Tag Archives: Papacy

The Petrine claims

03 Saturday Jun 2017

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The claims of the Church with regard to the office of the Pope go back to the very words of Jesus Christ himself. In Matthew 16:13–20 we read the famous confession of faith by Peter at Caesarea Philippi. In response to his statement affirming him as the “Son of the Living God,” Jesus tells Peter: “I tell you, you are Peter [Greek: petros] and on this rock [Greek: petra]. I will build my church …” Here we see Jesus change the name of Simon to ‘Rock’, before saying that He would build his Church on that Rock.

Against this Protestants have a number of arguments, one of which is ably summed up here. It is the argument over the Greek words ‘petra’ and ‘petros’. In Greek, nouns have gender.  It is similar to the English words actor and actress.  The first is masculine and the second is feminine.  Likewise, the Greek word “petros” is masculine; “petra” is feminine.  Peter, the man, is appropriately referred to as Petros.  But Jesus said that the rock he would build his church on was not the masculine “petros” but the feminine “petra.”

There is a perfectly natural explanation for the πέτρος (petros) / πέτρα (petra) construction: πέτρα (petra) is a feminine word. Jesus could hardly have used a feminine noun as the name of Simon Peter—“You are Petrina”?
So, grammatically, we have a problem. On the one hand, one cannot use πέτρος (petros) to describe a suitable foundation for a building project—for that, again as Matthew 7:24 indicates, one must speak of πέτρα (petra). Yet, on the other hand, Jesus can hardly name Peter, πέτρα (petra)—because the word is feminine! Jesus can’t give Peter a feminine name!

In fact, if Jesus wanted to apply the terminology of the πέτρα (petra), i.e., that which the Church is built upon, to Peter, we would expect to find very kind of shift in language we have in Matthew 16:18. The reason for the different Greek form is simply that Peter, as a man, needs a masculine name, and so the form Petros has been coined. But the flow of the sentence makes it clear that the wordplay is intended to identify Peter as the rock.  It is hard to see how any plain reading of the text can make Jesus the object of the sentence.

If there was no connection to Peter then precisely what point was being made by Our Lord when He changed Simon’s name? Jesus could have used the Greek word ‘lithos’ if he had wanted to make it clear there was no connection.

Nor will it do, as the piece I cited above, does to reject the argument that the Aramaic, Kefas/Caphas definitely refers to Peter.  Throughtout the NT the form Kephas is mentioned, so it is clear that there is a significance in the name change. (John 1:42; 1 Cor 1:12; 3:22; 9:5; 15:5; Gal 1:18; 2:9, 11, 14). Simon’s name was changed to rock for a reason. If Protestantism requires one plays games with words to deny that, then its house is not built on rock.  The deliberate use of the “pevtra-Pevtro” pun in 16:18, the only verse in the entire NT that contains both words, seems to indicate the Jesus specifically singled out the apostle Simon Peter as the “rock” in question. Peter is not given this position because he is inherently worthy; instead, he receives this title because he confessed his faith in the Messiah.

But, even if you grant this argument (and you may not) is that the same as saying that the Roman claims are correct? To show that a number of things would need to be shown: that what Christ conferred on Peter was something that could be passed on only to the Bishop of Rome; and that the powers were as Rome has claimed. It is to those topics we must turn.

The Papal claims: an historical perspective

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Islam, Pope

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One of the many tragedies of Christian history is that the Papacy, which ought to be a source of unity, has so often been a point of division; indeed, what often began as internal quarrels have, too often, turned into a source of schism.

I was asked recently why, if he was such an important figure, St Peter failed to inform us of his unique position? Good question, to which the answer is clear – it was all there in Matthew’s Gospel. In his own letters, Peter is content to appeal to Apostolic authority and eye-witness testimony. But it is important to understand that just like the doctrines and dogma we have been examining lately, the position of the Pope developed.  We have been examining how the early Christians developed their understanding of the nature of Christ, and of the Trinity, so it should come as no surprise that the same was true when it came to the office of the Pope.

So, just as with the Trinity, the natures of Christ, and the Theotokos, so too with the purpose of the promise given to Peter; these things the Church worked out as it came to have need of them. We cannot know why Jesus did not just write everything down in a book, but he did not; he founded a Church. Justr as it was left to that Church to tell us what the Canon of Scripture was, so it was left to it to work out the implications of the Petrine promise in Matthew’s Gospel.

It has been, then, only as problems arose in certain areas that the Church has come to need to define things. That is as true of the Papacy as anything else. A ‘primacy of honour’ was always acknowledged, but working out what it meant in practice was not easy, as successive posts here tried to show.

