The purpose of this research is to examine the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical, religious, and cultural background and context for the emergence of the Church's priesthood and provide a survey in general terms of the evolution of the institution from the earlier period to the present day, and then to discuss ways in which complex issue fronts facing the contemporary priesthood--notably celibacy, married priests, and women's ordination--may forecast possible lines of development.
Given the well-documented fact of the institutional religious lineage of Judaism and Christianity, one might very well think that features of the Jewish priesthood was taken up by the early Christians and adapted to the purposes of their body of priests. The biblical source for this is Jesus's empowering the apostles to forgive sends and sending them to spread the gospel just as God the Father had sent the Son, as well as Paul's assumption of priestly duties in the manner of the priests of the Old Law. But that formulation overlooks the somewhat complex origins of the Christian priesthood. Indeed, as Rausch explains (16), in the earliest days of the Church, the designation priest or levite was reserved for the Jewish priesthood, a reservation that became more pronounced as the differences of custom and belief between Christian and Jewish cults became more pronounced. Bishops alone, comprising the so-called episcopate, appear initially to have been regarded as the Christian clergy, although Rausch cites references to apostles, bishops, and deacons in early Christian tradition. But as the community of the faithful grew, so did the need for an administrative apparatus structured more formally than an episcopal staff.
There does appear to have been a distinction made between deacons, who assisted the bishops in "building up the community," and pastoral liturgical priests per se (Rausch 17),...