In the working document of Convivium, the priestly gathering celebrated with great fanfare to the greater glory of the Cardinal of Madrid, there was included, within a section titled “peculiar proposals”, the reference to a «temporal» priesthood. The expression caused scandal due to its openly heretical approach: Attributing temporality to the priesthood is not a minor terminological issue, but an attack on the very core of Catholic doctrine on the Holy Order. In certain ecclesial dynamics, no one wants to be marked and end up relegated as a vicar in the most ungrateful and peripheral assignment. Perhaps for that reason, it had to be none other than Leo XIV (to the dismay even of the heterodox theologian Andrea Grillo, who is attributed great influence in Traditionis Custodes) who, in the message to Convivium itself, did speak out and clarified to those present:
«It is not about inventing new models or redefining the identity we have received, but about reproposing, with renewed intensity, the priesthood in its most authentic core—being alter Christus—, allowing Him to configure our life, unify our heart, and shape a ministry lived from intimacy with God, faithful surrender to the Church, and concrete service to the people entrusted to us.»
The Indelible Character: Participation in the Eternal
The Church has not left this matter in ambiguity. The Council of Trent defined that the sacrament of Holy Orders imprints an indelible character. That expression is not rhetorical. The sacramental character means a stable configuration of the subject to Christ. It is not a revocable mandate nor a mission that ceases when pastoral utility changes. It is a permanent ontological transformation.
The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed that the ministerial priesthood differs essentially from the common priesthood of the faithful. It is not a matter of degree within the same reality, but a difference in nature. The presbyter is not simply a baptized person with more responsibilities; he is someone sacramentally configured to Christ Head and Shepherd.
The biblical root is clear: Christ is a priest «forever» according to the order of Melchizedek. Ministerial participation in that priesthood cannot be understood as constitutively temporal without emptying the analogy. If what is received is participation in an eternal priesthood, it cannot be defined by caducity.
Speaking of a «temporal» priesthood introduces a direct tension with that ontology. If it is temporal by nature, it is not indelible. If it structurally depends on a historical configuration that can cease as such, then what is received is not character but function.
The Functional Reduction: From Ontology to Community
The temptation to shift the axis toward the functional is not new. Hans Küng insisted on an interpretation of the ministry centered on its historical development and its community configuration. The emphasis for Küng—and his heirs like Grillo—is not on outright denying the sacramental character, but on relativizing its classical ontological formulation, presenting it as the result of a later theological evolution.
When the ministry is explained primarily as a structure shaped by the community and its needs, the focus shifts. What becomes decisive is no longer the ontological configuration received, but the ecclesial recognition that enables a function. The implicit logic is clear: if the community configures the ministry according to historical circumstances, it can also structurally redefine it.
That scheme has an evident affinity with the Lutheran conception. In Luther, there is no ontological difference between minister and layperson; there is a functional designation within the common priesthood. The minister exercises an office entrusted by the community. He is not marked by a permanent sacramental character. When, in the Catholic sphere, one begins to speak of «temporal» forms of priesthood, even if presented as experimental or «peculiar,» one enters that same functional logic and a situation of rupture.
The consequence is a silent mutation: the priest ceases to be perceived as stably configured to Christ and begins to be seen as the holder of a card that enables him for a structural assignment.
Discipline as a Symptom: From Being to Status
This ontological shift has visible effects in disciplinary practice.
Traditionally, penalties such as excommunication or suspension affected the exercise of the ministry and ecclesial communion, but not the sacramental being. The excommunicated priest remained a priest. The suspended priest remained ontologically configured to Christ. The penalty precisely underlined that the character remained even when the exercise was prohibited.
From a traditional perspective, resignation from the clerical state fits into very specific assumptions and has always had a minimal application: voluntary and definitive abandonment of the ministry with an express request for dispensation; very serious crimes that make public exercise morally incompatible; public and persistent rupture with the faith. In these cases, the Church protects the common good and avoids scandal. It does not erase the character—that is impossible—but withdraws legal rights and obligations.
The problem arises with the recent temptation to turn resignation from the clerical state into an almost automatic response to media crises, disciplinary conflicts, or external pressures that could be addressed with suspension or other medicinal penalties. Here the conceptual mutation appears.
If the priesthood is understood as an indelible character, discipline regulates the exercise without touching the sacramental identity. Suspension is coherent: it limits action, it does not redefine being. If, on the other hand, the priesthood is perceived as a functional status, resignation becomes a logical mechanism: the enabling is withdrawn.
In the practice of recent years, resignation from the clerical state is beginning to be presented as a superior and additional penalty to excommunication and suspension, which never implied loss of the clerical state. It is perceived as a sort of definitive cancellation, almost as if the priesthood itself had been extinguished. Although juridically the character remains, the collective imaginary associates it with a «de-priesting,» with all the theological message behind it.
That phenomenon reveals a bureaucratization of the concept. What is ontological begins to be managed as if it were administrative. Sacramental language remains in the texts, but practice transmits something else: that the priesthood is a status that authority grants and withdraws.
Conclusion: The Eternal Cannot Be Managed as a License
If the priesthood is stable participation in the eternal order of Christ, the Church disciplines behaviors and regulates exercises, but does not administer ontology as if it were a contract. When the category of «temporal» priesthood is introduced, it opens the door to a functional understanding that erodes the doctrine of the indelible character.
Reducing the priesthood to a structurally caducous reality implies transferring it from the order of being to the order of function. And when the order of being dissolves into that of function, discipline ceases to protect a permanent sacramental configuration and passes to operate as credential management. The eternal is subjected to the logic of status.