Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer Horn joins Cy Kellett to tackle the question of authority within the Church, specifically the role of Peter as the rock.
Transcript:
Caller: Your program has been really great in helping me grow, but I’m still not Catholic, so you guys need to do a better job, apparently.
Cy: All right, thank you for the progress report. We’ll do better.
Caller: I like history. So I look at history a lot and I don’t see the line going from Peter to the Bishop of Rome. Also, with the popes going between France and Italy and multiple popes, it seems like there’s too many problems there for me. So it’s like, okay, but
Joe: let’s start with a couple foundational pieces. Is it fair to say biblically that Jesus chooses a top-down structure of leadership for his church?
Caller: Yes, but he puts Christ as the head of the church, not the bishop in Rome.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Christ is the ultimate foundation of the church. We would not want to follow someone who thought he could replace Christ.
But in the same way that, you know, if you said, like, who is the head of your family? One answer is going to be you. One answer is going to be God the Father. Right?
But hopefully you don’t confuse in what sense you’re the head and what sense God’s the head. But like St. Paul can say, for this reason I bow the knee before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. Like, every fatherhood comes from the fatherhood of God.
Well, similarly, Peter being the rock comes from Christ being the rock. It’s not a rival rock. So you’ll find the same kind of language. And you can go back even to the Old Testament. Abraham is described as a rock, but that doesn’t replace the fact that God is the rock of Israel. It’s not an either/or in that sense.
But there is rock language used to describe Peter. In fact, his name is changed from Simon to Peter. And Peter means rock in Aramaic. It’s just very simply like, you are rock, and upon this rock I’ll build my church.
Really, before I even get to that, I just need to establish there is top-down leadership first, and second, Peter seems to have this very special authority within it.
So Christian leadership is servant leadership. Jesus tells the apostles this when they’re fighting at the Last Supper about which of them is the greatest. He gives himself as the example and says, behold, he among you is one who serves.
But then he does affirm that the 12 are called to be the servant leaders of the church that they are. He says, I have prepared 12 thrones for you. He says, as my Father appointed a kingdom for me, so do I appoint for you. You may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.
This is what I mean by the top-down kind of monarchical leadership of the Church. It looks like a kingdom; it doesn’t look like a democracy.
The very next verse, he singles out one disciple, Simon Peter, and says, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, but that’s you all, that he might sift you all like wheat.
Then he switches from the plural to the singular and says, but I’ve prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brethren.
So all the 12 are to be servant leaders of the Church. One of the 12, Simon Peter, is to be the servant of the servants of God. This is the basic structure of the church.
And you can go back and look at the structure of the family, you can look at the structure of Adam and Eve, of the patriarchs, of the prophets, of the priests, of the kings of Israel. And the idea that there’s always one person with whom the buck stops is this recurring theme in the plan of God in salvation history.
So then the question just becomes, does that suddenly change after the time of Christ for some reason? And the answer is no.
You asked about two specific historical events. One, how do we know this authority continues on from Peter? And we know this in several different ways. You can find references to this.
For instance, when St. Ignatius talks about the Church of Rome presiding in charity in his letter to them in the year 107, you can find, in the year 96, Clement of Rome writing to resolve a controversy in Corinth, even while an apostle is alive, they’ve written to the Romans.
But maybe the clearest example is Irenaeus in about the year 180 when he talks about the necessity, he says, of the Church of Rome. He calls it the very great, the very ancient and universally known Church, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul.
And he says it is a matter of necessity that every church should agree with this church on account of its preeminent authority. And then in the next paragraph, he traces one by one every bishop of Rome from the time of Peter and Paul to the time of Eleutherius in 180.
And so we don’t just know that the authority passes from Peter to the successors. We can tell you who they are by name, and we can tell you, not because of some late medieval legend or something, but from Christians in the 100s who grew up knowing people who were discipled by the apostles, like Polycarp.
So that’s the first part. Like, do we have clear historical evidence of this authority passing along through the successors in Rome? We do.
The second is, as you rightly point out, there are these controversies in the 15th century. So to make a long story medium, the Pope is elected Pope, but there are cardinals who voted for him who claim that, oh well, we didn’t feel free to elect the Pope.
And so they say that the papal election was invalid and they try to hold another election. They don’t have the authority to do this because there already is a Pope. You can have a papal conclave when the Pope is dead. You can’t just have a new papal conclave when you don’t like who the Pope is.
And so this new anti-Pope starts claiming to be the Pope, and he’s not. And then another group of cardinals gets together in Italy and Pisa and says, well, we’re going to reject both these guys and get a new Pope so that it’s all clean.
And this, of course, doesn’t solve the problem and makes it worse because now you have the real Pope in Rome, you got a fake Pope in France, and you’ve got a fake Pope in Pisa.
This was a confusing, messy situation. It embarrassed the church; it undermined the Church’s authority in a lot of ways, but it doesn’t invalidate the existence of the Papacy.
Like, you can have counterfeit money and it doesn’t mean money’s not real. You can have two different people who claim they’re married to the same woman, and it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a husband.
Like, there might just be times where there’s a question about the validity of one marriage, you know, so should an annulment be granted? There might be times where two different people claim to have won a presidential election, but that doesn’t mean that the answer is that there’s no President.
So it was a bad moment in terms of the legacy of the Church, but there was always a Pope throughout that.
Cy: You can hear the music. So we gotta leave it there. I’m gonna send you Pope Peter, Joe’s book, if you like it. And because you’re in Peoria, Illinois, the hometown of our own Luke Bender, who runs our YouTube, we’ll send you another of Joe’s books. How about *The Eucharist is Really Jesus*?