sacerdotalism

plural sacerdotalisms

1. countableuncountableThe spirit of the priesthood; devotion to priestly interests; priestcraft.
2. countableuncountableThe belief that priests can act as mediators between God and humankind.

   [T]hey tell fortunes, which practice, confined to a certain caste but forbidden to others, seems to be a kind of sacerdotalism.

   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

   2 more examples

   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.

   1894 December – 1895 November, Thomas Hardy, chapter III, in Jude the Obscure, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], published 1896, →OCLC

   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.

   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