It is clear that of the five ancient Patriarchal Sees, the three most important were Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople. It is interesting that the two cities where we know from Scripture that Peter lived, Jerusalem and Antioch, never mounted the sort of claims made by Rome, where tradition has it that Peter was martyred, and where his tomb can be seen. Alexandria, as befitted the See of St Mark (the interpreter of Peter) never questioned Rome’s primacy; that was reserved for Constantinople, whose claims were to be second to Rome, and were based entirely on its position as the imperial capital.

We have seen that Leo was basing his claims for the powers of his office on Peter’s position as the leader of the Apostles, and that that had nothing to do with Rome being an imperial city; the oft-touted notion that Roman Catholicism was ‘Roman State run religion’ (to quote Bosco) could not be wider of the mark; it had nothing to do with the Roman empire, and everything to do with trying to establish a position for the Church which made it as independent of State control as possible. For 1000 years after the death of St Leo the Great, Popes struggled to assert their independence from State control.

The greatest boost to the understanding of the development of the position of the Papacy came with the expansion of Islam: with Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria all under Muslim control by the end of the sixth century, only Rome and Constantinople were left; after 1453 there was only Rome. The need for some central authority to pronounce with authority on vexing matters of doctrine and dogma did not end with the fall of the other Patriarchal Sees, and Rome found itself in a situation where it was the last one standing. The question of whether Rome has always used its position wisely is an open one, and it would be hard to say the answer was yes. But that is quite separate from the developing understanding of the office, which held that in matters of faith and doctrine the Pope was protected from error.

The authority of the Bishop of Rome

19 Friday May 2017

Posted by in Early Church, Faith, Pope

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Before Leo had rejected the canon, both the Emperor Marcion, and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Anatolius, had written to him in conciliatory tones. Marcion hoped (Leo, Epistles CII) that now Rome’s doctrinal position had triumphed, Chalcedon could be ratified. Anatolius went along the same line in another December letter (Price III pp. 138-142) in which he tried to convince Leo that his delegates had reported things incorrectly and stated clearly they had not simply sent him the canon as a conciliatory measure but for his approval:

This decree has been transmitted to your sacredness by the holy council and by us in order to receive from you approval and confirmation.
He went on the ‘beg’ him to do so so that ‘everything that was transacted in writing at this holy and ecumenical council’ could then be enacted. This was not the language even of primus inter pares – it was language used to a primus. But as we have seen, Leo was not mollified and would not give his approval. He told the Empress Pulcheria that delighted though he was that the Council had proclaimed orthodoxy, he was saddened that an attempt had been made to add to the canons of Nicaea for no aim higher than political advantage.

Leo’s claims were based on Tradition and Apostolicity, he could not, and did not yield them.  On 21 March 453, with parts of Palestine claiming Chalcedon was not legitimate because Leo had not ratified it, Leo confirmed (Ep. 114.2) that he agreed to everything at Chalcedon which did not contravene Nicaea. Letter 116 to the empress makes the same point, adding:

Let vicious ambition covet nothing belonging to another, nor let anyone seek his own increase through injuring another, for however much vainglorious pride builds on extorted assent and thinks that its depredations can be strengthened through talking of councils, whatever differs from the canons of the aforesaid fathers [Nicaea] will be null and void.

Leo’s ratification of the Council was thought necessary by all concerned, and given the nature of the crisis in Egypt and Palestine, no one mentioned Canon 28, although clearly Leo was not ratifying it; Rome did not do so until the thirteenth century.

Leo’s claims were well-known and public; they were not contested by Constantinople. All men knew what it meant for Peter to speak through Leo. He spoke through no other Bishop. No other Bishop stood at the head of the others. No other Bishop’s ratification was sought in the way Leo’s was. Once can debate until well after the cows have come home what later men later claimed these things meant; contemporaries seem to have been clear enough. Lack of clarity came only when men desired it – as is so often the case.

Loose talk about Caesaro-Papism conceals a harsh reality. In Constantinople the Patriarch owed the claims he made in 451 to the fact he was the Imperial Patriarch; Church and State were one. The Roman Empire was effectively a theocracy – at Constantinople. Rome, deserted by the imperial bureaucracy, threatened by Huns, and already much reduced in population, owed its claims solely to Apostolicity. The odd thing about the anti-Catholic charge that Catholicism is a ‘Roman State religion’ is its historical ignorance. Imperial authority lay at Constantinople from the mid fourth century to the fifteenth century, and Rome, otherwise a political backwater, owed its authority not to the State, but to its Apostolic foundation on St Peter. Far from being s ‘State run’ religion, Roman Catholicism resisted all attempts by the Empire, and later by kingdoms in the West, to assert State power over the Church. A little historical knowledge would not come amiss in those who level the charge that the Catholic Church is a ‘Roman state run religion’; nothing could be further from the truth.

