When Paul urges his listeners to become his imitators in offering himself up as sacrifice, just as Paul imitates Christ; or Peter tells his that they are living stones of the long-awaited New Temple: both take for granted that to be in Christ is a fundamentally priestly form of life.
One can, and some do, read Martel’s book as an accusation against the world of systemic mendacity which it reveals. For my part, I read it as one of the events which signal that God’s forgiveness is at last reaching even the hardest-hearted parts of our Church.
So, the other shoe has finally dropped. The veil has been removed from what the French rather gloriously call a “secret de Polichinelle” - an open secret: one that “everybody knows” but for which the evidence is both elusive and never really sought. The merely anecdotal is, at last, acquiring the contours of sociological visibility.