sacerdotalism

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English

Etymology

From 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 humankind.
    • a. 1891 (date written), Richard F[rancis] Burton, “II. The Gypsy. Chapter V. The Gypsy in Asia.”, in W[illiam] H[enry] Wilkins, editor, The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam , London: Hutchinson & Co , published 1898, →OCLC, part II (Topographical Notes on the Gypsies and the Jats), § 4 (The Gypsies of Syria), page 223:
      [T]hey tell fortunes, which practice, confined to a certain caste but forbidden to others, seems to be a kind of sacerdotalism.
    • 1894 December – 1895 November, Thomas Hardy, chapter III, in Jude the Obscure, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, , published 1896, →OCLC:
      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.
    • 1933 September, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “A New Phase in the History of Life”, in The Shape of Things to Come, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: The Macmillan Company, →OCLC, 5th book (The Modern State in Control of Life), footnote *, page 429:
      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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