Why have priests? If all Christians are priests, Carlo Brusard is next.

Hello and welcome to Focus the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding,

and defending your Catholic faith. I'm Psy Kell at your host. And a common challenge that's made

to Catholics from our Protestant brothers and sisters, we don't need the priesthood. Peter

tells us clearly we don't need the priesthood in the first letter of St. Peter. He tells us that

we're all priests now. This means that he's done away with the ministerial priesthood.

That objection is one of the many objections that Carlo Brusard tackles in his book,

meeting the Protestant challenge how to answer 50 biblical objections to Catholic beliefs,

so we invited Carlo in and asked him that. Why do we have a ministerial priesthood

when it would appear in the first letter of St. Peter that Christ has done away with that ministerial

priesthood? Here's Carlo.

Carlo Brusard, Apologist extraordinaire, thank you for being with us.

Well, thanks for having me. I don't know about extraordinaire, but Apologists, yes.

No, I think Apologists extraordinaire.

Well, we're working on it. Okay, good. You might have noticed this, but a lot of times if you go

into a Protestant church, there's no priest there. There's a minister, a preacher,

but there ain't no priest there. No priest. So this is one of the differences between

Catholics and Orthodox and many, not all, but many in the Protestant tradition,

right? Is a difference in opinion about the importance of the priesthood or who exactly

is the priest, I guess, right? One way to say it. So I'm going to give you the Protestant

challenge, and then we'll go through it and see if we can justify the Catholic position.

Yeah, in order to be clear, you said, you know, we don't see any priest there, at least the type

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