On Clericalism

Extract

There is one side to the transformation of the Church going on today which might seem to have a purely liturgical bearing but which in fact goes wider and deeper – the general abandonment of the Latin language. This doesn't just imply the return to an intelligible and genuinely public liturgy but the abandonment of the lingua franca of what has been for centuries a clerical world and the moving out into the open and as yet largely unchartered waters of a lay and secular church – a church of the people, fully in the world.

Anti-clericalism is a lot easier to recognize than clericalism and therefore a lot easier to deprecate. Rather than merely deprecating it, however, with its long and ugly history especially in some Latin countries, we would be better employed in finding out to what extent it was justified and in fact at times made necessary by circumstances. It might, for instance, be considered rather significant that the part of Italy where communism and anti-clericalism is strongest, where there are still people who ‘baptize’ their children in wine out of contempt for the Church's sacraments, is precisely that part which formed the Papal states.

Clericalism is a historical phenomenon and has to be studied historically. It is, of course, a pejorative term and does not refer to the existence in the Church of a section of people called clerics, those who, in the definition of canon 108 of the Code, are ‘tied to divine service, having received at least first tonsure'.