The Manifold Priesthood of the Catholic Church: How the Four Modalities of Christo-Analogical Interchange Function in the Sacrificial Economy

 

The Manifold Priesthood of the Catholic Church

How the Four Modalities of Christo-Analogical Interchange Function in the Sacrificial Economy

• Introduction

• Two Types of Priesthood: A Distinction of Function in a Unity of Purpose

• Priestly Function Generally

• Baptismal Priesthood and the Sacrificial Economy of the Mass

• Modalities of the Two types of Priests: In Persona Christi and Alter Christus

• Mary, the First Christan Priest: An Opportunity for Narrative Appropriation

• The Priesthood of Mary

• Mary’s Priesthood as Mediation

• Mary’s Priesthood as Sacrifice

• Modes and Structures of Baptismal Priesthood: Practical Application 

• The Four Modalities of Christo-Analogical Interchange

• Spousal Relationship as a Structure of Baptismal Priesthood

• The Mendicant/Donor Relationship as a Structure of Baptismal Priesthood

• Conclusion

Introduction

“Well, actually there are two types of a priest in the Catholic Church.”  This little tidbit is a favorite piece of knowledge to drop when one wants to sound informed concerning ecclesiological matters.  There are those who are incardinated to a Diocesan (secular) and owe their allegiance to the bishop.  Then there are priests who are incardinated to an order (non-secular) and owe their allegiance to their community's superior.  Besides alignment, they differ in their vows, the priest in an order vows the evangelical councils, and thus is limited in his ability to own personal property.

“Well, actually” there’s only one true priest, Christ.  Any other priesthood is effective through him.  Thus far we have only made noncontroversial statements.  If you google “two types of priesthood” every statement involves the secular and non-secular varieties of the ordained we just mentioned.  But these are hardly “types”.  In their priesthood, or “as priests”,  they do exactly the same thing . . .

The purpose of this treatise is to reframe the assumption of “two types of priest”.  Our goal is to offer the primary frame as “baptized and ordained” as opposed to secular and non-secular.  The desired effect is manifold.  First, this reframe will allow for a better understanding of what lay participation in the liturgy means.  It is to be hoped that his formation will aid in the impetus and authority of the laity concerning their particular mission in the Church, as well as give them practical skills for implementing that mission.  Lastly, this framework will invite the reader to a deeper devotion to the Blessed Mother.   

In the first section, we intend to give an overview of the two types of the priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a sacrificial economy.  We will begin by defining the role of the priest as one who sacrifices and mediates.  We will define the two types of priesthood, ordained and baptized and demonstrated the role of each.  We will then note the role of the ordained priest as in persona Christi, ministering in the ritual life of the church. Next, we will note the role of the baptized as alter Christus, whose job is to heal and sacralize the world.  Lastly, we will point out that these two roles present the gifts of God, grace, and salvation, in the ordained priesthood and our willing response and struggle with that gift in the priesthood of baptism.

In the second section, we will discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”. We will carefully distinguish, again, between an ordained priest, which Mary was obviously not, and a priest of baptism, which Mary was by her willful involvement of presenting an alter Christus.  We will discuss how Mary fulfills both roles of a priest, mediation and sacrifice.   Lastly, we will discuss the value of Mary’s life for any priest by baptism as a model for narrative appropriation, they can make effective their own maternal mediation and sacrifices.  

In the last section, we will distinguish the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  We categorize those modalities under first person modalities of mediation and second person modalities of sacrifice.  We will go on to apply the four modalities to two of an infinite variety of social structures that can be used to practice baptismal priesthood.  Those structures will be the nuptial structure and the relationship of donor and mendicant.       

Two Types of Priesthood: A Distinction of Function in a Unity of Purpose

Priestly Function Generally

Again, the factoid concerning the distinction between secular and nonsecular priests is practically useless when considering priesthood itself.  It only helps when considering the difference in lifestyles of ordained priests or where they fit in the ecclesial power structure.  Most of the current commentary on priesthood is victim to a very common flaw, “preparing for the last war”.  The “last war” concerning the priesthood was the protestant reformation.  Though relations are better, Western Christianity is still reeling from the fall out of this catastrophe.  

The protestant reformation was mostly a movement of rejection.  As we noted in the former paper Sacramental Cosmology one fundamental rejection was cosmological, it was a rejection of the type of creation that is sacramental.  The sacramental cosmology was replaced with a cosmology that stressed the individual graspability of the world by evidence and intellect. This lead to a rejection of the sacraments, the hierarchical priesthood that facilitated them and especially the authority of that priesthood.  Instead, what was adopted was an idea of revelation that was narrowed to scripture and served as “evidence”.  The scriptures as evidence allowed for personal authority by interpretation.  This type of Christianity would have been inconceivable before the invention of the printing press, which facilitated the need for a literate populace.  

Ancient Christianity bases its religion on a relationship with a person (The Alpha and the Omega) through the cosmos, part of which is a book.  Now, instead of a relationship with a person through cosmos, a large part of Christianity is based on a relationship with a person simply through a book.

But the cosmological shift was not caused by the reformation. Rather the reformation was caused by the cosmological shift.  Because of the new cosmology of the enlightenment priests were seen as simply an oppressive power structure that kept people trapped in a scrupulous ritual Pelagianism through a fabricated “non biblical” power structure.  Unfortunately, the response of the Church in the counter reformation was not to ponder and demonstrate cosmology; or as much as it was it failed.  Instead, the tact was mostly the lazy approach of doubling down on the concept of “authority”, which played right into protestant hands.  Armed with the tools of the enlightenment, the protestants only needed to say, “why should we trust your authority if the Bible is God’s revelation?”            

We have discussed many effects of these trends in various former treatises.  This time we want to discuss some intuitive ritual investment that was lost in the hopes of fostering conscious ritual investment.  The ritual investment we are dancing around is the role and function of “priesthood” in the Christian tradition, especially as it concerns the Holy Mass.  In fighting the last war we are fighting the protestant reformation as we play up our differences in order to bolster them.  Protestants have “the priesthood of all believers” we have priests by holy orders as a sacrament.  The hierarchical church allows for ministering of the sacraments and these differences are critical.  Most Roman Catholic commentary on priesthood over the past few centuries has focused either on the exclusive nature of the role of ministering the sacraments or on the authority the hierarchical church has over the lay church.  Acknowledgement of these roles is good and proper, but the over emphasis leads to a variety of clericalism where the mass is seen as the preview of the ordained priest, and is a gift he gives to the community.  This disordered elitism is a just criticism of the reformation.     

The present battle is not the last battle, the present battle is the new evangelization.  With the tools of the Second Vatican Council, we can begin to set the stage for a realignment of our cosmology away from simple post enlightenment deistic/empirical to one that uses the good tools of the modern world but recognizes the sacramental nature of creation.  Again, former treatises have often commented on methodologies for such a realignment.  This time our goal is to shift current thinking on priesthood so that whenever anyone says “actually there are two kinds of priests” the two kinds they are talking about will be baptized and ordained.  We must begin by exploring what a priest is generally.

Yves Congar notes that the priesthood is only necessary in what he calls, in his book Lay People in the Church, “inbetween time”.  The “inbetween time” is postlapsarian reality before the Eschaton.  We have also called it “the cosmological paradox”.  That is the stretch of time between Eden and the Eschaton.  One major point of cosmic disparity between our situation and the bookends of perfection is our need to relate to God in a state of alienation.  From this alienation, we get the two tools of the priest, sacrifice, and mediation.

Since the fall humans are alienated from proper relationship with God.  In the former treatise Sacramental Cosmology, we discussed the importance of sacrifice as a pan human ritual archetype,

Because of the post Enlightenment shift in cosmology, the sacrificial systems of the ancient world seems antiquated, superstitious and needlessly complex, but it is an attempt through calculated ritual to answer a very complex question.  How do I show love to God?  For my fellow humans I can show love by helping them, teaching them, giving them gifts, bringing them joy.  But God does not need help, he already owns anything we could give him, we can teach him nothing and he possesses perfect joy.  How does one honor God?  

The answer is that one cannot “do” anything for God, but one can show love by taking valuable things, especially things one may be tempted to value over and above God, and releasing them from one’s ownership.  The most absolute way of doing this is by some form of destruction.  By releasing these object from our grasp it shows that we do not value anything we own more than we value God.  In its purest form as part of a system of calculated ritual, this is the way we can show love for God and God alone.

In religions that employ the role of “priest”, one major job is offering sacrifices so that the community can show gratitude, offer God glory, seek union with God, and show God honor.  In the most primitive context, the “community” is the family, and the priest is the father or mother.  As societies and cultures grew, the complexity of the role of the priest also grew.  The role of mediator developed as the priest became the one who was wise enough to offer proper sacrifice and became the person who mediated between God and the community.  This development can be seen across human history.  Biblically it can be seen in the Gentiles from Able to Melchizedek, who meets Abraham.  Microcosmically it can be seen in the priestly development in Israel from Abraham, to Aaron, to Samuel, to Hezekiah, then to Jesus and back (fully effectively) to the Gentile world.  This mediation is twofold.  In the first sense, the priest himself is the mediation because he sacrifices for the community.  In the second sense, the sacrifice is the attempt to heal the rift so the priest is the mediator only in that he offers the mediation. 

All of these attempted means of rectifying the alienation between God and humanity become typologies that allow us to recognize Christ’s perfect justification when he comes.   Hebrews attest that one of the many ways Christ is the true and perfect priest because he fulfills both roles.  Jesus is both priest and victim,

It was fitting that we should have such a high priest: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, higher than the heavens.  He has no need, as did the high priests, to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins and then for those of the people; he did that once for all when he offered himself.  For the law appoints men subject to weakness to be high priests, but the word of the oath, which was taken after the law, appoints a son, who has been made perfect forever.                

Hebrews is very concerned with helping the reader understand that the priesthood being discussed is an effective priesthood, not a mechanical office or traditional lineage.  Jesus is a priest because by his life and death he made the perfect sacrifice and was the perfect mediation between God and humans, perfectly healing the alienating division between the two.  Since his sacrifice and mediation for all humanity was perfect, and not in need of repetition, he is the only true priest, the great high priest.  All other “priesthoods” in Christianity take their effectiveness from participation in his perfect mediation and sacrifice.  This is reiterated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 

The redemptive sacrifice of Christ is unique, accomplished once for all; yet it is made present in the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Church. The same is true of the one priesthood of Christ; it is made present through the ministerial priesthood without diminishing the uniqueness of Christ's priesthood: "Only Christ is the true priest, the others being only his ministers.” 

