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The Catholic church agrees, but then accept the rest of the story.

And the priests acting through Christ perform the Sacraments and bring others to Jesus.

The Catholic Church is not saying the apostles are doing this by some magical powers or by their own power. Jesus “breathed on them” and gave them the power of the Holy Spirit to forgive sins. But the fact is the apostles are the revealed instruments of God’s forgiveness. If this is not a priest, then what is a priest?

There is a problem, a gap so wide that we can hardly be heard across it. To ME, to say, as Msgr. Pope does (and you, and others do) that the Episkopos and Presbyteroi of the Church are priests in Christ's priesthood ... TO ME that makes perfect sense and is congruent with 1 Cor 12 and elsewhere.

So WE would say, there is ONE Priest, even our Lord IHS XP, and the bishops and priests are priests in Him. It's not a multiplicity any more (or less) than any body is.

But metmom, hearing us says this, says, more or less, "There is ONE priest." And we are left shaking our heads because we thought we just said that!

(In this connection it's fun to do a word study on the phrase "in Christ" and related phrases like "in Him," or "in me" in the gospels and Paul.)

In related news, while the various contending schools of dispensationalists are impressive in their scholarship and their certainty, they strike me (no offense meant to anyone) as tone-deaf to the questions of time and eternity, of a changeless God engaging with temporal creatures.

So they cite a truly impressive array of verses and passages and,as it were, fold their arms and say,"Q.E.D." And yet I am almost completely unmoved and unpersuaded because, as far as I can see, they are imposing "enlightenment" and even materialist and empiricist categories in questions before which materialism and empiricism crumple.

While the REAL, 8-cylinder, turbo-charged, fuel-injected gnostics accuse of of being crudely materialistic, a great many Protestants and other non-Catholics say we are "mystical." But it is philosophy baptized (I mean, philosophy perfected by revelation) that leads me to say that an unnoticed arbutus in an unbaptized land sings a song of praise to the Creator which only those who have been graced with the Spirit will understand (to some small extent) but which all those aware of their longing for something outside the world may, MAY, hear.

To me personally and as a dilettante philosopher, the song of the flower which today is and tomorrow is not is a matter of grave importance when I, creeping on my knees, approach the throne of grace.

To them some of what I just wrote is incomprehensible and the rest perilously mistaken. Conversation will not flow smoothly.