The primacy of Peter.

A recent headline over an article by the American Catholic theologian Richard McBrien read, "Calling on the Vatican to surrender power." The author accused the Vatican and the Pope of centralizing power in Rome at the expense of the bishops throughout the world.

The Second Vatican Council (1962 -1965) discussed the same question--without McBrien's antagonistic overtones of pitting one against the other--by emphasizing "episcopal collegiality" complementing the discussion of the first Vatican Council (1869-1870) in defining papal infallibility. This discussion concerns Catholics and will be the subject of a forthcoming synod on bishops.

But what about the nature and exercise of St. Peter's primacy in the search for unity among all Christians? This is a further dimension which today concerns first of all the Orthodox Churches of the East which have maintained authority and unity under the system of national Patriarchs. It also concerns other Christian groups such as the Anglicans and Lutherans, who still claim to have unity in their own communions, however weak this may seem to Catholics.

Catholic Insight presents an introduction to this discussion on papal primacy in two articles by our contributing editor, in order to prepare for the Catholic-Anglican meeting in Toronto in May 2000 and other such discussions elsewhere. A statement "Reflections on the Primacy of Peter" was issued by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on October 30, 1998 (Origins, Jan. 28, '99, pp. 560-563). Editor

Any man chosen to be a bishop faces a formidable task before he can exercise his ministry: he must assure himself that he is in agreement with all the Catholic bishops of the world, thousands of them, in matters of faith and morals. One could imagine an army of chancery workers preparing and circulating long, complex statements detailing his views on everything from the Trinity to a just wage, and then waiting on tenterhooks for the replies that, if universally positive, would authorize him to take his place among the Catholic bishops and so allow the Catholics under his charge to continue as members of the universal Church. Such are the requirements of a Catholic bishop as a diocesan leader and successor to the Apostles in a Church that possesses the full and visible unity Christ prayed for: "that they may all be one; even as you, Father are in me and I in you" (Jn 17: 21).

In fact, the bishop-elect acquires this crucially important mandate much more simply, but just as effectively: all Catholic bishops are in communion with the pope, the bishop of Rome. Anyone, therefore, recognized as a Catholic bishop by the pope is, by that fact, in full communion with all the other bishops of the world, and so unity in faith and morals is preserved. The role of the pope in assuring the unity of the Church demonstrates the meaning of primacy in that to be in communion with the first of bishops, Peter's successor, assures one of being fully in the Catholic faith.

All the vaunted, or resented, powers of the pope come from his being this effective centre of the Catholic Church. Consider the matter of his having "universal jurisdiction", a legal phrase meaning that he can intervene directly anywhere in the Church. A noteworthy instance of his doing so occurred in 1995 when John Paul II removed Monseigneur Jacques Gaillot from his position as Bishop of Evreux, a city roughly 100 kilometres west of Paris. My concern here is not with the reasons for the Pope's action but with the method by which it was accomplished. The force behind the move was the implicit threat of excommunication. If the Pope had broken communion with him, as actually occurred in the case of the schismatic Archbishop Lefebvre, then Bishop Gaillot and his flock would have been outside of the Church. For to break the connection with Rome is to have broken it with all the bishops in communion with Rome. We recognize then that what may seem to be a legal and even a legalistic aspect of the Church is in fac t an essential part of the pope's pastoral ministry to the Church as a whole.

Eastern Church

Two other very different cases make the same point. When the Eastern and Western patriarchs--i.e., the bishops of Rome and Constantinople--excommunicated one another in A.D. 1054, the effect should have been to make Constantinople an exclusive centre for the Greek church, as Rome had been and continues to be for the universal Church. Significantly, however, the bishop of Constantinople does not exercise the power that could be his as the primary see of the Orthodox church, so that the tenuous unity among the numerous national churches of the East--the Greek, the Russian, the Serbian, the Romanian, etc.--does not come from a conviction that the Eastern patriarchate continues, in some special way, the ministry of Peter. And without Peter, all that is left to the Orthodox as a basis for unity is a shared history and a common form of worship. I shall return to this topic in a second article.

