Laymen in Priestly Robes

This chapter addresses the extent to which parish clergy were embedded in their local community and considers how familial, social, and economic factors firmly bound clerics to a life that very much mirrored that of their parishioners. In fact, people of the parish were often connected to their priests through ties of kinship and affinity. Clerics lived out their lives as more than just priests; they were also the sons, brother, uncles, and nephews of the people in the parish. In effect, priests behaved like laymen because they were laymen in the priestly profession. Indeed, parish clergy represented an amalgamation of both the clerical and secular worlds. The clerical profession provided them with a priestly identity, and their experience as men of the village, in turn, influenced how they interacted with parishioners as priests.