The practicalities of resisting State power were never less than problematic. It might have been Stalin who famously asked ‘how many divisions has the Pope?’, but he was hardly the first. From Justinian through to Hitler, powerful men would threaten the Pope, even hold him hostage. The Popes would create their own State for safety and invent Western diplomacy to protect it. Whatever the modalities, the reasoning was consistent – Peter spoke through the Pope and against that Rock not even the Gates of Hell would prevail. Nor have they, and nor will they. Empires rise and fall, Great Powers wax and wane, powerful men strut and fret their hour upon the stage, and Schisms come and multiply; but in the Eternal City, on the Rock of Peter, his successor remains; history affords no other example of such longevity. The works of human hand do not endure in this fashion; the work of God does.

Rome vs Constantinople

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by in Faith, Pope

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The Chalcedonian Fathers explained Canon 28 to Leo as follows:

And we further inform you that we have decided on other things also for the good management and stability of church matters, being persuaded that your holiness will accept and ratify them, when you are told. The long prevailing custom, which the holy Church of God at Constantinople had of ordaining metropolitans for the provinces of Asia, Pontus and Thrace, we have now ratified by the votes of the Synod, not so much by way of conferring a privilege on the See of Constantinople as to provide for the good government of those cities, because of the frequent disorders that arise on the death of their bishops, both clergy and laity being then without a leader and disturbing church order. …

We have ratified also the canon of the 150 holy Fathers who met at Constantinople in the time of the great Theodosius of holy memory, which ordains that after your most holy and Apostolic See, the See of Constantinople shall take precedence, being placed second: for we are persuaded that with your usual care for others you have often extended that Apostolic prestige which belongs to you, to the church in Constantinople also, by virtue of your great disinterestedness in sharing all your own good things with your spiritual kinsfolk. Accordingly vouchsafe most holy and blessed father to accept as your own wish, and as conducing to good government the things which we have resolved on for the removal of all confusion and the confirmation of church order

If this sounds as though the assembled Fathers were nervous about Leo’s reaction, it was because they were. His delegates at Chalcedon had opposed the canon, saying that only the Pope could confer such precedence. The Fathers were, they told Leo, confident that they were acting as he would have wanted. They could not have been more mistaken. Leo’s reaction, a letter to the Emperor Marcian, written on 22 May 452 may be seen in full here. The parts most relevant to our argument are as follows:

Let the city of Constantinople have, as we desire, its high rank, and under the protection of God’s right hand, long enjoy your clemency’s rule. Yet things secular stand on a different basis from things divine: and there can be no sure building save on that rock which the Lord has laid for a foundation.  …….

For the privileges of the churches determined by the canons of the holy Fathers, and fixed by the decrees of the Nicene Synod, cannot be overthrown by any unscrupulous act, nor disturbed by any innovation. And in the faithful execution of this task by the aid of Christ I am bound to display an unflinching devotion; for it is a charge entrusted to me, and it tends to my condemnation if the rules sanctioned by the Fathers and drawn up under the guidance of God’s Spirit at the Synod of Nicæa for the government of the whole Church are violated with my connivance (which God forbid), and if the wishes of a single brother have more weight with me than the common good of the Lord’s whole house.

St. Peter had founded Rome and Antioch, St. Mark, Alexandria; Constantinople owed its foundation to the Emperor, no Apostle had founded it, and any priority it claimed could not be justified on the grounds the other Sees used. Leo’s own representatives, who had not been present when the canon was passed, had protested:

The apostolic see ought not to be humiliated in our presence, and therefore we ask your sublimity to order that whatever was transacted yesterday in our absence in prejudice of the canons or rules be nullified. But if otherwise, let our formal objection be recorded in the minutes, so that we may know what we ought to report to the apostolic man the pope of the universal church, so that he may pass sentence on either the insult to his see or the overturning of the canon. (Price and Gaddis, Acts of Chalcedon, III, p. 91]

Neither tradition, nor apostolic authority sanctioned the novelty that was Canon 28. Its sole basis in ‘tradition’ was canon 8 of Constantinople 381. But this canon was controversial at Rome, and in the form it was recorded at Chalcedon in canon 28 it was also inaccurate, as the Pope’s delegate, Paschasinus pointed out in the sixteenth session. There is a difference between the Greek and Latin versions of the Acta, and since the original is no longer extant, we cannot tell which version is more accurate.