Now it remains to talk about how we as his Church participate in his priesthood.  This brings us to what we called in The Onesiman Interface the mundane priesthood.  We now come to our division, “well actually there are two kinds of priest.”  For this treatise, the wish is that every follower of ancient Christianity knows this and knows the kinds to be baptized and ordained.  The standard answer for the Roman Catholic, diocesan and ordered or secular and nonsecular, betrays the assumed clericalism that downplays or even eliminates the role of baptismal priesthood.   If a celibate priest uses the analogy of being “married to the church” he is not married in a sacramental sense, only an analogous one.  If a baptized layperson says, I am a priest of Christ, that person is actually and fully a priest, not by analogy, but by sacrament.  Baptismal priesthood is not only real as a sacrament, but it is also necessary for the full function of the mass as a sacrifice that sanctifies the world. 

When a Roman Catholic says, “That man is a priest” they invariably mean the man is ordained by the sacrament of holy orders to be a priest.  This is a certain type of priesthood in the Church which is hierarchical.  As with any Christian priesthood, it starts with the priesthood of Christ.  The bishop is the person of Christ for the community regarding authority to teach faith and morals and regarding the ministry of most sacramental rituals, especially the sacrifice of the mass.  He ordains presbyters (priests) to act in his stead and under his authority (the authority of Christ).

Regarding authority, the Bishop (and the ordained priest by the bishop’s authority) offer expiation according to the conscience of the believer.  He offers teaching to follow such that the baptized can act in good conscience so as not to constantly fear and second guess.  This was discussed at length in the treatise Relativism, Conscience, and The Magisterium.  

Regarding the sacramental ritual system, these priests stand “in persona Christi”.  As was noted in the treatise The Onesiman Interface, 

By their ordination, they become vessels by which Christ, through the sacraments, conveys grace.  During a sacramental ritual, the priest stands in persona christi not just in a dramatic or theatrical way, but in truth by his ordination.  The human priest himself is inconsequential in this position, but his physical body is a necessary as part of the outward sign of the sacramental ritual.                  

The ordained body becomes a sacramental ritual instrument used in the rites to convey grace, the grace of Christ’s presence in physical human form.  Since humans are sensorial creatures this sacramental interplay is extremely necessary.  Our faith is not simply rational, it involves the whole of our being, including our need to experience Jesus as a human.  Effective ordination allows this by the authority of Christ.  As the Catechism of the Catholic Church  states

The ministerial priesthood has the task not only of representing Christ - Head of the Church - before the assembly of the faithful, but also of acting in the name of the whole Church when presenting to God the prayer of the Church, and above all when offering the Eucharistic sacrifice.

"In the name of the whole Church" does not mean that priests are the delegates of the community. The prayer and offering of the Church are inseparable from the prayer and offering of Christ, her head; it is always the case that Christ worships in and through his Church. The whole Church, the Body of Christ, prays and offers herself "through him, with him, in him," in the unity of the Holy Spirit, to God the Father. The whole Body, caput et membra, prays and offers itself, and therefore those who in the Body are especially his ministers are called ministers not only of Christ, but also of the Church. It is because the ministerial priesthood represents Christ that it can represent the Church.

For the caput et membra head and body, the head is Christ and the body is the Church.  In ministering the ordained priest is Christ (in persona Christi) and the church (standing before Christ) during the ritual in a resonation of Christ who is God and man.  The priest “collects” the sacrifices of the baptismal priesthood, performed in the world, into one and all are offered as one sacrifice through the mass.  This healing and sacralization of the world by the baptismal priesthood, collected and offered by the ordained priesthood, binds the sacrifice of the mystical body of Christ (the church) the corporeal body of Christ, sacrificed on the cross, and makes these sacrifices effective.  This back and forth is what we are calling the sacrificial economy between the baptized and ordained priesthood.  

Our contention that there are two types of priest, baptized and ordained, is not controversial. Again the Catechism of the Catholic Church states,

Christ, high priest and unique mediator, has made of the Church "a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.” The whole community of believers is, as such, priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ's mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are "consecrated to be . . . a holy priesthood.”  . . .

The ministerial or hierarchical priesthood of bishops and priests, and the common priesthood of all the faithful participate, "each in its own proper way, in the one priesthood of Christ." While being "ordered one to another," they differ essentially. In what sense? While the common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace --a life of faith, hope, and charity, a life according to the Spirit--, the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians. The ministerial priesthood is a means by which Christ unceasingly builds up and leads his Church. For this reason it is transmitted by its own sacrament, the sacrament of Holy Orders. 

We are not seeking to introduce anything new, simply refocus how the question is answered as a stock response.  We are not seeking to belittle the unique role of the ordained priesthood.  We are not seeking to question the authoritative role of the episcopacy.  In fact, from this point on, whenever we state that “XYZ” is the role of, proper to, or the task of baptismal priesthood, it must be remembered that ordained priests are baptized, thus it is the laity’s role as well as the ordained priests role by virtue of their baptism.

We are seeking is to correct an over emphasis of ordination that does belittle and harm the role of baptismal laity.  This overemphasis comes as a result of authoritarian societies reacting to the enlightenment and the reformation by focused assertion and definition concerning the role of the bishop and priest.  The assertions are not the problem.  The problem is this focus to the absolute exclusion of baptismal priesthood.  The role and use of this priesthood was intuitive previous to the enlightenment.  Now understanding and investment in the role of the baptismal priesthood is near extinct among the laity.  So much so that when in grade school “the good sister” observes one’s suffering and says, “offer it up to Christ” the average catholic suffer has little framework for what that means.  What it means to exercise one’s baptismal priesthood. 

Lay priesthood by baptism is not a result of a loosy goosy or inappropriately innovative “the spirit of Vatican II”.  It is conciliar teaching and needs to be brought into the full light and developed in applicable ways according to the intention of the council.

So what is the difference between ordained priesthood and baptismal priesthood? To focus on differences in lifestyle and authoritative structure of ordained priests keeps the status quo of clericalism.  To refocus on differing priesthoods according to the sacramental nature of the church  redirects the distinction to the differing roles in the mystical body of Christ.  But the difference is rarely illuminated from the baptismal side, thus it becomes hard to see laymen as priests at all, and ordained priests are only understood as priest because of their ordination, not their baptism.  Their actions as baptismal priests get “umbrellaed, under their ordination and are given some extra air of sanctity even though those same actions in the by a lay person are as effective because they come under the auspices of baptismal priesthood, not ordained priesthood..  Concerning baptismal priesthood the Catechism simply states,

Incorporated into the Church by Baptism, the faithful have received the sacramental character that consecrates them for Christian religious worship. The baptismal seal enables and commits Christians to serve God by a vital participation in the holy liturgy of the Church and to exercise their baptismal priesthood by the witness of holy lives and practical charity.

This is the essence of the baptismal priesthood, it is a priesthood of worship by a holy life and acts of charity.  The tools are the same sacrifice and mediation, exactly like to the ordained priesthood.  But instead of taking place in ritual, this sacrifice and mediation take place in life.  Thus when a lay person gives to charity, they are exercising their baptismal priesthood.  Under the existing climate of clericalism, when an ordained priest gives to charity, it is somehow seen as more holy or spiritually effective, because he is ordained and this action is not “priestly”.  And that is true, it is priestly.  But it is priestly because he has exercised his baptismal priesthood, not his ordained priesthood.  It is the same sacramental function as any lay person.  Whenever any of the baptized exhibit holiness or act charitably, they are effecting their priesthood.  Whenever any of the baptized die to self and live in Christ they stand as an alter Christus through their baptismal priesthood.  Lumen Gentium makes this same point     

 

Though they differ from one another in essence and not only in degree, the common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, by the sacred power he enjoys, teaches and rules the priestly people; acting in the person of Christ, he makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.

 

If baptismal priests sacrifice and mediate through their lives, especially if they are laymen, what do these baptismal priests have to do with the sacrifice of the mass?

 

Baptismal Priesthood and the Sacrificial Economy of the Mass

 

The treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent, discussed a construct for understanding how Christ “bore our sins on the cross” by seeing this burden through a eucharistic lens.  Perhaps the same view can be applied to the sacrifices of the baptismal priest.  In that treatise we stated,

 

How Jesus, “bore our sins in his body upon the cross” can be a very confusing concept, especially when one remembers that he is “one like us in all things but sin”.  A way to make sense of this is the third descent in the Eucharist coupled with the fact that the Eucharist is a participation in the original sacrifice on Calvary through the very “time binding” mentioned above.  Christ becomes one with the sinner across space and time through descending into the sinner’s body.  Christ’s Body, the Church, which is composed of those same sinners, is united to his body on the cross by this same communion.

Because across space and time Christ’s body (as the Church), is composed of sinners and their sins one can see how the Eucharist is the matrix for a two-way flow of grace.  Christ’s body is extended through space and time through the Eucharist makes the Church his mystical body.  That extension is balanced by a backflow of sin gathering upon Christ’s body hanging upon the cross.   Through the Eucharist the communicant is bound to Christ Body, specifically his body at the event of his sacrificial death, where he takes our sin upon his body and destroys it by his death. The effect of “communion” with his body is that, as part of Christ’s body, the venial sin of the communicant is destroyed with Christ Body through his sacrificial death (though not mortal sin, where one who is in open rebellion against God will accept the invitation to the Eschaton nor the forgiveness offered).  Through the Eucharist, that mystical body is bound across space and time to his sacrificial death and at the same time, the individual sinners are purified of the guilt of venial sin.  Thus in mass one can easily assent, “When we eat this bread and drink this cup we proclaim your death O Lord until you come again.”

 

For this treatise, we can say, what is true concerning communion and sin is also true of communion and sacrifice.  Again, Lumen Gentium states,

 

Taking part in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which is the fount and apex of the whole Christian life, they offer the Divine Victim to God, and offer themselves along with It. Thus both by reason of the offering and through Holy Communion all take part in this liturgical service, not indeed, all in the same way but each in that way which is proper to himself. Strengthened in Holy Communion by the Body of Christ, they then manifest in a concrete way that unity of the people of God which is suitably signified and wondrously brought about by this most august sacrament.

