Originally Posted by
JAD
To put it in a very basic way, God continually reaches out to us. He sends mission after mission after mission, all throughout our history -- the Garden, and then Noah, and then Abraham, and Moses, and over and over again, He extends the covenant, we break it, He extends it again. In Christ he broke out the tac nuke of covenants, the MOAB. Christ created the sacraments -- baptism, eucharist, confirmation, holy orders, marriage, reconciliation, and anointing of the sick -- as ways of reaching back out to us, over and over again, throughout our individual lives. In the fullness of faith, Christians use these sacraments to continually try to get back toward union with Christ (since we continually slide away). Our union isn't perfected within this life, even for the saints, but we work to get closer, and to return to closeness. As Jesus was the rescue mission sent to save the world once and for all, the sacraments are the little missions that work in each of our lives, on a daily (or at least weekly) basis.
All baptized are priest, prophet, and king (interesting discussion for another time). But we teach and believe that the descent of the holy spirit, communicated as it was in Acts through the laying on of hands (ordination), permits some people to act -- temporarily, occasionally, and under very specific conditions -- in persona Christi Capitas. That person effects the sacraments in the place of Jesus - and just as we need Jesus, we need the priest to perform that function. We need an externality. The externality doesn't need to be perfect -- they aren't, in fact, intended to be so -- but we believe that they have a small grace through the sacrament of ordination that is biblical, Jesus-derived, and necessary.
The Pope and bishops are primarily there to preserve the direct chain of that ordination -- they can be traced back directly to Peter -- and to preserve and defend tradition (see GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chapter 4 "the Ethics of Elfland," for a nearly perfect description of why tradition is important). They are there to prevent the Church from changing quickly, thus to defend it from heresies of popular opinion that would destroy it. Arianism is the greatest example, but they come up all the time. Ones from outside, like Dr. Meyer's helpful observations, don't matter much; it really becomes an issue when it comes from within (as it did with Arius). We are about to go through a whole shitpile of that as a result of the McCarrick scandal, and honestly I wish we had a Pope better grounded in theology (we had one, but he was not a great administrator and couldn't hang). Francis' gift for PR probably won't make the Pennsylvania stuff go better, and I sincerely hope he doesn't say something dumb about McCarrick.
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