peter himself had a wife (Matthew 8:14; 1 Corinthians 9:5), and Paul warns of teachers who would come “forbidding to marry” (1 Timothy 4:3).
The church needs faithful shepherds, called by Christ, tested by the church, and set apart to preach the Word and administer the two ordinances the Lord gave. It does not need a priestly caste to stand between the sinner and his Savior. “Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God . . . Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:14, 16).
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.
