Peter does not teach that Christians are so many
separate priests, but that they share in the one
priesthood of Christ. And all Christians share in it
because they are all members of His Body.

It is this organic aspect of things that at once
protects from displacement the sole mediatorship of
Christ, and explains the consistency therewith of
ministerial priesthood in the Church on earth.   The
ministerial priest has no other priesthood than that
of the laity, and to set lay priesthood and
ministerial priesthood in sharp antithesis is
misleading. There is but one priesthood;   and the
participation  in  it   of   ministers   and  laymen 
is   equally real, is equally grounded in membership
of Christ’s Body, and is unalterably conditioned by
interior organic relations which preclude external
substitution or intervention by ministers between the
laity and Christ.   The difference between those to
whom the   name   “priest”   is   technically  applied
— the technical limitation must not be overlooked —
and laymen is not one of kind of priesthood, for all
have the same priesthood, fundamentally speaking. It
lies in the offices fulfilled in this priesthood.  
Not all have the same office therein.1    

The “priest” technically so called has an official or
ministerial part in it, whereas the rest participate
in his priestly ministrations unofficially  and
personally.   He is their leader and organ, but the
function is as truly theirs as it is his. This
function is organic, an act of the Body of Christ, and
the ministerial organs are organs of the Body. They
are also ministrations of Christ, but only because
their ministrants are organs of His mystical Body —
not less so because the relation involved is of
Christ’s appointment and of the Holy Spirit’s
effecting.
 
History shows that the ministrations of the Church on
earth are liable to sad abuses, and that grave
hindrances to the Church’s spiritual work are thereby
created.    But we surely show lack of faith in the
work of the Holy Spirit and in His appointed methods
when we are betrayed by our legitimate resentment
against human misuse of them into abandoning them,
whether wholly or in part. The evils requiring
reformation pertain to human perversity. They do not
inhere in the institutions of the Christian covenant,
which retain their spiritual value for earnest souls
in the most corrupt ages of Church history.

§ 8. Out of these evils have grown the mutually
related disasters of loss of  the  Church’s visible
unity and of a very serious reduction of
ecclesiastical efficiency. The result is that the
Church is widely declared to be on trial before the
bar of enlightened Christian judgment, and is said to
be found wanting.  In Christian lands millions have
ceased to take the Church seriously, and that abnormal
and truly functionless thing called “churchless
Christianity” is extending its sway far and wide.  An
alarming proportion of those who retain an ostensible
allegiance to one or other of “the Churches” do so
without vital reason, and without noticeable effects
upon their lives and characters.

1 Cf. Rom. xii.  4-7.


From Francis J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology vol viii p63
A.D. 1918