The difference between the roles of the ordained priest and the baptismal priest is not that the ordained priest sacrifices and the baptismal priest does not. 

 

For all their works, prayers and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne—all these become "spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ". Together with the offering of the Lord's body, they are most fittingly offered in the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus, as those everywhere who adore in holy activity, the laity consecrate the world itself to God.

 

Thus the communion of the Eucharist not only purifies, it also sanctifies and gives effectiveness to the sacrifice of the entirety of the priesthood.  The minister (ordained priest) is there as the ritual sacral matter to effect Christ’s presence in human form and bring the offering to the table for the “collect” the collection of all sacrifices of the community.  He does not “make” these sacrifices in the ritual, only offers them through Christ, effectively unifying them to his pascal act.  It is under the auspices of the baptismal priesthood that sacrifice is made by the people of God. This interchange is the  sacrificial economy between the two that takes place in the Eucharist.  Sacrosanctum Concilium states,  

 

Rightly, then, the liturgy is considered as an exercise of the priestly office of Jesus Christ. In the liturgy the sanctification of the man is signified by signs perceptible to the senses, and is effected in a way which corresponds with each of these signs; in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members.

 

The document goes on to urge full active and conscious participation by the laity in the mass.  But then the document falls back into the counter reformation mindset, focusing on the ordained priesthood,  

 

In the restoration and promotion of the sacred liturgy, this full and active participation by all the people is the aim to be considered before all else; for it is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit; and therefore pastors of souls must zealously strive to achieve it, by means of the necessary instruction, in all their pastoral work.

 

For most Catholics, “full active participation in the liturgy” means saying the responses and singing at mass.  The zealous catechist urges the faithful to consciously do this and not spout off responses as rote pronouncements.  If a member of the laity really wishes to up their liturgical game, they become a lector or eucharistic minister, and then they are really actively participating.  But it is the assertion of this treatise that each of these methodologies is still pathetic compared to what is really required for the true participation of the laity.

We are seeking a shift in understanding from how the laity participates by ritual rubric to an understanding that is informed by the  sacrificial economy of the mass.  This understanding centers on how the laity participates in the mass according to their priesthood.  The difference may be surmised in the difference in view of the Mass as an oasis and the Eucharist as an activation.  

The current climate of clericalism creates an attitude toward the liturgy where one focuses on what the ordained priest “does for us” by his ministry.  This attitude sees the mass as an oasis. The layman goes to the ritual to be “recharged” or for respite from a hectic profane life.  When one sees the eucharist from the function of the priest by baptism, one sees the mass as an activation or sanctification of the sacrifices brought to the mass from the layman’s life. To understand the difference one must understand how the offering of the baptismal priesthood’s sacrifices differ in nature from that of the ordained.

When a person is ordained, they become a minister of the sacraments, which they administer by means of a ritual priesthood.  This is an important function, but the ordained priesthood is not sufficient for effective performance of the eucharistic sacrifice.  The ritual of the mass functions as a binding of the sacrifices of the baptismal priesthood to the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.  The sacrifice of the baptismal priesthood is not a ritual run by a hierarchically defined rubric.  It is framed as a living sacrifice.  

The treatise The Spiritual Sacrifice of the Incarnation noted how Christ himself utilizes his life as a sacrifice not just in his death, but by sacrificing his will to the Father.  The treatise Toward Appropriate Thanatosian Piety, describe in great detail how we sacrifice our lives to God by letting those parts of us that tend to evil be destroyed by Christ.

What Paul is getting at with “The Flesh” is the idea that there are parts of the spirit which are not healthy and need to die.  The body is not the problem, but that it dies and rots seems to be an indicator for the greeks that the body is somehow evil.  So Paul labels aspects of the human soul, “The Flesh” to give the greek minds an adverse reaction, and an awareness that these things need to come under the power of Holy Death, they need to dissolve into nothingness.  “The Spirit”  is the aspects of the human soul that needs to live.  The humans build sin “The Flesh” on top of “The Spirit”.  Holy Death, under the direction of Christ, destroys “The Flesh” and “The Spirit” remains.  When one is baptized into Christ’s death, one is putting oneself under the power of Christ and “his death”  meaning Holy Death, whom he controls for your benefit.  You are conformed by baptism to utilize the grace, by means of your cooperative will, to allow Christ to direct Holy Death appropriately within your very soul.

                    

A living sacrifice is a denying of one’s will in order to live for God.  The priest “gives up”, but the priest also fulfills and engages.  The idea is clearly Pauline and shows up specifically in Romans 

 

I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.  Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.

 

The reader can see how the methodology of sacrifice is not defined by ritual rubric, but lived, by discerning God’s will and then acting on it.  As Hebrews  says, “Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have; God is pleased by sacrifices of that kind.”  The sacrifice of the priesthood of baptism is made by a life well intentioned and then, well lived.  These sacrifices are then bound together and offered through Christ, the great high priest, by attaching them to his sacrifice on Calvary.  This is done by the ritual of the mass as described above and as described in 2 Corinthians, “He indeed died for all, so that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.”

Modalities of the Two types of Priests: In Persona Christi and Alter Christus

Unlike the distinction between secular and nonsecular priests, we can draw a functional distinction between the ordained and the baptizmal priesthood.  It is the role of the ordained priest to stand In Persona Christi as receptive sacramental matter in the ritual of the mass.  The body of the priests presents or effects the human body of Christ in the mass.  The baptismal priesthood is not limited to the mass, in fact, in that ritual, the priesthood of the baptized is at its most passive.  The “active participation” in the mass of the laity comes in that they exercise their priesthood as alter Christus, Utilizing the ability to stand in as Christ, or meet Christ in others in the wider world outside of ritual liturgy.  

The ability of the priesthood of baptism is perfectly summed up in Theresa of Avila's famous prayer, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.”  But as the baptized reads the prayer, one must remember it applies to all of the faithful, such that one can present Christ to others as an alter Christus, or experience Christ through them as an alter Christus.  When this is done through agapic love, which is self sacrificing, the priesthood of baptism is in effect.  That act will be collected and built into the body as a whole in the Eucharist.    

In his encyclical, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii Pius XI discusses the priesthood.  Most likely it has been read as a document exclusively aimed as the ordained priesthood, but here we may ponder whether or not it can be granted a wider application, only limited to the ordained priesthood when specifically mentioning the unique role they play.  For example, when Pius XI speaks of alter Christus it is easily applicable to baptismal priesthood and its sacral role,

This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.’ (1 Cor 4:1) The priest is the minister of Christ, an instrument, that is to say, in the hands of the Divine Redeemer. He continues the work of the redemption in all its world-embracing universality and divine efficacy, that work that wrought so marvelous a transformation in the world. Thus the priest, as is said with good reason, is indeed ‘another Christ’; for, in some way, he is himself a continuation of Christ. ‘As the Father hath sent Me, I also send you’ is spoken to the priest, and hence the priest, like Christ, continues to give ‘glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will.'”  

Once one takes an expansive view one realizes that the vast majority of this encyclical applies to the laity as much as to the ordained priesthood.

The mediation offered by the ordained priesthood who stands in persona Christi in the eucharist is an indispensable part of the  sacrificial economy of the liturgy. But, it should be more clear how quantitatively small this function is.  According to the  sacrificial economy, most of the sacrificial acts by Catholic priests are done through the priesthood of the baptized and take place by employment or experience of the alter Christus.   Through the ordained priest (in persona Christi), the collective offering to the Father through the eucharist is how the Great High Priesthood of Christ is effected.  It is what binds the church ontologically in its being and in its sacralization and justification of this present world.  But the priesthood that offers the sacrifices in the world apart from the liturgy is the priesthood of the baptized.  As 1Peter 2 says,

 

Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

 

Since this is their special charism, it is the priest by baptism that heals, reshapes and sacralizes the world as Lumen Gentium very clearly points out,

The faithful, therefore, must learn the deepest meaning and the value of all creation, as well as its role in the harmonious praise of God. They must assist each other to live holier lives even in their daily occupations. In this way the world may be permeated by the spirit of Christ and it may more effectively fulfill its purpose in justice, charity and peace. The laity have the principal role in the overall fulfillment of this duty. Therefore, by their competence in secular training and by their activity, elevated from within by the grace of Christ, let them vigorously contribute their effort, so that created goods may be perfected by human labor, technical skill and civic culture for the benefit of all men according to the design of the Creator and the light of His Word. May the goods of this world be more equitably distributed among all men, and may they in their own way be conducive to universal progress in human and Christian freedom. In this manner, through the members of the Church, will Christ progressively illumine the whole of human society with His saving light.

 

Moreover, let the laity also by their combined efforts remedy the customs and conditions of the world, if they are an inducement to sin, so that they all may be conformed to the norms of justice and may favor the practice of virtue rather than hinder it. By so doing they will imbue culture and human activity with genuine moral values; they will better prepare the field of the world for the seed of the Word of God; and at the same time they will open wider the doors of the Church by which the message of peace may enter the world.

Because of the very economy of salvation the faithful should learn how to distinguish carefully between those rights and duties which are theirs as members of the Church, and those which they have as members of human society. Let them strive to reconcile the two, remembering that in every temporal affair they must be guided by a Christian conscience, since even in secular business there is no human activity which can be withdrawn from God's dominion. In our own time, however, it is most urgent that this distinction and also this harmony should shine forth more clearly than ever in the lives of the faithful, so that the mission of the Church may correspond more fully to the special conditions of the world today. For it must be admitted that the temporal sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world. But that ominous doctrine which attempts to build a society with no regard whatever for religion, and which attacks and destroys the religious liberty of its citizens, is rightly to be rejected.

The job of the priest by baptism is much less targeted and extremely dynamic in nature. The modes and methodologies of sacrifice and ritual are almost infinite.  Exercising priestly functions under one’s baptismal charism is a hard job, it calls for actual sacrifice from the priest.  The baptized must make hard choices and creatively activate dormant sacredness.  It takes maximal attention and is an exercise of all the gifts that are granted by the Holy Spirit in the sacrament of confirmation.  A good examples of this was the methodology of ritual redemption laid out in the treatise Modern Slavery and the Mercedarians.  

