sacerdotalism

English

Etymology

sacerdotal +‎ -ism

Noun

sacerdotalism (countable and uncountable, plural sacerdotalisms)

  1. The spirit of the priesthood; devotion to priestly interests; priestcraft.
  2. The belief that priests can act as mediators between God and mankind.
    • 1895, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Part 6, Chapter 3,
      You make me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it may be called, if it’s that which has caused this deterioration in you.
    • 1898, Richard Francis Burton, The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam, edited by W. H. Wilkins, London: Hutchinson, Chapter 5, p. 223,
      […] they tell fortunes, which practice, confined to a certain caste but forbidden to others, seems to be a kind of sacerdotalism.
    • 1933, H. G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come, Book 5, Chapter 9,
      This was the phrase of that interesting mystic St. Paul (Saul) of Tarsus […] who did so much to pervert and enlarge the simpler cosmopolitan fraternalism of Jesus of Nazareth […] before it was finally overwhelmed and lost in the sacrificial sacerdotalism of formal Christianity.
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