Why do Catholics call their priests “father”?
The correct answer from Catholic Answers online library. http://www.catholic.com/library/Call_No_Man_Father.asp Call No Man “Father”? Many Protestants claim that when Catholics address priests as “father,” they are engaging in an unbiblical practice that Jesus forbade: “Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Matt. 23:9). In his tract 10 Reasons Why I Am Not a Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist anti-Catholic writer Donald Maconaghie quotes this passage as support for his charge that “the papacy is a hoax.” Bill Jackson, another Fundamentalist who runs a full-time anti-Catholic organization, says in his book Christians Guide To Roman Catholicism that a “study of Matthew 23:9 reveals that Jesus was talking about being called father as a title of religious superiority . . . [which is] the basis for the [Catholic] hierarchy” (53). How should Catholics respon