In contrast, the priesthood of ordination is a passive function, working ex opere operato.  Where baptismal priesthood signifies struggle and will, ordained priesthood signifies gift and grace.  Both of these aspects are essential to understand Christian action and soteriology.  When a priest blesses, it is effective by virtue of his ordination (gift), when a baptized layman blesses, his blessing is only as effective as their cooperation with their baptismal grace (struggle). This soteriological paradox is also presented in the flow from Baptism to Confirmation.  Baptism is the gift of salvation, Confirmation is the responsibility to use that gift.   The ordained priesthood represents the gift of grace and salvation which is free, even though the person could never merit it.  As the Catechism states,

This presence of Christ in the minister is not to be understood as if the latter were preserved from all human weaknesses, the spirit of domination, error, even sin. The power of the Holy Spirit does not guarantee all acts of ministers in the same way. While this guarantee extends to the sacraments, so that even the minister's sin cannot impede the fruit of grace, in many other acts the minister leaves human traces that are not always signs of fidelity to the Gospel and consequently can harm the apostolic fruitfulness of the Church.

       

The priesthood of baptism is reflective of our responsibility to cooperate with grace and act in the world after we have “put on the clothes of Christ”.  What one can infer from the above passage is that an ordained priest is rarely acting in the capacity of his ordination.  That capacity is reserved for the ritual structure of the church.  But according to a well formed economy when an ordained priest gives to charity or gives consolation to the grieving, or offers some struggle or suffering to the Lord, they do it under the auspices of their baptismal priesthood, just like the rest of us.  Thus in the liturgical  sacrificial economy, there can be a mass where there is a priest offering the mass as its minister, but the entire assembly is made up of formally ordained priests.  Those in the assembly are not standing in persona Christi, but offering all their sacrifices as alter Christus for the collect, just as any unordained may do.  In the Church, the actual function of the ordained priesthood is extremely niche, whereas the function of baptismal priesthood is near universal.

These two types of priesthood are each essential for the  sacrificial economy of the mass. Though that job seems specific to the ordained priesthood, the flow between the sacrifice of Christ through the priest and the sacrifice of his mystical body the Church through the laity are both necessary.  Each type of priesthood is essential for the sacralization of the world.  Though that job seems specific to the laity, their sacrifices to make the world holy as the body of Christ find their sacrificial and ontological unity in the collect of the liturgy.  As Lumen Gentium states,

[N]o creature could ever be counted as equal with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer. Just as the priesthood of Christ is shared in various ways both by the ministers and by the faithful, and as the one goodness of God is really communicated in different ways to His creatures, so also the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude but rather gives rise to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing in this one source.

In this section, we set out to give an overview of the two types of priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a  sacrificial economy.  We began by defining the role of the priest as one who sacrifices and mediates.  We defined the two types of priesthood, ordained and baptized, and demonstrated the role of each.  We noted the role of the ordained priest as one in persona Christi, ministers in the ritual life of the church. And we note the role of the baptized as alter Christus, whose job is to heal and sacralize the world.  We lastly pointed out that these two roles present the gifts of God, grace, and salvation, in the ordained priesthood and our willing response and struggle with that gift in the priesthood of baptism.

In the next section, we will proceed to discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”.  In the last section, we will distinguish the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  

Mary, the First Christan Priest: An Opportunity for Narrative Appropriation

In the last section, we set out to give an overview of the two types of priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a  sacrificial economy. In this section, we will discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”. We will carefully distinguish, again, between an ordained priest, which Mary was obviously not, and a priest of baptism, which Mary was by her willful involvement of presenting an alter Christus.  We will discuss how Mary fulfills both roles of a priest, mediation and sacrifice.   Lastly, we will discuss the value of Mary’s life for any priest by baptism as a model for narrative appropriation, such they can make effective their own parental mediation and sacrifices.  

In the last section, we will wrap up by distinguishing the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  We will categorize those modalities under first person modalities of mediation and second person modalities of sacrifice and apply the four modalities to the nuptial structure and the relationship of donor and mendicant.    

The Priesthood of Mary

The amount of respect Roman Catholics have for Mary is hard to overestimate.  We can call her Mother of God, we can even call her Mediatrix of all graces.  But then, to call her a “priest” seems totally wrong.  This is probably because “everyone knows” that only men are priests.  However, once one shifts one’s thinking on the two kinds of priest from diocesan and ordered to baptized and ordained, one can realize fully half of the priests of Roman Catholicism are women.  Once one realizes that the mediation of the baptized priest is alter Christus as opposed to in persona Christi and realizes that the sacrificial role of the baptized priest is living sacrifice as opposed to canonical ritual sacrifice, then women are easily put into the category of priest.  At this point, Mary becomes the first and greatest “participatory” priest of Christianity.  It may help to make the reader more comfortable with the existing Roman Catholic female priesthood if they take Mary as their launching point. In the last section, we discussed the practice and function of priesthood, sacrifice,  and mediation.  After going over some general aspects of Mary’s special priesthood we will take both mediation and sacrifice each in turn as applied to Mary’s priesthood.

At the most basic level, if you ask a Catholic, “what does a priest do?” An easy correct answer would be, “they do the sacraments.”  This seems to mean that they administer seven particular rituals for the Church. But even under this seemingly restrictive definition, Mary fits the bill.  Of course, Mary was not a minister of the defined seven ritual sacraments.  But the treatise Sacramental Cosmology discussed the three primordial sacraments, Creation itself, marriage, and the incarnation.  The first, creation, was administered by God.  The second, marriage, was administered first by God with the first parents, then by all people thereafter (even of the seven, this is the sacrament where the baptized are the ordinary ministers).  The third, the incarnation, was administered by God through the cooperation of Mary.  Her body, as fundamental and receptive sacral matter, begets (or “administers”) the incarnation.  The body of Christ, which her body prepared and sustained, is the summation of what it means to be an outward sign of an invisible grace.  By her ministry of this outward sign, the world receives all of the effective sacramental graces in the Church.  

Mary is obviously not an ordained priest.  Her priesthood is under the auspices of priesthood of baptism.   This means she is a priest who ministers as a living sacrifice by her will.  This position is validated by her ministry being effected by her all important fiat.

If she is a priest by baptism, it must be baptism by desire.  There is no record of her ever being baptized by water, even by John.  But to dissuade any doubt, the Church has dogmatically proclaimed her immaculate conception.  Mary was, “conceived without the stain of original sin.”  This means, at the very least, that at her conception she was graced with all the graces we receive at baptism.  Mary’s priesthood, being the variety that is baptismal, means that she operates under the model of willful engagement as an alter Christus.

Mary presents as an alter Christus in the same way that the rest of us do, as one who indicates the person of Christ by living in such a way as to demonstrate Christ to the world by our person.  Any formal student of mariology knows that all appropriate mariology is ultimately a commentary on the person of Christ.  Anyone who practices marian devotion well knows that such devotion is meant as a catalyst for devotion to the person of Christ.  She certainly does not ritually stand in for the person of Christ the way an ordained priest does.  Instead, it is by her life, by how she forms relationships that she leads to Christ.  As the mother of both the corporeal and mystical body of Christ, she presents as a unique and special alter Christus for the Church and for the world.  Her life is a rich resource for narrative appropriation in order to better develop one’s baptismal priesthood.  It is obvious that Mary uses her will to effect her priesthood.  Again, her fiat is the most prominent example of this.  It is this willful cooperation and all the sacrifices that come along with it that become her priestly sacrifices offered to the Father. 

But what may be the most interesting indication of Mary as both of these is the passage in Matthew’s Gospel where Jesus seems to reject his mother,

     

While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers appeared outside, wishing to speak with him. [Someone told him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, asking to speak with you.”]  But he said in reply to the one who told him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?  And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.  For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

A protestant may see it as a validation of “the church” of believers over Mary. But, any Catholic knows that Mary “does the will of my heavenly Father” because of her fiat.  No Catholic would ever see this as a rejection of Mary, rather it is a validation.  What actually happens in the passage is an identification of the Church with Mary and Mary with the Church by example or by use of will to be alter Christus and express the implied ontological unity.  Mary gives birth to the corporeal body of Christ and therefore gives birth to the mystical body of Christ.  Being part of the mystical body allows one to act as an alter Christus.  The Church is made through Mary in a similar way that creation is made through the Logos and in a similar way that humanity is created through Eve.  But the statement of Jesus brings to mind Christian ontology, that all is simple and manifold at the same time.  That, as the generating principle distinct from what is generated, at the same time it is one with what is generated.  Thus Mary is Jesus’ mother because she gave birth to him and because she did the will of the Father.  The Church, the siblings of Jesus, is the body of Christ and therefore members can act as alter Christus by use of their will.  As the risen Christ said to Saint Paul, “I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.”  All by their will are mother and sibling to Christ and all by their will can act as alter Christus.  By this action, all give birth to Christ in unique, new, and dynamic ways, becoming the mother of Christ.  All of this is begun by Mary’s priestly actions of mediation and sacrifice.

This entire convergence of priestly function, especially as it concerns mediation is commented on in Pope Saint John Paul II’s encyclical Redemptoris Mater,

In effect, Mary's mediation is intimately linked with her motherhood. It possesses a specifically maternal character, which distinguishes it from the mediation of the other creatures who in various and always subordinate ways share in the one mediation of Christ, although her own mediation is also a shared mediation. In fact, while it is true that "no creature could ever be classed with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer," at the same time "the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude but rather gives rise among creatures to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing in this unique source." And thus "the one goodness of God is in reality communicated diversely to his creatures.

At this point, we can begin to unpack the nature of Mary’s priesthood according to how she acts as mediator. 

   

Mary’s Priesthood as Mediation

There is a certain piety in Catholicism that refers to Mary under the title Mediatrix of all Graces.  Interestingly, those invested in that piety would most likely be the type that would be adamantly averse to pondering a priestly role of Mary.  But as we noted one of the main roles of the priest is as mediator.  Pope Saint John Paul II clearly sees a major aspect of Mary’s mediation as motherly.  In one respect her most dramatic mediation is biological.  She ministers the incarnation through her biological person.  This is Mary’s role throughout her whole life.  Early in utero Mary’s ovaries already contained all of the eggs she would produce in her life.  She carried the Christ egg for her entire life until he was born.  Her physical being was a tabernacle, standing in between the potentiality of the incarnation and the actuality of the incarnation.  

