Materialist Anti-Physics: Medieval Priest Edition

This article on the priest's role in fact tells you almost nothing about the role of priests.
https://www.historydefined.net/what-was-a-priests-role-during-the-middle-ages/

What you want to know is how a medieval farmer's life would differ if they didn't have a priest. 

It tells you one fact: they would pay fewer taxes. (Traditionally 1/3 of their grain harvest - a detail not present in the linked article.)

How did the farmer feel about his priest? Aside from doing rituals, how did a priest spend his day? What roles in the social fabric fell to the priest, and were they any good at these roles? They weren't trained - okay, did they need to be trained? Public school teachers, for example, are identical regardless of whether they've "qualified" or not. The relevant skills are like muscles. You can't train muscles by sitting for lectures on lifting technique. (Also the skills are inherently deviant, but never mind.)

 

"This created the ludicrous situation where people attended Mass, and neither the priest nor the parishioners knew what was being said meant."

Social role: every Sunday had mandatory rest. No matter how tyrannical your local lord, the farmers would be able to sit down and relax for a few hours every week. The "ludicrous" motions were merely an excuse for an important function. 

Of course excuses were lies, so a genuinely holy religion says farmers must rest because rest is the commandment. 

Nevertheless, having found one excuse-function dyad, we must suspect there are others. Priests were idle: what function did that serve, if any? Were they idle de facto or merely de jure? 

"It was and still is a stricture of Roman Catholicism that priests should be celibate and not marry. But in practice, this was widely ignored. "

Because it was and still is a bad, unholy rule. Ignoring it is pious.

A genuinely holy religion avoids impious rules, but never mind.

"In time the Reformation would lead to a significant improvement in the methods used to train priests."

Who said it? Know them by their fruits. Prima facie, "training" the priests led to destruction of the Church. Improved it out of existence. 

We still don't know how a regular medieval farmer related to their priest. 

This is like describing a heart and failing to mention that it pumps blood. Is this genuinely a heart, or is it merely a muscle cancer? From the linked alleged-description, we can't tell the difference.

How the farmer felt about their priest is a nonphysical fact. You may even, perhaps, call it spiritual. This feeling dominated how the farmer chose to interact with the priest, and thus was a primary driver of the social role. Because materialists cannot discuss this fundamental property, in the end they cannot discuss anything of substance at all, material or otherwise.

P.S. Speaking of excuse-function dyads, English vicarages ended being UBI for geniuses, which as it turns out is a great idea. Unlike peasants, given the chance to be idle and indolent, very few geniuses choose to be idle. Rather, it merely removes anything which competes with their natural desire to show off and express their genius. The profits of such a plan vastly exceed any costs, especially the cost that some non-geniuses pass the test anyway and some geniuses nevertheless choose to become useless degenerates.