Catholic consecration creates priestly qualification rather than recognizing it

Evidence

This tension between everyone’s a priori lack of qualification for a certain superiority and the absolute qualification which he acquires a posteriori through the interference of a higher authority, reaches its peak in Catholic clergy. Here, family tradition, or education from childhood on, play no role. Even the personal quality of the candidate is unimportant in comparison to the spirit which exists in mystical objectivity and which is bestowed upon him through consecration to priesthood. The superior position is not given to him because he alone is naturally predestined for it—although this may, of course, be of some importance and does form the basis for a certain differentiation among those admitted. Nor is it given to him on the greater chance of his being “called” rather than not. No, the consecration creates the special qualification for the position to which it calls the individual, because it transfers the spirit to him. The principle of God giving an office and the required competence along with it is here realized in the most radical fashion, in both of its two dimensions—unfitness prior to the occupancy, and subsequent fitness created by the “office” itself. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 776

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘office confers the mind’ principle parallels Weber’s routinization of charisma and institutional legitimation; also resonates with sociologies of professional self-fashioning.
• ADDENDUM: The public office that ‘creates’ the leader’s competence parallels how infrastructure/craft institutions generate the capacities they appear merely to house.