Observing that minority religions are second-class in the US and one is expected to conform to the majority is an observation, not an angry outburst.
Which to me is even stronger and more subjugating than “my teacher.”
I’m nominally Catholic. It had never even occurred to me to connect the term with familial kinship. It’s always just been an honorific to me, nothing more, nothing less. If it does mean my spiritual father (which I suppose it might), then that’s a meaning that completely went over my head. But I don’t place any special weight on terms like “father” or “brother.” I call many people “brother” who are not biologically related to me. My tenant calls me “papi” (meaning “daddy.”) I do understand others are not me and have different feelings towards these words, but I just call people by whatever respectful title they prefer: rabbi, imam, father, sri, reverend, lord, supreme ruler of the universe, whatever. I can intellectually understand the thoughts of where people who object to this are coming from, even if it seems odd to me from social conditioning.
I very much see your point, and that calling a priest “Father” carries a subtext of deference to his spiritual authority that is not appropriate to you; a subtext missing when, say, calling another member of your fraternity “Brother”.
Nitpick, though, since you’ve said that English isn’t your native tongue: “Priest” is not a title. Should you ever encounter a Catholic priest, you won’t offend by calling him, say, “Reverend Churchwell” (to use the name of my old parish priest who wouldn’t have objected if you called him “Steve”); but “Priest Churchwell” would sound weird.
I’m genuinely surprised that any Doper would be skeptical of such a claim coming from a credible source. Off the top of my head, I personally can’t think of a language or culture where I know that elders are commonly referred to as “grandfather” but I have zero difficulty believing it’s possible, because there are so many, many different ways that humans express themselves.
For example, in Indonesian, the terms for “mother” and “father” are the same as “Mrs.” and “Mr.” Customs vary across Indonesian cultures (it’s a very diverse nation) but there are lots of areas where the term for a person you’re fairly close to/on equal terms with is the same as “brother” or “sister.” Likewise, older people are frequently referred to with honorifics that are words for “aunt” and “uncle.”
It’s also common in at least some parts of the Pacific (Micronesia and Hawaii being the two places I can personally attest to) to refer to an elder woman as “auntie.”
Certainly among my Midwest American and Polish circles, “uncle” and “aunt” are used for non-family members. My friends’s kids are often introduced to me as “uncle Peter” or “wójek,” though we are not blood relatives.
When I was a lad in exotic East Coast USA, “Uncle” and “Aunt”, were used to address relatives old enough to be your parents (and yet weren’t your grandparents) - and since I had plenty of cousins older than my parents, I called a lot of people Aunt or Uncle (the words also applied to very close friends of my parents or grandparents, even if there weren’t related - basically, anyone that my parents would refer to by first name in front of the kids, I was expected to call “Aunt” or “Uncle”). And I’ve been called Uncle Andy_L by the children of my cousins.
That being said, I don’t think it’s a huge faux pas to call a Roman Catholic priest “Mr. Anderson” instead of Father Anderson if that’s more comfortable for you (I agree that “Priest Anderson” would be unusual)
I don’t mean I would call a priest Priest X, just that comparisons to Rabbi or Imam or whatever fall flat because they are akin to Priest (which is obviously not used). In practice I’d say Mr or Reverend.
I don’t think any of the priests I know would be offended or anything by it. I suspect they might be used to it. It sounds odd to my ears, but it’s what I’m used to. I’d go with “Reverend So-and-so” for those who are uncomfortable with “father.” That sounds equally as usual as “father” to me.
Same here. If they were adults and related, even it technically 2nd cousins or something, I called them Aunt & Uncle. And I called my Godparents “Dad” and Mom", as per their request.
I would have the same reservations as @Broomstick to call priests father, but I’m lucky that calling them “Vater” isn’t common in Germany. Both Catholic and Protestant priests are called “Pastor” here, and the usual address is “Herr Pastor” or “Frau Pastorin”, which I can live with. But I might as well call them Herr/Frau XY.
As for addresses like Your Excellence, Your Eminence or Your Majesty, I would never call anybody this, not a Pope, a cardinal, a queen or an ambassador. Nobody deserves these honorifics by birth or position, and they are not the better of me. Yeah, I’m a strict lower-case republican.
Really? Well, you sure sounded pretty upset here:
Oh, I get the message, it’s loud and clear - the uppity heathens need to shut up and conform to the dominant religion.