The Latin version asserts Roman primacy, the Greek version omits this. In contemporary terms this did not matter since what was actually at issue was not the relative standing of the two sees but Constantinople’s jurisdiction in the east. It was only later that this difference was elevated to one of importance

But, as we have seen, it did not matter which version was advanced, the one in the canon itself or the conciliatory one put to Leo, he was having none of it because it infringed his unique apostolic privilege. There is no hyperbole, no poetic language – and no chance of misunderstanding. Leo was not having the ancient tradition of the Church usurped by the ambitions of the Imperial city. There was no sure foundation except the rock upon which Christ had built his Church. If ‘Peter speaks through Leo’ meant anything, it meant that Leo spoke with the authority of St Peter himself; not jumped-up Patriarch at Constantinople was going to change that at the best of an Emperor. Christ had spoken, Leo was defending what he had inherited; his successors would do the same.

St Leo the Great and the background to Chalcedon

12 Friday May 2017

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St. Leo the Great deserves his title; he has a claim to be the greatest Pope since St. Peter. There is an argument to be made for his being the Pope who definitively established the Petrine claims. This short series cannot hope to do justice to the man, or even his Papacy, but it tries to illuminate these wider issues by focussing on the most controversial part of his career – the part he played at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451.

The Council was called by the Emperor Marcian to sort out the mess left by the second Council of Ephesus, held in 449 which had ended in chaos. The successor of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Patriarch Dioscorus, had there secured the declaration that the monk Eutyches, who had been condemned for Christological heresy, was in fact orthodox. The decision was over-turned at Chalcedon, something the Egyptian Church and other Eastern Churches have never accepted. It was the first great schism. Central to it was the definition of the two natures of Christ offered by Pope Leo.

When the Fathers at Chalcedon declared ‘Peter has spoken through Leo’ what did this mean? Since 1054 Orthodox Christians from Greece and Russia have contested the plain meaning of the words; since they also contest the plain meaning of Matthew 16:18, this occasions no surprise.

At the heart of much of the dispute is the question of the jurisdiction held by the early Popes. Canon 3 of the Council of Sardica (343)  allowed appeals to Rome from the decision of a local bishop (See H. Hess, The early development of Canon law and the Council of Sardica (2002), esp. pp. 212-214.) This was a codification of Rome’s response to the case presented by St. Athanasius in 341. In his Apologia ad Constantium Athanasius tells us that after he was expelled from Alexandria by the Arian-inclined authorities he went to Rome to appeal against the judgement of the Eusebian bishops at Tyre who had deposed him and other orthodox bishops, including Paul of Constantinople. Pope Julius (337-352) presided over a council of 50 bishops in 341 and overturned the Tyrian verdict; Athanasius, Paul and their fellows returned to their Sees and were reinstated.

It might be noted here that his opponents were just as interested in being in Rome’s favour as two of them, Ursacius of Singiduum and Valens of Muras wrote to beg forgiveness. (See Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos 58 for the texts).

That such a view, that is that Rome had appellate jurisdiction from other bishoprices, was not confined to the West is shown not only by the appeal to it from Athanasius and Paul of Constantinople, it is present in St. Jerome’s writings. Its most recent manifestation was one with which the young Leo was personally familiar as he had been involved with it. After the Council of Ephesus (the ‘robber council’) Flavian, Theodoret and Eusebius had written to Pope Celestine to protest against their deposition and to seek his approval to their restoration. They did so in view of the fact that before that Council the Pope’s legates had declared that: ‘Peter, the prince and leader of the apostles [who] was given the power of loosing and binding sins’ continued to live and judge in his successors. This was read into the record at Chalcedon.

The circumstances which made that necessary will be the subject of a short series of posts on Chalcedon which will appear after one celebrating the centenary of Fatima. This is a ‘trigger warning’ to Bosco.

By whose authority?

21 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Bible, Catholic Tradition, Early Church, Faith, Pope

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It is clear to anyone examining the history of Christianity that our understanding of the ‘faith once delivered’ deepens and develops. The word ‘Trinity’ appears in the Bible as often as the words ‘the New Testament Canon’, and yet the Church would, and does, say that both are critical parts of our Faith. We all (I hope) read Scripture and reflect upon its meaning, and being fallen beings, we can all come up with interpretations which, to us, are plausible; but say, for example, that, like Arius, we come up with the idea that Jesus was, as the Son of God, a creature, and not God? We can, as Arius did, provide reasons for this view, and we can convince ourselves we are right. It is only if we are willing to submit our judgment to that of another authority that orthodoxy can be maintained. We might, of course, care not a jot for orthodoxy and be firmly convinced that where all previous generations,and most of this generation of Christians have erred, we alone are right, but that way lies chaos, and a house built on sand will not stand. But what authority do we accept?

