Russell Shaw: On Clericalism

Imagine a man who wakes up in the morning with a headache, fever, and chills. The symptoms persist and are there when he goes to bed that night. Next day, it's the same thing again -- headache, fever, chills. This continues day after day, week after week, over and over. Finally the poor man starts to think: "I guess this is how people always feel. I just have to live with it."

The Catholic Church is something like that man. In the Church, the illness is called clericalism. We Catholics have suffered from it so long that most of us take it for granted. In fact, we're clericalists ourselves. "That's how it is," we say. And our symptoms persist.

They look like this:...

While not really a Russell Shaw fan, I thought it might be worth reading reading what he says about the topic.