[4] Anthony Pogorelc writes that clericalism is a social phenomenon and product of organizational development in which elites/officials exercise domination over the subordinate members and structures in religious institutions.
Outside of Christianity, clericalism is not restricted to the ordained (e.g., priests, ministers), as it occurs in purely secular guilds, such as academia, the legal and medical establishments, and the public-safety clergy, i.e., the police and military.
James Carroll gives as an example of the clericalist privileging of the priesthood in current Catholicism the fact that "Church law provides for the excommunication of any woman who attempts to say Mass, but mandates no such penalty for a pedophile priest".
In 2007, Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea wrote,[12] For the priest who is vulnerable to clericalist narcissism, and to the bishop embedded in it, the interpretation of ontological change that posits an actual merger with the being of Jesus Christ at the moment of ordination can support a belief that clergy are called by God to be inherently superior to other human beings.One schismatic Traditionalist Catholicism group, Novus Ordo Watch (which claims that with the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church ceased to be truly Roman Catholic and became a "Neo-Modernist sect"), defends the power of the clergy, (though it doesn't use the term clericalism).
[13]Opposition to religious authority, typically in social or political matters, and especially opposing the influence of Roman Catholicism, appeared in Catholic Europe throughout the 19th century, in various forms, and later in Canada, Cuba, and Latin America.
According to the Pew Research Center several post-communist states are current practitioners of political anti-clericalism, including Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, China and North Korea.