One of the most attractive aspects of the form Anglicanism I grew up with was that it was dynamic; it expected us to grow in the Lord. The idea that the faith was delivered once for all to the Apostles is directly from the Scriptures, but our history tells us that we (Christians) did not understand it all at once, or even over a few years. indeed, surely one of the points of Paul’s letters is that even those converted by him through the Spirit, did not ‘get it’, and even when they did, some of them fell away. That was why the letters were written; it was why they were kept; it is why we read them to this day.

Yet. St. Peter himself acknowledged that they were not always easy to understand, and warned us that some people, in their attempt to do so, had twisted his words. So, from the beginning, the Spirit guided Christians; indeed we might even say that that is why God inspired Scripture itself, so that we should have God’s word to hand. But Scripture does not verify itself or validate itself or explain itself.

We might turn to an Ecumenical Council, but no more than Scripture, does an ecumenical council verify itself. No one said before Nicaea or Ephesus that this was going to be an ecumenical council, and the Orthodox are right to say that only when it is accepted by the people and bishops as such is a Council ecumenical.

We might go to the maxim of St. Vincent Lerins, which tells us that orthodoxy is what has been believed everywhere at all times by everyone, but that will not quite do either, as it does not answer the question of development. Before the Church developed the theology of the Trinity, one might claim that it was inherent in Scripture and therefore has always been believed by everyone, but that begs the question about what ‘everyone’ understood, or understands, by ‘Trinity’?

In the West, the office of the papacy developed to fill this need, with Leo the Great, as we saw yesterday, claiming that that his interpretation of the Petrine claims inhered in Scripture. By the eleventh century the Christian East was unwilling to concede the level of development claimed by Rome, not least when it came to changes in the wording of the Nicene Creed. But the Great Schism did not provide the East with an answer to the question of authority, and it has not help an ecumenical council. The Reformation in Europe was a rejection by some, of Rome’s claims, but it did not fill the gap either; indeed it opened the way to every man claiming personal infallibility.

It may be that modern man needs no authority other than his own, but historically this has not been the case. That is not to say that the existence of the Pope and the Magisterium creates a trouble-free attitude to authority (as any reading of some of the comments on this blog alone would testify), but it is to say it is the least worst option we have evolved.

 

Leo the Great and the Papal claims

20 Thursday Apr 2017

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In our search for authority we have seen that the Scriptures neither define nor interpret themselves The obvious place to go is the Pope. There is a good analysis of the claims made by the Church for Matthew 16:18 at the ‘Lonely Pilgrim’ blog (follow the link). Now either we believe Jesus meant what he said, or we need to explain it away. The Protestant view has been to find ingenious reasons why it doesn’t mean what the Catholic Church says it does, but before Catholics get too triumphalist, they might want to note that the Orthodox do not accept the Catholic view, even whilst fully acknowledging that the Bishop of Rome has an honoured historic position. Those with a taste for esoteric controversy might follow up this argument on various Catholic and Orthodox fora.

I probably ought to say up front that to me both the Catholic and the Orthodox views of the Papacy smack of special pleading: both selectively report Church history to justify their existing position. That does not mean that I don’t think they both have something in them, but it does mean that there is a good amount of tares in with the wheat.

The Orthodox are happy to accept a primacy of honour. That phrase would do a politician proud, since it can mean whatever its users want it to mean. It is said that that is what the early Church gave to the Bishop of Rome, but what does that mean?

Of course we can go back to Clement’s letters, and we can argue about who Clement was, and whether he was Pope, but let us not forget that the last person sending letters to advice and admonition to Corinth was St. Paul, and no one said he was Pope. But before we get carried away in the other direction, let us not try to make great claims for the so-called Pentarchy either. Jerusalem lost its important very early and never recovered its authority; Antioch’s first bishop was St. Peter, but no one there ever based any claims to general authority on it; Alexandria, which housed a famous theological school, never claimed authority outside of North Africa; and Constantinople was a late-comer which owed its authority solely to the Emperor.

If our understanding of anything has developed, it is the understanding of the position of the Pope. A recent scholarly book by Susan Wessel shows how Leo the Great (Pope 440-41) was the first Pope to make systematic use of the Petrine verses to show that Rome did, indeed, have authority over other Sees. St. Leo the Great made two main contributions to the developing understanding of what ‘primacy’ mean. The first amounts to an assertion that the past existed in the present, not just because he was Peter’s successor, but in the form of a direct and present link between the Apostle and the Pope. As he put it in his sermon on 19 September 443 (Sermon 3.4)

Regard him [Peter] as present in the lowliness of my person. Honour him. In him continues to reside the responsibility for all shepherds, along with the protection of the sheep entrusted to them. His dignity does not fade even in an unworthy heir.’

This is what Leo understood by the saying of the Chalcedonian Fathers: ‘Peter has spoken through Leo. (See here also W. Ullmann, ‘Leo I and the Theme of Papal Primacy’, Journal of Theological Studies 1960, pp. 26-28).

Under Roman jurisprudence, a person was supposed to be present in his legal representative, even as the deceased was in his heir. The same jurisprudence was present in the eastern empire, so to argue that anyone in Constantinople would have been ignorant of this conception of what it meant for Leo to have said what he had said seems to strain credulity. Indeed, as K. Shatz puts it in Papal Primacy From Its Origins to the Present (1996), Leo made ‘the “church of tradition … into the church of the capital city that extends its laws to the whole world.’ (pp. 33-36 for the argument).

On this understanding the Pope was not simply Peter’s representative but his living successor – Peter spoke through him. Thus, Rome’s judgments and decrees were rendered universal because the Holy Apostle was understood to be present in Leo and in the system of justice he administered. As Leo put in in that same sermon on 19 September 443 (3.3):
Persevering in the fortitude he received, blessed Peter does not relinquish his government of the Church. He was ordained before the others so that, when he is called rock, declared foundation, installed as doorkeeper for the kingdom of heaven, appointed arbiter of binding and loosing (with his definitive judgments retaining forces even in heaven), we might know through the very mysteries of these appellations what sort of fellowship he had with Christ. He now manages the things entrusted to him more completely and effectively. He carries out every aspect of his duties and responsibilities in him and through him whom he has been glorified.

So, if we do anything correctly or judge anything correctly, if we obtain anything at all from the mercy of God through daily supplications, it comes about as the result of his works and merits. In this see his power lives on and his authority reigns supreme. This, dearly beloved, is what the confession has obtained [Matthew 16:18]. Since it was inspired by God the Father in the apostle’s heart, it has risen above all the uncertainties of human thinking and has received the strength of a rock that cannot be shaken by any pounding.

It is Peter’s presence that brings about the Christian universalism that Leo envisoned himself exercising. If we look at his letter to the bishops of Illyricium, 12 January 444, placing them under Anastasius, the bishop of Thessalonica, and telling them that serious disputes must be referred to Rome, we see him exercising that power of which his sermons spoke.

The primacy of Rome was not simply the result of Apostolic succession, or of inhertance from St. Peter, but of this very special relationship which ensured that Peter spoke through the Pope. As Leo says in a sermon given on 29 September: [Sermons 5.4]
our solemnity is not merely the apostolic dignity of the most blessed Peter. He does not cease to preside over his see but unfailingly maintains that fellowship which he has with the eternal Priest. That stability which he received from Christ the rock (by having himself been made ‘rock’) has poured over onto his heirs as well. Whenever there is any show of firmness, it is undoubtedly the shepherd’s fortitude that appears.
Leo’s views are set out in fuller form in a sermon preached on 29 June 443 (Sermon 83.1) in which he makes it clear that since Peter exercises the Lord’s power on His behalf, so too does the Pope exercise the powers of Christ Himself, as Peter speaks through him.

This is not a claim made by any other Bishop. It was made in public by Leo in his sermons and letters, and it was based firmly upon Scripture, patristic testimony and the common law of the Empire. Before examining how it was exercised in a situation where there was a dispute, we must turn to Leo’s second contribution to the delineation of the Petrine primacy.

More Catholic than the Pope?

08 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by in Blogging, Faith, Pope

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Once upon a time, not that long ago, it was a statement of the obvious to ask ‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’ Now, to many, that is a real question. To some the answer is plain enough, and if pressed, questions will be asked about others in the hierarchy too. What such statements have in common is the assumption that the individual making them is competent to judge the Pope and his or her bishop. That seems to me the essence of the Protestant viewpoint. It was the departure point for Luther, as it has been for all heresies. The Catholic Church has a Magisterium to pronounce on orthodoxy and heterodoxy; kind though it is of individuals to claim to be able to provide the same service, there is about it a presumption which is unattractive: who died and elected you Pope? That seems to me essentially Protestant – it assumes that the individual believer has the discernment to pronounce where the Church is silent. I wonder how many such individuals are, like myself, converts, and whether they are not carrying into their new Church, the mind-set of their old? I leave it there as an open questions, as I have no idea.

