"clerical class" is a valid phrase in English and can be used in both spoken and written contexts.
For example, "Children from the clerical class were especially disadvantaged by the education policies of the 1970s."
"Tolerance of the clerical class is so low.
Why would he deliberately undercut his own clerical class?
"I'd love to show the clerical class, the clerical culture -- from the inside," he added.
Thus far, the Wahhabi clerical class has complied with the monarchy's frequent requests to sanction its various measures.
It hasn't, and the demands for reform seem to have won significant support from important members of Iran's clerical class.
Presumably, since the Facetiae were written in Latin, they could be savored by the clerical class without corrupting the morals of the masses.
One of the more unusual aspects of the crisis is the visible absence of the clerical classes.
Trollope became the poet of the clerical classes — Anglican priests (who were state employees, spiritual bureaucrats), civil servants, members of Parliament, and solicitors.
But more interesting is that the vast majority of the clerical classes are themselves alienated from the Islamic Republic they in large part helped to found.
There can be no doubt that the clerical classes remain important, and individual mullahs highly influential, but as a collective body they have gradually lost that sense of cohesion they had built over the better part of a century.
For example, the lampooning of the clerical classes is generally not acceptable, but cartoons of former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, himself a man of the cloth, go unpunished.
