Fr. Richard G. Cipolla
St. Mary's Norwalk
You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16:18)
Why
Peter? Why does Christ make him the rock on which the Church is founded?
Why not John, the disciple whom Jesus loved in a special way and who was
chosen from the Cross to take care of Jesus’ mother Mary? Why Peter?
Peter, who tried to chatter on the mount of the Transfiguration and who
did not understand that silence is the only response to the presence of God.
Peter, who faltered walking on water and had to be rescued by Jesus.
Peter who refused to understand that Jesus had to go to Jerusalem to be mocked,
spat upon, and to die on the Cross, Peter the recipient of Jesus’ harsh
words: “Get thee behind me Satan!”
Peter, whose impetuosity sliced
off the soldier’s ear in Gethsemane, Peter who—this is the deep betrayal—denied
Jesus three times: “I do not know him.” Why Peter? The question may
have no obvious answer. For our Lord saw something in Peter that is not obvious
to us, and it is to him that those words were spoken: “You are Peter, and on
this rock will I build my Church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it”. And then gift of the keys of the kingdom of heaven, binding
and loosing. .
Why
even ask the question , why Peter? , even if there is no definitive answer. And yet
the question should be asked at this particular time in the Church, for much is
at stake in the understanding of the Petrine Office today. The
current crisis in the Church has manifold aspects: liturgy, the onslaught of
militant secularism, the almost instantaneous transition from modernism to
post-modernism, the inability of the Church through theologians to articulate
the problem and the solution in terms of the person of Jesus Christ . the
collapse of the manhood of the bishops, the function of the papacy in today’s
world. It is the last that somehow encapsulates the problematic
situation of the Church in today’s world.
Yesterday
in the Traditional calendar we celebrated the commemoration of Pope Zephyrinus,
Pope and martyr. He was Pope for 11 years in the early third century.
He was a victim of the persecutions under the emperor Severus. As
bishop of Rome he fought several heresies including one that claimed that
Christ became God only after the resurrection. He is numbered among the
martyrs, but he was not directly killed by the persecutions. Did Zephyrinus know that he was
Pope in the modern sense? Most probably not. He knew he was bishop
of Rome and the successor of Peter and that he had an obligation to keep true
to the Tradition that had been handed down to him. And what he knew is the
basis of the Petrine Office, the wonderful gift of God to the Church. He knew that the ministry of the supreme
pastor of the Church is to be the guardian of the Tradition of the Church.
Now
to talk about the infallibility of the Pope in terms of Zephyrinus is
totally anachronistic. Zephyrinus was concerned to combat the many
early wrong- headed understandings of the person of Christ and to stay alive
under the Roman persecutions. His staying alive had little to do with the Bee
Gees’ understanding of staying alive. He wanted to stay alive to fulfill
his role as the Bishop of Rome: to pass on the Tradition of the Apostles and to
combat opinions and teachings that were contrary to that Tradition that had
been handed on to him to keep and secure.
The history
of the papacy is the history of the West. It is not always a glorious
history. There have been good Popes, there have been glorious Popes and
there have been bad Popes, and “bad” as an adjective is not used merely in a
moral sense, referring to popes with mistresses and children, to popes who were
quite at home on a horse leading a charge against the enemy, the enemy that
could be local as well as on a more global scale. The really bad popes forgot
who they were in the deepest sense in their primary mission of preserving and
handing down the Apostolic Tradition within whatever time of history in which
they lived. But they all understood that one of the primary bearers of the
Tradition was the Roman Mass, whose roots may go back to the Apostolic Church
itself. They understood the Roman Mass as the liturgical source and summit of
the act of passing on the Tradition entrusted to them in terms of the heart of
the matter: the Sacrifice of the Cross. Alexander VI, probably never to
be sainted, understood that when he was at the foot of the altar that he was
the priest , whose function was to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as it
had been handed down to him. It never occurred to him that he had any
authority to change or alter this living icon of the Tradition of the Church in
its liturgical manifestation.