The modus operandi is certainly a Protestant one. It is to compile lists of statements from Church documents and to fashion them into a club with which to beat the Pope or bishops; it assumes, a priori that the Pope and the bishops are either unaware of such statements, or less able to pronounce on orthodoxy than the individual who has found the quotations on the Internet; that is what I mean by an essentially Protestant mind set.

That said, let us examine for a moment where such phenomena originate, and see where that gets us. Overwhelmingly, at least during this pontificate, it derives from a suspicion that this Pope is undermining the orthodox faith, that he is, himself, unorthodox, and that his is abusing his position to try to change the mind of the Church on matters where change is not possible. That it resembles the reaction of many Republicans to President Obama is not accidental, as the cross-over between such Republicans and such critics of the present Pope is a large one. But, once we have arrived at this point, what then?

The critics of the Pope are sincere in their views; but in other contexts, the same critics would not accept sincerity as a defence. A man who genuinely believed he was a woman would not get much sympathy in such circles by using that as a defence, so it is unclear why, by their own standard, the critics should be let off the hook by the ‘sincerity’ defence, or by the fact that the ‘feel’ what they feel very strongly. Their invocation of certain websites which ‘prove’ their case falls to the same criticism; those who reject the conclusions of most the world’s most qualified researchers on climate change because of what they have read on denier websites are not in a good position to use the same technique to criticise the Catholic Church. Or, if they do, then they are essentially saying they know better than the Pope and the majority of the Cardinals and bishops. I daresay that if you really think that the majority of the world’s scientists are wrong on something so important, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the intellectual arrogance to believe that the majority of the world’s Cardinals and Bishops also know less about what Catholicism is than you do; but there is equally little reason why the rest of us should accept such arrogance as a sign of infallibility.

It is understandable that, after the arduous journey home to Rome, the convert should want a quiet life, but from the beginning the Church has not offered that. This is because even St Paul and St John faced individuals who were sure that the Holy Spirit had told them what those two Saints had not been told, and that they had special insights denied to others. This was why Paul, like John, exhorted believers to rely on the traditions, oral and written, inherited from the past. But across the centuries the truth and weeds have grown up in the same field, as they always will, and it has been the job of the Magisterium to pronounce on the matter. As the monk, Luther, discovered, for the individual to take on that role is to begin the first step on a slippery slope.

Yes, as Catholics, we have a great concern for orthodoxy and tradition, but why proceed from the assumption that the Magisterium takes another view? We either believe that the Holy Spirit will guard the Church from material error, or we don’t, and if we act as though He can only do so with our help as a key-board warrior, then we incur the sin of presumption. Obedience is easy, so is tolerance, when we obey and tolerate that with which we agree.

In conclusion, let us recall what the Lord Jesus told Mother Julian in the thirteenth ‘showing’:

“In my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the onset of sin was not prevented: for then, I thought, all should have been well. This impulse was much to be avoided, but nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed because of it, without reason and discretion.

“But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’

Amen.

Virtue signalling

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Pope

≈ 65 Comments

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For those of us of a conservative disposition, the practice of ‘virtue signalling’ is a habit of the Left, who, in condemning the racism of others both signal their own virtue and impugn that of their opponents; from a debating point of view it is a form of adversarial confrontation which afford much satisfaction; from the point of view of trying to resolve issues, it is usually a failure. The difficulty is that no one ever says they are virtue signalling, and I doubt anyone does it consciously; it is something more obvious in the eye of the beholder. One might reason thus: “I am stating obvious truths clear by the right of reason in order to combat what I perceive as racism/homophobia/misogyny or some other evil; You, on the other hand, are signalling your imagined superior virtue by applying your own false standards to me and claiming that because I fall short of them, I am in the wrong.” And so it goes, with both sides talking, or more often, shouting past each other.