A second challenge to the primacy of Rome was set in motion by the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. In this case, there could be no attempt to maintain unity by substituting another bishop for the pope because the "Reformed" churches, including Anglicans, radically redefined the role of bishops or, more commonly, eliminated it altogether. The break with Rome cost Protestantism dearly; not only was there necessarily a denial that visible unity was essential to Christianity, and therefore a realizable ideal, but also the lack of common ground in the understanding of history and in the forms of public worship robbed them even of the limited unity Orthodoxy enjoys. The consequence has been a splintering into numerous sects that continues to the present day among the heirs of the Reformation. (More on this later, too.)

Every baptized Catholic is empowered by the Holy Spirit to proclaim his faith. The universal witness of all the baptized, therefore, will express infallibly the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. This truth is enunciated in three ways. The simplest is what Catholics as a whole believe, what is called the consensus of faith: "The whole body of the faithful ... cannot err in matters of belief" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 92). It is this consensus that the bishops express when they invoke their apostolic authority in teaching. This teaching will in turn be infallible when the faith of the universal Church is enunciated; i.e., when all the bishops agree on a teaching, whether individually or gathered in an ecumenical council. But in his Petrine office, the pope represents the union of bishops, and thus he can speak in their name and so express the faith of all believers. As we have seen, to be in union with him--as all Catholics are through their bishops--is to profess the faith of the Church. Consequen tly, when the pope speaks solemnly in the name of the Church, he enunciates that universal faith which Christ commissioned his Church to proclaim (Catechism, par. 890-92). This papal prerogative goes back to Peter's confession of faith at Caesarea Philippi--"You are the Christ, the Son of the living God"--and Jesus's consequent promise to Peter--"You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church....Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven" (Mt 16.16: 18, 19).

Catholics who like to quote this passage of Scripture to confound their Orthodox and Protestant critics are sometimes stymied to find that their interlocutors are not only well aware of the text but are also capable of giving it quite a different interpretation. The Orthodox, with a strong commitment to the apostolic descent of their bishops but without an effective centre of unity, apply the text to local bishops, each one of whom shows himself to be a successor to Peter by proclaiming and guarding in the local--diocesan--church the faith that Peter proclaimed at Caesarea. The church universal is left to take care of itself.

The result is a church so localized that it is unable to act as a whole. For example, there has not been a general council recognized or sponsored by Orthodoxy since A.D. 787; i.e., 1,212 years ago. Thus the most solemn teaching organ among the Orthodox has been silenced, and with that silencing a vital element of the church's mission has been lost. Protestants--including Anglicans and those Lutherans who have kept a vestige of the order of bishops--by rejecting the apostolic character of the episcopacy have been led to focus on the individual response to the Gospel. Peter's faith becomes my faith because I can confess, as he did, that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ of God.

The superiority of the Catholic reading of Matthew 16 is demonstrated by our including and then going beyond these interpretations. Each bishop, each Christian, is called upon to appropriate Peter's faith in Christ, the former as the apostolic teacher of his flock and the latter as sharing in the faith Peter professed. The authenticity of these interpretations is confirmed for a Catholic by their being found among the traditional teachings of the Church. To that extent the Orthodox and Protestants are correct. But they do not go far enough, for there is another element to Peter's witness, namely the representative role of Peter which is confirmed in this passage and in many other places in the New Testament. Consequently Catholicism is in the strong position ecumenically of honouring the partial truths which are found in Orthodoxy and Protestantism and then completing them with the fulness of truth which is the basis of the actual unity that Catholics enjoy and to which all Christians are called by their all egiance to Christ.

These ecumenical possibilities I shall examine in a second article.

Father Daniel Callam is professor and head of the Department of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas.