What does Pope Francis mean with "clericalism"?

[farpinho]

What does Pope Francis mean with “clericalism”?

 

[godisgood77]

He means that we should reject the efforts by priests and bishops that focus on maintaining or increasing the power of a religious hierarchy when they should be focused on the beatitudes

 

[De_Maria]

What does Pope Francis mean with “clericalism”?

Clericalism is the attitude that it’s the Church’s job to do all things religious. Thus, lay people won’t minister to others because it’s the Priest’s job. They won’t give alms, because the Church is supposed to give. They won’t help fix the Church, because the Church does that. Lay people can’t give blessings, its the Priests’ job.

Clericalism is one of the main reasons for Vatican II. It is a condition which still afflicts many lay Catholics today. I’ve heard that there are some priests that still hold that attitude, also. But I’ve only seen it in the lay community. Especially in the Spanish speaking community. But some visitors from Ireland told me it was deeply ingrained there.

Vatican II has done much to eradicate that idea, but you still see vestiges of it.

 

[BlackFriar]

The Wiki definition seems a good start:

“… the application of the … leadership or opinion of ordained clergy in matters of either the church or broader political and sociocultural import.”

“In a pejorative manner, “clericalism” is often used to denote an ecclesiolatry approach to issues beyond the church by either clergy or their supporters.”
“… the cronyism and cloistered political environs of Christian denominational hierarchy…”

“… is not restricted to the ordained as it occurs in purely secular guilds, such as academia, the legal and medical establishments, and the public-safety clergy: the police and military.”

“an internal and cloistered body that answers only to itself or that such leaders should … act as a powerful force in matters beyond the internal concerns of their church.”

 

[babochka]

Pope Francis spoke on a different aspect of clericalism here:

Pope Francis and the Reform of the Laity| National Catholic Register

In a 2011 interview with an Argentinian Catholic news agency, he said this contagious spiritual sickness comes from a clericalism that passes from clergy to laypeople.

“We priests tend to clericalize the laity. We do not realize it, but it is as if we infect them with our own disease. And the laity — not all, but many — ask us on their knees to clericalize them, because it is more comfortable to be an altar server than the protagonist of a lay path. We cannot fall into that trap — it is a sinful complicity.”

Clericalization means focusing fundamentally on the things of the clergy and, more specifically, the sanctuary, rather than on bringing the Gospel to the world.

Clericalism ails the clergy when they become too self-referential rather than missionary. But it afflicts laypeople worse, when they begin to believe that the fundamental service God is asking of them is to become greeters, lectors or extraordinary ministers of holy Communion at Church rather than to live and spread the faith in their families, workplaces, schools, neighborhoods and beyond.

The reform that’s needed, he continued in that interview, is “neither to clericalize nor ask to be clericalized. The layperson is a layperson and has to live as a layperson with the power of baptism, which enables him to be a leaven of the love of God in society itself, to create and sow hope, to proclaim the faith, not from a pulpit but from his everyday life. And, like all of us, the layperson is called to carry his daily cross — the cross of the layperson, not of the priest.”