For those of a conservative disposition, this is most obviously seen in the cries of anguish from the Left over President Trump. Where conservatives see a figure of some vulgarity but one who is delivering what he was elected to deliver, others see a putative fascist dictator to whom the only possible response is a form of hysteria which incorporates demands he is removed from office – by a coup if necessary; he is, as the hashtag warriors have it #notmypresident. This reminds me of another set of over-reactions to an elected leader, who was opposed from the moment his election was announced, about whose election rumours were in circulation to cast doubt on the legitimacy of his position, and about whom a section of the press cannot get enough lurid headlines, and over whose actions many might use the hashtag #notmypope. But, it might be objected, has he not used harsh language about the Curia? Has he not outraged those used to a traditional way of doing things? Is he not a disruptive force? The parallels with Trump grow. Those who never liked him from the start like him even less the more he does. Everything is read through a hermeneutic of hatred and suspicion. So, does a Bishop suggest that pastoral provision might be made in certain circumstances for the divorced to take communion? Who knows, as the headline will be that that Bishop is an apostate teaching that the divorced can take communion? Any nuance gets lost in a media scrutiny whose purpose is to arouse feelings rather than convey information. And so, as with Trump, one ends up doubting most things reported in some parts of the media because it is clear that the purpose is to reinforce the initial picture formed by hostile opinion.

It would be splendid if everything in Christian life could be settled by resort of a Biblical text, but as early as the time of the Apostles, as St John and St Paul found, there were those who interpreted what they were being told in a different manner. Nor was this all just being awkward for its own sake. As the early Christological arguments showed, there were real questions to be asked about how Jesus could be God, and what it meant to talk and think in this way. Throughout Christian history there have been occasions when Christians have fiercely disagreed about how to interpret parts of their common faith – to the extent of burning each other (and then later claiming it was all the fault of the State, as though the State were some neutral by-stander uninfluenced by the Church). A living faith will always have disputes. As we reach out to embrace the infinite, we shall always be finding that there is more there than our human minds have compassed; and changed circumstances demand responses from the Church.

When I was a child, not a single one of the pupils at my school had a divorced parent; indeed it was not until I was a university lecturer that I met anyone who had been divorced. Now I would say that the balance has shifted entirely. To say that the Church should respond to this huge change and its causes by acting as though we still lived in the world of the 1950s might seem to some a simple statement of standing by the faith once given, whilst to others it might seem like adding a yoke to the already heavily burdened. There is truth in both positions, and to guy the other side as either unfeeling rigorists or unthinking apostates does no justice to a difficult situation. Those who suppose there are simple answers to complex questions will always be with us; but it is the job of the Church to discern how to help us best live a Christian life. If that were easy, we should all have been doing it a long time ago.

 

Private judgement?

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Synod 14, Synod15

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A great deal of fuss has been made about the ‘Dubia’ from the four cardinals to the Pope and his refusal to answer them. Readers of the Catholic press  will be familiar with the divisions over Amoris Laetitia. They concern the moral law, the nature of the sacraments and the authority of previous teaching. But it comes down to the question: can remarried Catholics receive Communion if they aren’t living as brother and sister? The Church has always been clear that the answer to this is ‘no’, but it is equally clear that pastoral practice has varied, not least in the sorts of circumstances people find themselves in in a society where late conversions are common and civil divorce very easy. These are new circumstances and for the representatives of the Church simply to insist on a binary answer which would fit all cases, might lead to injustice; but for the Pope not to reply might risk another sort of injustice, in which the faithful look up and are fed stones.

Whatever answer to Pope gave, it would seem unlikely to change the reality at parish level. We are told that the use of contraception among Catholics is common, and yet, if one looks at the lines for Communion and one took them at face value, you’d not suppose that at all – quite the opposite. In the end the individual knows their situation, as does their confessor, and to pronounce in the abstract would simply to be to assert what no one has challenged – which is that the recent Synods did not change the teaching of the Church with regard to communion for the divorced, however much some would like to to have done so, and however much those who would have liked this claim it has. This is a matter on which the teaching of the Church is clear, and where pastoral practice clearly varies. It is not the only such issue.

No doubt those calling on the Pope to say something more have their reasons for so doing, and no doubt the Holy Father has his reasons for not responding. For the individual Catholic, it is hard to see what is unclear. Those who wish for clarity have already found it in pastoral practice, which varies according to what the confessor knows of his flock; this is right and proper. The Church is not a penal colony, it is a field hospital in a world where Sin is injuring and has injured many Faithful. Those who want clarity have it in the age-old teaching of the Church; if they wish to apply it to every individual regardless of circumstances then, to use a word much beloved of the Pope, that would seem a trifle ‘rigid’. So the Holy Father may be showing much wisdom in letting things lie where they are, because in practice, it is the individual conscience which knows where truth lies, and if that conscience is formed well by the confessor, then we can be sure that what is done is what ought to be done.