This dormant motherhood is an alter Christus.  She carries the person of Christ with the potentiality to reveal Christ to the world.  Mary’s biological state is indicative of the baptized’s spiritual state.  Each human contains a dormant alter Christus.  Baptism and Confirmation are our yes, our fiat to incubate and ultimately show that Christ to the world in our own person.  When this happens the love of this demonstration leaves us and takes a life of its own.  This is a narrative appropriation similar to the one discussed in the treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent, but there the in utero imagery concerned humility and Christian power dynamics, whereas here the narrative appropriation revolves around how one actively brings Christ to the world by one’s volition and actions.        

Besides her biological mediation, which we narratively appropriate to give impetus to our ability to be an alter Christus, Mary also mediates by her intercession, which is most potent.  Again from Redemptoris Mater

Her mediation is thus in the nature of intercession: Mary "intercedes" for mankind. And that is not all. As a mother she also wishes the messianic power of her Son to be manifested, that salvific power of his which is meant to help man in his misfortunes, to free him from the evil which in various forms and degrees weighs heavily upon his life. 

And again, a major mediation any baptized person can perform is to pray for those who need prayers, which is every person in the world as well as the souls in purgatory.  But the unique nature of Mary’s intercession is her closeness to the Lord as his mother and as the queen of heaven.  Intercession itself is a universal priestly ministry of the baptized, not one that we share with Mary analogically.

By these mediations, Mary demonstrates a complex relationship between the believer and the savior as well as the savior and his Church.  The incarnation presents a spiraling set of subordinations as it plays out Christian power dynamics in the most dramatic display in all of salvation history. The virtue being displayed here is the ability to jettison pride.  The theological virtues are one’s greatest aid in this respect, because two relinquish control and one self gives as opposed to grasps.  First, the Logos empties himself to become human and subjected himself to the world. In that subjugation, he subjects himself to Mary’s maternal influence.  As was discussed in the treatise The Spiritual Sacrifice of the Incarnation, Jesus needed to be able to grow in wisdom and age and favor before God and man.  We stated, 

The biggest criticism of the idea that Jesus lacked knowledge in any way is that it subjects the Son to the Father. Subjugation or monarchianism sees the Son as lesser to the Father.  But with this understanding of the two knowledges as part and parcel of the mysterious bridge between the eternal and the temporal, one can see that no such subjugation exists, except as a sacrifice of love that the Son willingly undertakes.  But that subjugation only exists in the process of time and can maintain orthodoxy when the meta paradox is acknowledged.        

In his infancy and his growth, he was subject to his parents and relied on them for both sustenance and education.  God trusts Mary to assist salvation history in by her care and influence on the incarnate Son.  Speaking as a parent, it also took trust that Mary would let go of her son and allow him to be who he was meant to be.  Mary’s wisdom in how she raised Jesus was discussed in the treatise The Dysfunctional Human Family and the Nontraditional Holy Family   

The setting of the environment by discipline is balanced by the establishment of a nurturing environment.  That is, an environment that allows a child to explore who they are and to discover himself and God’s plan for them. 

At the wedding feast of canaan in John chapter 2, Jesus seems hesitant to perform the miracle.  In fact he is adamant that it is not time to get started just yet.  He says to Mary, “my hour has not come.”   But Mary takes the opportunity to show her son his own ability by forcing him to use his own skill.  She seems to have more faith in him than he has in himself, how typically parental.  She wisely does not tell him exactly what to do, but trusts his judgment and simply sets the conditions for him to act.  This scene is the culmination that all parents wish for.  It is the end result of a life of nurturing, which starts as taking care of a child's every need, to recognising their strengths and helping build them, to finally instilling that child with the confidence to act on their own and then letting go.

Thus there are two aspects to mediating via the baptismal alter Christus.  First, one must grow Christ in one’s self and present him to the world through one’s self.  Mary did this both spiritually and biologically by her fiat and parenting.  She also did this spiritually and biologically in her person as she sought to live in the mode of Christ suited to her spiritually and in her actions (biologically).  The former is particular to Mary, but the latter form of mediation is the methodology of all baptized Christians. 

The second aspect of parental mediation we learn from the wedding at Canaan is the ability to let go of Christ.  We can nurture and present Christ as an alter Christus, but we must not seek to control Christ as our property just because we have a part to play.  The line of Mary, “do as he tells you” is of summative importance.  At this point, she lets go and allows Christ to work beyond her simple presentation.  Mediation is not about the mediator, it is about a relationship beyond the mediator.  If the relationship is stifled because the mediator wants to over control or take center stage, the mediation is rendered ineffective.  Hence Redemptoris Mater rightly states,

This maternal role of Mary flows, according to God's good pleasure, "from the superabundance of the merits of Christ; it is founded on his mediation, absolutely depends on it, and draws all its efficacy from it."

The biological and maternal mediation of Mary is an excellent opportunity for narrative appropriation by the priesthood of baptism.  She biologically generates (internally) the Christ, sustains him (internally), presents him to the word (by his birth), disciplines and nurtures him until he is mature, and then lets him go.  This maternal story is present throughout the mediation of the priesthood of baptism.  We must have a deep spiritual life (internal) that can offer a fiat.  We must grow Christ in us until he is mature in us (internal spiritual), then we must become allow him to show in our person (external: alter Christus). Then Redemptoris Mater rings true, “And thus "the one goodness of God is in reality communicated diversely to his creatures.” We must let Christ go and trust the effects of out priestly action on others, and not seek to control them or worse, control Christ who works with them by our mediation.        

Mary’s Priesthood as Sacrifice

It is no secret that by her fiat Mary undertook great risk as a young single mother in an ancient Semiticsemetic culture.  By saying yes she trusted God’s plan, yet risked her life in a very real way.  Had Joseph denounced her she would have been subject to capital punishment.  But we are more interested in her sacrificial role as a manifestation of maternal love, which is certainly one of the ways that her priesthood is effected.  As it says in Redemptoris Mater, 

This fiat of Mary-"let it be to me"-was decisive, on the human level, for the accomplishment of the divine mystery. There is a complete harmony with the words of the Son, who, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, says to the Father as he comes into the world: "Sacrifices and offering you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me.... Lo, I have come to do your will, O God" (Heb. 10:5-7). The mystery of the Incarnation was accomplished when Mary uttered her fiat: "Let it be to me according to your word," which made possible, as far as it depended upon her in the divine plan, the granting of her Son's desire.

This is not an uncommon sacrifice, but willfully and truely entered with basic knowledge of the struggles involved, it is a great and powerful one.

This is the powerful sacrifice that is motherhood.  First, you must have your body literally ripped apart and to complete the sacrifice you must survive this.  The suffering and struggle imparted upon Eve is the beginning of the offering of trust involved in this sacrifice, thus it is proper to the baptismal priesthood.  To engage in the sacrifice one must come to terms with the fact that one’s body is not one’s own.  This is true in a fundamentally spiritual way, but, in this particular sacrifice it is true in a dramatic biological way.  One is ripped apart, and the “excess” becomes a new life that is “you” but is also their own independent being (slowly but ever increasingly so).  The struggle and sacrifice continue as one nurtures the new life and one must jettison every self centered will and desire.  The treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love, gave a brief glimpse of the absolutely exhausting nature of this sacrifice from a more modern perspective,

As a married person you must handle children who need to be monitored hygienically, be dressed, be fed, transported back and forth in due time and at absolutely random times fed again, helped with homework and extracurriculars, bathed, and bedded down.  You must aid children who get sick, get fever, headaches, vomit, poo themselves, get cavities, get lice, knowing the whole time you are holding their head, or cuddling them and telling them it’ll be okay or sleeping in bed next to them because they’re in great pain, knowing all that time families share everything and you and your spouse are next, but since your sick days are used, when your body hosts your child’s germs you will still be working and coming home and taking care of newly rejuvenated and very energetic children.  As a parent you will have children who are greedy, covetous, lying, wrathful, envious, slothful, prideful, concupiscent machines that need constant moral direction.                     

The maternal sacrifice (whether it be done by a male or a female) is one that involves dying to self by offering one’s self to their children and dynamically interacting with the environment as an alter Christus.   

The hope then is that one’s child learns the lesson and learns to become an alter Christus themself.  And again as is necessary for any sacrifice, there is a letting go of something valuable.  Regarding mediation, the sacrificial role is about letting go of the chid’s ability to present Christ and in effect allow Christ to work as Christ.  In the sacrificial role of motherhood, the letting go is the same.  One may shape a child, but that child may not be who you expected they would be.  Thus one must let go of one’s time in order to raise the child and let go of one’s expectations in order to allow the child to express Christ in a way appropriate to them.

All of these sacrifices are the sacrifice of any mother and they are especially the sacrifice of Mary.  Her manner of motherhood (virginal birth) was out of the ordinary. Her son’s role in history was unique. That her son rectifies God and humanity was unique and glorious, what mother wouldn’t want that role for her child?  But the manner was not necessarily expected.  Hence the image of the pieta, the mother holding her dead son, strikes to the core of maternal sacrificial relinquish. 

All of this is useful for a baptismal priesthood that employs maternal sacrificial as a methodology.  One can use Mary as the model of a self sacrificing parent.  Again, one must present Jesus as alter Christus in one’s own person.  But as a parent, to the best of one’s ability, one must present it to the world in one’s child.  All of this requires a great amount relinquishing of self and one’s most cherished property, one’s child.  To be able to look to the blessed mother is a great help for the priest of baptism who sacrifices as a parent.        

In the first section, we set out to give an overview of the two types of priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a  sacrificial economy.  In this section, we sought to discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”. We carefully distinguished, again, between an ordained priest, which Mary was obviously not, and a priest of baptism, which Mary was by her willful involvement of presenting an alter Christus.  We discussed how Mary fulfills both roles of a priest, mediation and sacrifice.  Primarily she is the mediator of the primordial sacrament of the incarnation. We discussed how this mediation involves maternal sacrifice, both of body and of self.  Lastly, we discussed the value of Mary’s life for any priest by baptism as a model for narrative appropriation, such they can make effective their own parental sacrifices. 

      In the next section, we will distinguish the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  We will categorize those modalities under first person modalities of mediation and second person modalities of sacrifice.  We will go on to apply the four modalities to two of an infinite variety of social structures that can be used to practice baptismal priesthood.  