I think you should get your anger sensor recalibrated if you think that simply pointing how what someone else’s message sounds like is “angry” or “upset” 
I’m surprised at how many people would be uncomfortable referring to a priest as “father Jones”. Maybe it’s because i grew up among Catholics, but to me that’s just a title, and doesn’t imply any particular relationship. And I’m Jewish.
I doubt the priest will be upset if you call him by any respectful term, though.
For many of these titles you are not really applying these honorifics to the person, but acknowledging the country or body they represent.
Calling the ambassador excellency is honouring his country. If you encounter him in an official setting you are treating him as the representative of his country, not as an individual. The Pope represents the RC church. You call POTUS Mr President, because your honour the position, not the person. Even a monarch in most western countries is encountered doing their constitutional job as representing the country. In an official setting the Queen of the UK is addressed as the embodiment of the country. Otherwise “Maam” will do just fine. These are not just historical hangovers, there is a very real legal underpinning that remains current.
In the modern world, most people occupying these roles are pretty clear about the division between the person the title and the job. Not all, but that is their problem.
It is interesting that some religions refuse to acknowledge other religions by using a symmetric address. “Heretical confession” is just such a fabulous phrase. This is basically old men’s wars.
So many words get re-purposed. Doctor is a great one. Officially, at least where I live, doctorates can only be bestowed by organisations with an appropriate charter. For decades, medical doctors did not actually get a doctorate. They got a couple of undergraduate degrees: MB & BS. There was shift to align their degrees so that they now get a MD. In principle, no MD, no Doctor X. But everyone called them “Doctor X.” Yet doctor as a title has absolutely nothing to do with medicine. But English speaking societies have adopted it as such.
Father might grate on some, but it is a stretch to say that conventional usage has not extended the meaning of the word to include it is an honorific without any ambiguity.
As I already said - it’s an observation. If I was actually upset or angry I’d say so. Minorities usually are pressured to conform to the majority, and majority usually don’t want to be bothered with noticing them. That applies to more than just religion.
Of course, anyone pointing that out is most easily dismissed as being “angry” or “unreasonable” even if they aren’t.
It’s not a question of monarchies versus republics; the ambassadors or heads of state or government of a republic are also styled as excellencies in international diplomatic usage. That usage is not common domestically, though; so while, say, the German chancellor would be addressed as “Your Excellency” in a formal letter sent by a foreign government, no domestic journalist would ever used that in an interview.
As for the “Pastor” thing in German, that seems to be regional; I (grown up in Catholic Bavaria) would associate it only with Protestants and would never use it for a Catholic priest (the logic being that, to my knowledge, the Lutheran church follows the logic of universal priesthood, so there is no separate class of priests distinct from the other members of the church). A Catholic priest would, where I grew up, be a “Pfarrer”, though I’ve always addressed every Catholic priest I’ve ever met personally by “Mr last name”. I would also use “Pfarrer” to talk in the third person about a Protestant pastor, which I acknowledge is somewhat contradictory to what I said above but simply a result of the fact that “Pastor” is not a commonly used word here. “Vater” would, as I understand it, not only be uncommon for a Catholic priest but plain wrong (save for certain set phrases, such as the “Father forgive me for I have sinned” bit in confession). The closest equivalent would be “Pater”, but that is used only for priests who are members of a monastic order, not for your everyday parish priest.
One culture where respected elders are called “Grandfather” is electricians. The head electrician on a job is the “Gaffer”, a contraction of “grandfather”.
Yep, seems to be a regional thing. I grew up in a very Catholic region of Westphalia, and Catholic priests were always “Herr Pastor” for me and everybody else.
In English, a “pastor” is the priest in charge of a specific church, but it’s possible to have a priest who isn’t a pastor (he might be a monk, or might be an assistant pastor at a church large enough to have multiple priests, or might be between assignments, or might have been defrocked). And you’d seldom refer to a priest as “pastor” without specifying the church.
I’ve also seen some cases where there are non-priests who do the administrative job of running a church (they’re titled “pastoral administrators”, or something like that), with a non-pastor priest who’s the “sacramental minister” of that parish.
Of course, DrDeth, the penalty for daring to get any part of the formalities wrong is The Spanish Inquisition!.