Church has an undeniably hierarchical dimension. However much he is a man like everyone else,51 there is an inescapable aloneness of the priest,52 which endures even through whatever secularization of the priesthood and which would remain even if celibacy were not a mandatory discipline in the Western Church. The danger of secularized understandings of priesthood lies in suspicion of what is spiritual. Cries that priestly formation has been too “monastic” and now must be secularized often relegate