Modes and Structures of Baptismal Priesthood: Practical Application

       

In the first section, we set out to give an overview of the two types of priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a  sacrificial economy.  We began by defining the role of the priest as one who sacrifices and mediates.  We defined the two types of priesthood, ordained and baptized and demonstrated the role of each.  We noted the role of the ordained priest as one in persona Christi, ministers in the ritual life of the church. And we note the role of the baptized as alter Christus, whose job is to heal and sacralize the world.  We lastly pointed out that these two roles present the gifts of God, grace, and salvation, in the ordained priesthood and our willing response and struggle with that gift in the priesthood of baptism. In the previous section we sought to discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”. In this section we set out to offer a practical application of baptismal priestly life by distinguishing the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange. We will illuminate techniques of these modalities by two exemplar structures of application, the nuptial structure and the relationship of donor and mendicant.    

The Four Modalities of Christo-Analogical Interchange

The priesthood of ordination is a ritual priesthood.  All functions proper to it happen in the ritual context of the church.  Baptismal priesthood is a relational priesthood.  The priestly functions of sacrifice and mediation happen in the relationships one has to God, their neighbors and their environment. This is the difference between in persona Christi and alter Christus as we defined them.  

The social and especially interpersonal, nature of the priesthood of baptism is specifically made evident in the other offices conveyed by baptism, prophet, and king.  Simply put, a prophet calls a king (or society itself) back to God or activates zeal for God in the community.  A king orders society to God’s good purpose.  All of the baptized are called to do these three things in the world as it exists.  The priesthood of baptism is transformative of society.  It is this priesthood that brings the gospel to a broken world and then brings that sacrificial struggle back to the binding sacrifice of the mass.

This is primarily done by the laity who by means of interpersonal relationships and social structures.  Those structures are on a micro and macrocosmic scale.  Those structures can take on many and various forms, some of which are natural and some of which are constructs of society.  Every field of operation is fair game for a baptized priest to do their work, and in this field “wisdom is vindicated by all her children”.  Baptismal priesthood is the priesthood of evangelization by both word and deed and as a priesthood, this evangelization is done by means of mediation and sacrifice.  We already commented on some ways this priesthood operates according to one institution of personal relationship, motherhood.  We will now conclude this treatise with two more structures of practical applications of baptismal priesthood as alter Christus acting through both mediator and sacrifice.  Those structures will be the relationships between spouses and between donor and mendicant. But first, it will be helpful to get a handle on some modalities for experiencing alter Christus.

There are four modalities for experiencing the alter Christus of the baptized priesthood.  How one uses different modalities as a christo-analogical interchange was discussed in the treatise The Onesiman Interface

The primary analogical methodology we are going to apply will be a christo-analogical interchange.  It is fairly standard to have a regular way one analogically interprets a parable in terms of analogically inserting God or Christ.  When Jesus says, “A man had two sons . . .”  The pious reader almost immediately sees “the man” as either God or Christ and the sons as themselves, their neighbors, Christians, sinners or the like depending on how the narrative plays out.  This makes absolute sense given that God made us and is our father, and the faithful are children of God.  But it is a healthy trick to be able to switch hit your analogies in order to be able to garner an exponentially greater amount of fruit from any given parable.  This skill revolves around being able to interchange God or Jesus with the reader and the neighbor or sinner. 

 In that treatise, we gave an example by analyzing the parable of the dishonest steward where we refocused the role of each character in order to change the lesson or meaning of the parable.  We also applied the technique to the Letter of Philemon itself.  Given these stories are our formative texts as Christians, we use them for narrative appropriation in order to shape and give meaning to our lives.  For this treatise, we are discussing what the baptized Christian’s life means as “priest” who acts as an alter Christus.  Like the parables and narratives, we can shift the focus of the meaning of an act depending on who signifies Christ.  However, the fluidity of this christo-analogical interchange is always informed by Christian ontology.  Therefore it all leads back to a oneness in Christ.  There are four experiential analogical possibilities; “Christ as the helper”, “Christ as the helped”, “the helper of Christ” and finally“helped by Christ”. Each of these four ways gives the experient a different insight into the mediation and sacrifice of one who acts as alter Christus.    

The first two modes center on mediation.  The baptized priest presents Christ to another person.  First, there is effecting and experience alter Christus through the modality of “Christ as the helper”.  This is the one that first springs to mind when one hears the phrase “alter Christus”.  One realizes that they themselves must present as Christ to others in order to help, heal, or forgive them. 

The second mode is less expected.  It is experiencing  “Christ as the helped”.  It seems impossible that anyone could “help Christ”, but it must be remembered that the Savior said, “Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”  When we hear this quote the first modality immediately comes to mind, because we are the helpers.  But someone must be helped for this to work and to assume it is never you is to take a stance of pride.  We all need healing, we all need help, we all need forgiveness.  We have the opportunity as Alter Christus to be Christ, who allows himself to be anointed, who understands that he must glean as an impoverished itinerant, who (as an indigent) allows sinners to offer him food and dines with them.  In this way, the practitioner receives help and is consciously aware that they are allowing others to practice charity.  This is not condescending, it is necessary for the practitioner because they need help.  Jesus needed food or he would starve and people helped him.  To invest in this modality of alter Christus is to participate in the humility of Christ, who emptied himself and “had no stately bearing”.  It also teaches one that there is dignity in being helped and allows one to view those one helps under the first mode as possible a possible alter Christus also.  This duel role in the christo-analogical interchange leads to an experience of the greater ontological point, “we are all one in Christ”.  Though we all share brokenness, we also all share the ability to present Christ to one another.  

These first two modes center on alter Christus as a mediation and take the first person perspective.  But given the dual nature of presentation, which requires a “presenter” and a “presented to”, and given the ontological unity we have in Christ, first person christo-analogical interchange is only half of the story for experiencing alter Christus.

When one focuses on how we share Christ from our person, we get first person alter Christus.  This is the priestly function of mediation where we present Christ for others as baptismal priests.  Again, this is not in persona Christi (by ritual), but alter Christi (by will and action in the world). When we focus on our brokenness we get what we will call second person alter Christus.  This is the recognition that we meet Christ in others who help, heal and/or forgive us because we are broken.  In this case, priestly function is sacrifice.  The impetus is completely off ourselves, and we recognize Christ in our neighborhood apart from our self.  In that recognition, we will give up something valuable for/to Christ as a sacrifice.  But in the sacrificial “giving up”, one share in the priesthood of Christ one’s self.  

The first variety of second person alter Christus that employs a cristo-analogical interchange is to be “helped by Christ”.  This is an acknowledgment of weakness and brokenness and the need for aid, either healing, forgiveness, or help.  In terms of alter Christus for the practitioner, it is tantamount to times when Jesus asks the Father for something, for example, to raise Lazarus or to heal someone.  This emptying allows us to shed the hubris that lead to the original fall and conforms us to the “self emptying”: logos who became incarnate.  The nature of this type of sacrifice was discussed at length in the treatise The Spiritual Sacrifice of the Incarnation.  This is an alter Christus of negation, the mode is one of recognizing Christ in the other, but the effect is an experience of the humility of Christ to not see the form of God as “something to be grasped at”.  Just as Christ can say, “The father is greater than I” and through that humility presence divinity for us, so we can say, “my neighbor is Christ to me” and presence Christ himself through a particular humility, for Jesus also said “The father and I are one” and we are all one in Christ.  The benefit of this sacrifice is not the power of Christ's dominion, rather, it is the power of his humility.

The last variety of christo-analogical interchange is the second variety of second person alter Christus.  That is the “Helper of Christ”.  In this variety, we meet Christ in those who need our aid.  As we noted in this mode’s first person  “opposition”, “whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me”.  So we can meet Christ in the poor, or those who need aid or healing, and we offer our skills, gifts and graces to them.  This offering is a sacrifice, we give up our treasure and time to help others.  In this, we become an alter Christus not by mediation, but by priestly sacrifice.  By that sacrifice, even though to analogous role of Christ is played by the one being helped, the practitioner participates in Christ by the baptismal priestly function of sacrifice by use of will and effort in the great high priesthood of Christ.  Again, this is conceivable if one is invested is invest in Christain ontology, where things are simple and manifold at the same time.  All are one in Christ.

        

The priest of baptism does not act by rubric.  It is open to practice in any corporeal or spiritual work of mercy, or in any experience of joy or suffering.  These modes are interchangeable, fluid, and even simultaneous.  It is quite probable that one enters a situation believing they are going to act under one mode, only to find out they have been assigned another by the grace of the Holy Spirit.  A classic example would be where one walks in expecting to mediate via Christ via “Christ the helper” (first person 1) and instead one is mediated to via “helped by Christ (second person 1).  So one would say something like, “I went to help the poor under the over pass, but really I was the one who was helped.”  This openness and ability to adapt is necessary for the practice of baptismal priesthood and, as was discussed in the treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love, is the specific charism Catholics who have undergone the sacrament of marriage.  Thus our first structural application of baptismal priesthood for this section will be the spousal relationship.

Spousal Relationship as a Structure of Baptismal Priesthood

In his General Audience on April 15, 2015, Pope Francis commented on the complementarity between man and woman.  He notes,

[I]t is not man alone who is the image of God or woman alone who is the image of God, but man and woman as a couple who are the image of God. The difference between man and woman is not meant to stand in opposition, or to subordinate, but is for the sake of communion and generation, always in the image and likeness of God.  

The same teaching is followed in the treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love where it discussed the trinity as the primary analogy of married life, with the major narrative for appropriation being the First Parents.  Spouses mediate by their sacramental sign as a married couple.  As we noted in the former paper Sacramental Cosmology The bodies of the couples become fundamental sacramental matter that conveys grace.  The priest's body as fundamental sacral matter stands in persona Christi in a very particular way. But the bodies of the married couple sacramentally portray loving relationships in a wide variety of ways.  They are signs of varieties of love, to each other, to their children and to the world at large.

As we noted the baptismal priesthood, the priesthood we are all called to, must be dynamic and fluid.  Thus married life must often switch hit the analogies and narratives it uses for appropriation.  There are three major analogies of love that are well used in married life, Trinitarian Love, the love of God for rebellious humanity, and the love of Christ for the Church.   The first is the trinitarian analogy, which we mentioned and explored in detail in Two Paths for Expanding True Love.  This narrative appropriation is a priestly mediation of the imago dei as Pope Francis pointed out.  This analogy and narrative appropriation is for guiding the marriage to its perfect manifestation.  When a marriage achieves this it mediates the imago dei as a sacramental sign for the participants and the world.  It is here that one practices their baptismal priesthood in a concelebration of mediation.  

