If everyone baptized is already a priest, why do we have priests as well?

🔥The question: “If there is such a thing as the ‘common priesthood’, can lay people celebrate Mass and hear confessions too?”

🛡️The Church's answer: Everyone who is baptized shares in the priesthood of Christ. This is called the common priesthood of the faithful. We offer God spiritual sacrifices — prayer and thanksgiving, taking part in the sacraments, a holy life, self-denial and loving service — and we bear witness to Christ in the world. Lay people are not spectators without a mission.

The common priesthood and the ministerial priesthood received in the sacrament of Holy Orders are not two levels of one thing, with one holding more of it. They differ essentially, and inside the one priesthood of Christ they are ordered to one another. The ministerial priest teaches the word in the name of Christ and serves the People of God, and above all makes the eucharistic sacrifice present in the person of Christ. Sharing in the common priesthood does not mean that anyone at all may take up the ordained ministry, or the sacraments entrusted to it, at will.

🧐If they press further: “So is the ministerial priesthood holier, and the laity below it?” — ordination is not an award for being superior or a certificate of perfection; it is the grace and the responsibility of serving the community. Every one of the faithful holds the same dignity through baptism and is called to holiness, and the different ministries and roles work together for one shared mission, like the members of a body.

✨In one sentence: “Every believer shares through baptism in the common priesthood that offers up a whole life and a whole love, and the ordained priest serves the community in word and sacrament through the ministerial priesthood, which is something distinct from it.”