Is
it an accident that the momentous development of the doctrine of the papacy
occurred in the nineteenth century with the declaration of the Infallibility of
the Pope in matters of faith and morality? It is no accident that this
development of the understanding of the Petrine Office was defined towards the
end of the confluence of the Enlightenment and the great period of Romanticism
that encouraged revolutionary fervor. Against the prevailing notion of
truth as individualistic and relative and man-centered, the promulgation of the
doctrine of the infallibility of the Pope at the First Vatican Council was the
Church’s No to the deeply flawed understanding of the nature of things
that was the mark of the mid and late nineteenth century. The quirky
Anglican church historian, Charles Williams, said that with the
proclamation of the dogma of infallibility at the First Vatican Council
the Church regained her manhood. Chew on that phrase. “HER manhood”,
for a while.
And
yet it was men like Blessed John Henry Newman, who opposed the definition of
infallibility. He did not oppose it on personal grounds, because he believed in
the doctrine as a valid development of dogma. But he feared that defining
this doctrine would lead to terrible excesses in understanding of and the
practice of the Petrine Office, the gift of God to the Church. And he was
right. The definition of Infallibility of the Pope at Vatican I was in a
real way a minimalist definition that disappointed many of the Ultramontanists
of that time. It was clear that the Pope could define a dogma as infallible
only on the basis of what the Church has always believed, however nascent that
belief was. It is clear in Vatican I that the Pope has no power to define
infallibly anything that the Church has not always believed and the Pope has no
power to define any doctrine that is not consonant with the teaching of the
Church for the past two thousand years. Development of doctrine--
YES. Innovation that is not consonant
with the Tradition-- NO.
I doubt
if Newman could have forseen the development of the papacy into a global phenomenon
that, fed by the omnipresent instantenaity of the multi media, has turned an
office in the Church into part of the incessantly available informational
culture in which we live. A hundred years ago many Catholics did not know
who the Pope reigning at that time was. They knew he existed, that he
lived in Rome, and was doing his job to protect the truth of the Catholic
Tradition. Today everyone knows who the Pope is and every word he speaks,
be it in his daily homilies at Santa Marta , or on airplanes with the press (most
of whom have no understanding of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church)
or in tweets, or in some other medium. The instantly recognizable Pope has made
people forget the fragile humanity of the first Pope. Peter’s non-understanding and lack of
fidelity was overcome only by the sheer grace of God. Peter can never be idolized or made a rock
star.
But
that is not the greatest problem we face on this Sunday. What we
face is the destruction of Catholic Tradition by those entrusted with the
passing on of this Tradition. Passing on the Catholic Tradition is not a
mindless exercise in keeping things as they are. Nor is it a matter of
doctrinal bookkeeping. Nor is it driven by a fear of the world as it is
today. It is a matter of love. Passing on the Tradition, the teaching of the Church, based solely on
the teaching of Jesus Christ, is the job of every Catholic, but most acutely it
is the job of every deacon, priest and bishop and above all the Pope. The
nonsense that we hear spouted at the highest levels of the Church about mercy
trouncing all of the moral teaching of the Church, is evidence of the deep
failure and the lack of courage to be faithful to the clear and difficult teaching
of Jesus Christ himself.
And
yes, this sermon will conclude with a reference to the Mass we are celebrating
here today. The gainsayers will write it off with a movement of the hand,
signifying the reductionism of everything by the pastor to the Traditional
Mass. This is how Father ends all of his sermons. I wish that were
true at a personal level. But it is not. Because the most powerful antidote to the
dangerous and futile nonsense that goes on in the Church today is the proper
celebration of this Mass. What we do here together today vibrates in
eternity. It is much more important than an eclipse of the sun. What we
do here together, priest and people, is to make present the whole Tradition of
the Church in the only acceptable worship of God within the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass, the essence of who God is: infinite love.