But we also pointed out in Two Paths for Expanding True Love that married life is the more dynamic life of the two, therefore a marriage must be more willing to switch-hit analogies to express many kinds of love, even loves of this imperfect postlapsarian reality. Most often in a marriage the love if the Trinity is a guiding factor rather than an expressed reality.  We all fall short continually.  Therefore there are two other major analogies married couples work with by appropriation to express love that is sacrificial in nature.  They are the love of God for rebellious humanity and the love between Christ and the Church. 

The analogy of the love of God for rebellious humanity is the story of fidelity, the fidelity of God to his covenant with Israel, even when they are unfaithful.  It is the story a member of a marriage can draw on when the other member is breaking the covenant and is unrepentant.  In this case, one is mediating God’s agapic and self giving love through sacrifice of self.  It is this type of love that urges the incarnation, thus when a member of a marriage is forced to patience and fidelity, in as much as they express it, the express the impetus for the incarnation and they express Jesus’ own patience with sinners.  This patience waits until the moment of death for sincere repentance. 

The third major analogy is most likely the most prominent in married life, that is the love between Christ and the Church.  This analogy is where all four modes of christo-analogical interchange can be present.  It has mainly to do with how the married couple interrelates and how they bring Christ and present Christ to each other through mediation and sacrifice.  In this relationship, one member is in need of help, or healing or forgiveness and the other is there to provide for their needs in the ways that Christ provides for his Church.  The basic spiritual methodology for this priestly exercise is given in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians,

Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.  Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.  For the husband is head of his wife just as Christ is head of the church, he himself the savior of the body  As the church is subordinate to Christ, so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.  Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.  So [also] husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one hates his own flesh but rather nourishes and cherishes it, even as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.  “For this reason a man shall leave [his] father and [his] mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.  In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself, and the wife should respect her husband.

In this passage, Paul is using the reader’s understanding of marriage to explain how Christ relates to the church.  But, because of the devaluing of marriage at the expense of other forms of Christian living, we understand Christ’s love for the church better than we understand nuptial love.  This is a particularly Roman Catholic problem, which is sad because our sacramental view of marriage is the most full presentation of what marriage is supposed to be and is perfectly suited to foster priestly action by the baptized.  

 Another major obstacle of this passage is the gender issue, which becomes so blinding to the modern mind that it draws our eyes far away from the applicable point of the passage.  The theological conservative seeks to use this passage as a proof text of divinely sanctioned patriarchal benevolence, whereas the theological progressive invests all available interpretive energies seeking to contextualize the passage and minimize gender roles at the expense of any useful interpretation for daily life.  Both sides get obsessed with gender power-dynamics.  But no such dynamics are present in the passage.  The passage presents Christian power dynamics and thus is about mutual subordination, not domineering power. The universal mandate is made clear in the ever ignored first verse of the passage “Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.”  This is the thesis, and the rest is commentary on this simple declaration of self emptying love.  What Paul goes on to do is explain how each part of a partnership may want to go about doing that and he does it in gender typical ways for his time.  

A helpful way to go about applying this passage to married life is to transform its basic commands into questions.  These questions are gender neutral and will illuminate the sacrificial nature of nuptial love, and there bye illuminate how this structure facilitates baptismal priesthood.  Paul gives imperatives to each member of the marriage.  First, wives are to be subordinate to the husband as to the Lord.  That statement translated into a question becomes, “would I trust this person to make every decision in my life?” Husbands are also charged with a daunting task, love your wives as Christ loves the church, “Would I die for the betterment of person?”  One will notice in each case everything is basically given up, so it is not hard to gender neutralize the passage into a universal beatitude.  The gender differentiation breaks down between the perceived femenine living sacrifice, which implies action on a command, and the masculine sacrificial death, which implies renunciation as opposed to active engagement.  A sociological study may or may not prove bio-sex tendencies toard these modes, but either way corralitive information is irrelivant.  We are all called to both types of sacrifice.

Each member of the marriage should be able to answer both of these questions in the affirmative depending on the circumstance, the need, and the role they play in the operative christo-analogical appropriation.  Each member of the marriage is called to make the ultimate sacrifice of love for the other, in the same way, the church sacrifices for Christ and Christ sacrifices for the Church.  What makes the difference is whether the practitioner is the one in need or the one offering aid/forgiveness.  

One common manner of nuptial sacrifice and mediation as alter Christus is the aquessence of self to the process of cross-spectral mutual pedagogy.  That for any general personality trait, each spousal member abides in a differing place on the spectrum of intensity.  So, for example, the topic we have danced around, gender, could apply.  As Pope Francis said, the genders are not in contrast, but compatible.  But, how that actually plays out in marriage and family life involves a learning process that can be painful if one does not have a sacrificial attitude.  A member of the marriage who is overly masculine, or has a masculinity tainted by concupiscence, must learn femininity and be brought back into balance by their spouse.  In this case, the four modes presented are under the auspices of Christ the teacher and his student.  For it to work the practitioner must give up, sacrifice, how one defines one’s sense of “self”.  The other must teach, that is mediate Christ as the teacher, with patience, mercy, and truth.

This type of sacrifice/mediator dynamic is a constant in the structure of marriage and mirrors the structure of liturgy where the baptized priests sacrifice through the ordained mediator.  But typical of marriage the roles are far more fluid and dynamic, and even (often) simultaneous.  The one who practices their baptismal priesthood successfully in the structure of marriage must learn to recognize which role they are playing and whether the situation best calls for first or second person analogy (as described above). It can apply to any personality trait from social engagement, to relationships, to exercise and diet, to housekeeping methodology, to virility and libido. In every facet of the married couple's life they are mediating Christ as a teacher and/or sacrificing self to Christ the teacher in learning to be better people and a better couple morally, spiritually, socially regarding efficiency etc. It goes far beyond gender dynamics. It is an extremely complex and life long dance. This dance demands constant sacrifice performed by each member of the marriage and then both bring these sacrifices together (for they are truly one) to liturgy to be bound with the community and offered to Christ through the sacrifice of the mass  

Beautiful as this sounds it is often not a pleasurable experience and the resistance, brought by the effect of original sin, leads to argument and conflict in a marriage.  This leads to another powerful matrix of sacrifice and mediation that must be practiced by the baptized priest in the nuptial structure, forgiveness.  In this situation, the four modes of christo-analogical interchange operate as Christ the forgiver and the penitent.  Forgiveness will be necessary whenever there is conflict and forgiveness is needed for offences against both jus ad bellum and jus in bello.  It is also in play in a wider scope when the source of the conflict is that one member has wronged the other.  

Again, regarding forgiveness in marriage, all the four modalities are applicable.  It is up to the individual spouse to gauge whether they are Christ or the penitent, that is, whether they are mediating or sacrificing.  The first person modalities are the easiest to grasp.  One may need to mediate Christ to their partner and offer forgiveness to them when they have done wrong.  Or one may need to be an alter Christus by priestly sacrifice and sacrifice their own pride, seek absolution, and accept forgiveness.

The second person modalities are harder to square.  It seems near impossible to comprehend the dynamic of “forgiver of Christ and Christ forgiven”.  How can one “forgive Christ” he does not wrong us.  But we do target Christ (or God) with blame, even when there is no fault in Christ.  In this way, the “forgiveness” is our letting go of blame by our own realization that it is we who are in the wrong for blaming.  Just as accepting forgiveness is a sacrifice of pride (I have done wrong), this too is a sacrifice of pride (I have judged wrong) which leads to catharsis.  There are a few possible ways this could play out.  First, One may blame the parter in error and need to sacrifice their pride to admit their mistake.  A partner may have done something inadvertently or accidentally that is evil and one is blaming them.  Worse, the partner may have “experienced” something evil and are blamed (miscarriage or sexual harassment for example).  The recognition of Christ in one’s partner helps one reinvest in their partners intractable dignity and helps one let go of bitterness. In each of our examples, the priest of baptism must sacrifice their pride and “forgive”, that is, let go of their judgment, because the partner is blameless (as Christ is when we harshly judge him, his providence or his teaching).  

The reverse is also true.  It may be that you are the partner who has experienced or inadvertently done some evil.  It may be that you are the one who is being wrongly blamed.  In this case can you mediate as an alter Christus? Can you treat your partner as you would want Christ to treat you if you happened to be in the wrong this way? 

These are just two of the ways that partners exercise their baptismal priesthood by the constant practice of meditation and sacrifice as alter Christus.  The dynamism of baptismal priesthood is compounded by the fact that these are only two of many varieties, all of which offer infinite variables. Then add to that marriage is only one structure in which one may practice baptismal priesthood and one cannot achieve a starker contrast than between the dynamic and fluid practice of this priesthood and (minimally fluid though it is) the comparatively rigid practice of ordained priesthood.  Thus, just by way of demonstration, we will lastly offer a structure that takes place outside the nuptial relationship. That way is the structure of the donor and the mendicant.

The Mendicant/Donor Relationship as a Structure of Baptismal Priesthood

Saint John Chrysostom famously stated, “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.”  We spent the entire last section of the former treatise The Onesiman Interface discussing ways that this can be the case.  In that treatise, the lesson drawn from the Judgment of Nations in Chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel teaches us of a special priesthood of the indigent,

When the Son of God came in the flesh, humanity had an opportunity to collaborate with God and worship in his physical presence.  Instead, humanity decided to pronounce judgment and act out of hatred and violence.  The story of the Judgment of nations assures us that God always gives us an opportunity to repent.  Jesus has left to poor to stand in his stead, what we do to them, we do to him.

In that treatise we also took pains to relay the value of the indigent in our postlapsarian world and how their dignity, though unique to postlapsarian reality, is real and effective in its transformative power.  Here we need only stick to our main distinctions, the  four modes of christo-analogical interchange, and how a baptismal priest may utilize them to mediate and sacrifice as an alter Christus.  In this, we will see that we can find Christ in our encounter with the poor both in them as a person and in our self in how we interact with them.  Each different aspect of christo-analogical interchange will give us a variation in our experience.

We can start with the first person alter Christus, the modes of mediation.  The first is the most obvious to the Christain who wishes to give to charity, that is, first person Christ the helper.  When one donates to a mendicant one is offering material aid to them in order to sustain their life or offer them some joy.  Just as Christ helps us and supplies for our needs we go to others and supply for theirs.  We are discussing mendicant and doner which could come under many varieties, corporeal as well as spiritual.  But for the sake of ease, we can keep our constant example giving alms to an indigent.  

The first person mediation of alter Christus maneuver can be more difficult than it seems.  As a Christian one may expect gratitude when acting this way because we assume we have proper gratitude toward Christ concerning his gifts to us.  But actually quite often we do not.  Thus when we experience the ungrateful indigent, the insight we get is Christ’s pain at our ingratitude for all the ingratitude of the world, especially our own.  By this mediation, one meets Christ in one’s self, via the alienation of ingratitude.  This can then be used as motivation to personally practice proper gratitude.

Another useful aspect of this type of mediation comes from the far too common misconception that the poor “have it easy”.  It is a common myth that the indigents on the side of the road somehow make huge sums of money at their trade.  Even if one believes this, one can still make good use of this type of mediation.  In this case, it must be remembered that we are given this planet with all the environmental benefits possible.  Water falls freely from the sky, food self generates or springs freely from the ground. Yet even still we still demand more and more from God.  With this knowledge, one can present as a first person Christ the helper and donate to the indigent in the same way one would want one’s own petty petitions answered.  One can garner divine empathy and come to know that stress and trauma are real despite actual or perceived situations.            

For most reading these lines, the next modality seems near impossible.  This mediation is when one is Christ the helped.  “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” It is possible that anyone reading these lines may find themselves in the position of an indigent and reduced to begging.  (at the very least we all must ask for help in many ways in our lives).  In this case, when the judgment of the nations happens you were the impoverished in need that was ignored.  You as the mendicant are Christ.  The “mendicant orders” of Christianity have ritualized and appropriated this structure of alter Christus as a manner of baptism priestly ministry.  The supreme example is Saint Francis himself, who began that type of order.  Previous to him, Christianity has always had hermits and anchorites who have utilized this mode of mediation.  But it is important to remember that even if this mode is foisted upon the believer it is still a dignified, valid, as effective methodology of mediatory priesthood by baptism.

Under this mode, the mediator has the ability to present Christ to humanity for a second chance.  As we noted in The Onesiman Interface,

when one person is subject to another, the one who controls the power dynamic according to “the world” has a chance to act for the world a second time and treat Christ as Christ should have been treated, because the one standing before them is standing [as an alter Christus].  

As a mediator one is allowing anyone to approach Christ and show humanity’s goodness, unlike what happened when Christ came the first time.  Unfortunately one also will bear the brunt of humanity’s scorn for the poor, just as Christ did.  Thus this mediation shares in Christ’s sacrificial humility, which one can then bring to liturgy in order to bind that sacrifice to the sacrifice of the mass.  

This profound dignity of indigent mediation leads us to shift our christo-analogical position and begin our discussion of second person alter Christus.  One offering to the poor expects the poor to grovel in gratitude because they are in need.  It must be hard to be impoverished and be under constant demands and suspicion.  But if one is an indigent, one can be helped and relieved to find Christ in the donor.  The struggles of constant poverty are humiliation, but if this humiliation is the manure of resentment, then bitterness is what one reaps.  To encounter Christ in the donor, even if the donor's words are harsh or uninformed, allows one to offer sacrifices these humiliations to him.  The indigent is still a baptized priest of Christ.  The indigents sacrifices are as valuable, if not more so than any other.  According to Luke's Gospel, they possess beatitude more naturally than the rest of society.  It is most likely these humiliations that allow it.  As I drive through the urban landscape of my life I see seeming countless beggars, some who I know to stand on certain corners all day, almost every day.  They sit and walk the line for hours.  In that time one is not “entertained” as the rest of us ate by pocket devices and digital social escape.  They seem to live an inner contemplative life, or at least have one foisted upon them.  The indigent can use this time to hone prayer and practice the sacrifice of their baptismal priestly trade, sacrificing their pride and meeting Christ in the donor.  This is the common beatitude of poverty according to Luke’s version of the sermon of the plain.  To meet Christ in the donor helps one acquire and maintain a constant state of gratitude for the free gift of life and the free gift of salvation.       

One of the great benefits of second person alter Christus in giving alms is that one can use one’s baptismal priestly sacrifice, which one carries to the mass as a legitimate offering, to also bring dignity to an indigent and stand tall at the judgment of nations.  When one hears the words of John Chrysostom quoted above the shock is that is conjure this type of priestly encounter with the poor, that one is offering sacrifice to Christ through the poor as mediator.  As we noted above often people will have encounters with the poor where the expect a first person modality and wind up in a second.  “I went to help the poor under the overpass, but really I was the one who was helped.”  Meeting Christ in poverty comes by all four modalities, either as mediator or priest offering sacrifice.  In this case, one is not necessarily seeking theological teaching from the indegint (though do not believe for a moment that this is out of the realm of possibility, or even probability).  Rather one is seeking to meet Christ as a priest offering sacrifice, and therefore under the auspices of a second person modality of alter Christus, a priest offering sacrifice, sharing in the priesthood of Christ, in Christ and to Christ. 

The sacrifice one makes is the offering of time talent and treasure to the indigent.  The treatise The Onesiman Interface discussed how offering to the panhandler is a true sacrifice of that we are often inordinately attached to our money.  Thus when approached by a panhandler we are assaulted by a slew of demonic temptations in the form of questions,

Is this panhandler worthy of my money?  Will this panhandler use my money in ways I deem inappropriate for him to use?  Not even dangerous, by the way, just “inappropriate” or “unwisely”.  

In western capitalism we have an inordinate attachment to money.  We hold it above all things, so much so that much of our prayer life may be consumed with request for money.  “Lord please let me win the lottery, so I never have to pray to you again.”  I would say give donations to hunger relief charities as a matter of course in your life, but when confronted with a panhandler hunger should not be what is on your mind.  You are now being presented with an opportunity to detach from money.  To let go of that thing that is so coveted that it stands above most if not all other relationships.  

  

To relinquish money is to destroy its mastery over you and reassert your fidelity to God over creation.   

But perhaps the more important sacrifice is the sacrifice of pride it takes to recognize the indigent as mediator of Christ. John Chrysostom was right, it is common for us to imagine being with Jesus in first century Palestine and being smug toward the pharisee who challenged him as an upstart.  But in him there was no stately bearing.  Could we recognize a five foot four Jesus who was poor, smelled of body odor, and had rotten teeth as our teacher, master, and savior?  Would we not be more like the pharisee, offering advice or reprimanding him for his lifestyle, than the woman who bathed his feet as a penitent despite his humble appearance?  Practice makes perfect.  As a priest of baptism, we must approach the impoverished beggar with all the zeal of a newly ordained priest approaching the altar to offer sacrifice to Christ.  

The three structures that we offered as examples for baptismal priestly action, motherhood, spousal, and mendicant/donor, are examples of an almost infinite variety of relationships we could illustrate.  If the reader just imagines a treatise that drags on to explore the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange applied to healer and heald, mourner and comforter, student and teacher, boss and worker, siblings, waiter and diner, mutual sharers in joy, mutual sharers in grief, what else?  The list is almost endless.  For each example, there are the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange the setup dynamics of mediation and sacrifice for imaging the alter Christus.  This is the dizzying fluidity, dynamism, and similitude of baptismal priesthood.  Then we come the most important relationship of all, the baptized priest (who may also be an ordained priest) sitting in the pew and the ordained priest standing in persona Christi offering mass, binding all of the mediations and sacrifices into one and offering them to Christ through the liturgy. How many types of priest are there?  There is only one priest, Jesus Christ.  There are two types of Priest, ordained and baptized.  There are infinite types of priests by priestly ministry.

In this last section, we distinguished the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  We categorized those modalities under first person modalities of mediation and second person modalities of sacrifice.  We went on to apply the four modalities in turn to two of an infinite variety of social structures that can be used to practice baptismal priesthood.  Those structures were the nuptial structure and the relationship of donor and mendicant.      

Conclusion

 

 

In the first section, we set out to give an overview of the two types of priesthood in the Catholic church and how they together form a  sacrificial economy.  We began by defining the role of the priest as one who sacrifices and mediates.  We defined the two types of priesthood, ordained and baptized and demonstrated the role of each.  We noted the role of the ordained priest as one in persona Christi, ministers in the ritual life of the church. And we note the role of the baptized as alter Christus, whose job is to heal and sacralize the world.  We lastly pointed out that these two roles present the gifts of God, grace, and salvation, in the ordained priesthood and our willing response and struggle with that gift in the priesthood of baptism.

In the second section, we sought to discuss how Mary, by her immaculate conception, participates in the baptismal priesthood and is the first “Christian priest”. We carefully distinguished, again, between an ordained priest, which Mary was obviously not, and a priest of baptism, which Mary was by her willful involvement of presenting an alter Christus.  We discussed how Mary fulfills both roles of a priest, mediation and sacrifice.  Primarily she is the mediator of the primordial sacrament of the incarnation. We discussed how this mediation involves maternal sacrifice, both of body and of self.  Lastly, we discussed the value of Mary’s life for any priest by baptism as a model for narrative appropriation, such they can make effective their own parental sacrifices.  

In the last section, we distinguished the four modalities of christo-analogical interchange.  We categorized those modalities under first person modalities of mediation and second person modalities of sacrifice.  We went on to apply the four modalities in turn to two of an infinite variety of social structures that can be used to practice baptismal priesthood.  Those structures were the nuptial structure and the relationship of donor and mendicant. 

There is an inflationary danger to applying the title priest to all of the baptized.  It seems to run close to the protestant concept of “priesthood of all believers”.  But the situation now presents the danger of the opposite.  Non ordained Catholics experience the alienation brought on by clericalism.  According to that alienating narrative the mass is administered by one for the benefit of others, rather than a dialogue of two types of priest working in unison to offer their sacrifices to God.  There is a need for a rebalancing and reinvestment in the prominence of the baptismal priesthood so that members of the laity can authentically engage in true, full and active participation in the liturgy.