The more we understand the nature of this choice gift of God, the better we will be able to respond to the Spirit’s action in the world, and to receive the graces it brings according to God’s often hidden purposes.
This article is the first in a five-part series on the Papacy.
“I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18).
Why did God give us the Pope? To answer that question it will help to begin with a more fundamental one: what might be the purpose of human institutional life in the plan of the Creator? A merely sociological analysis would show that institutions are necessary for human flourishing and even for human survival. We are essentially communal creatures who make our way in a constantly changing world of space and time. If ways of life, ideals, and relationships are to have any stability or longevity, they need to be ordered by some kind of institutional framework. Whether in political life, business, kinship groups, or education, every human society instinctively develops institutional forms for the maintenance and continuing vitality of their life together. A human civilization can be described as an interlocking network of different institutional arrangements that together form what we call a culture. Thus to be anti-institutional is in an important sense to be anti-human.
It has long been understood by Christians that some form of political and social order is demanded by our created nature, and is therefore part of what it means to live according to God’s ways. In many areas of life the specific forms of institutions have been left to human creativity and custom. Christians have not usually held that there is only one possible God-given form of political life or of economic organization, and have only insisted that whatever the institutional form, it should be characterized by fundamental justice and it should allow for the proper worship of God and for human life to flourish. But in two essential areas God has done more than bring about a context that demands organized corporate life; he has given us the specific shape of that life. Those two primary institutions are the family and the Church, the graced human structures within which our fundamental identity is secured and our sense of life’s meaning is passed on.
God’s purpose for establishing primary institutional life according to a divine plan can be seen in the Scriptures. Having created the first humans, God did not leave them to sort out their most intimate relationships in whatever way their intelligence and creativity might choose. He gave them the institution within which they would come to their full humanity; he created the family, founded on the union of a man and a woman and bringing into being a network of related people. When God established the Church through his prophet Moses, when he gathered together a people who would be his own possession and among whom he would dwell, he gave them the form of their religious and moral life down to the specifics of an ordained priesthood and a pattern of worship, the whole fabric of which made up the Mosaic Law. Jesus followed a similar pattern. When he formulated the New Covenant, he said that he was not abolishing the Mosaic Law, but rather bringing it to its fulfillment. Like Moses, he passed on to his followers an institutional framework that included a moral law, a polity, a priesthood, and the specifics of worship.
The early Christians had no doubts about the God-given institutional nature of the Church’s common life; it was a continuation and fulfillment of what they had already known under the Mosaic Covenant. There is a notion that has gained currency over time suggesting that Jesus was a wandering and solitary idealistic figure around whom an inchoate group of people gathered, who only slowly over the centuries constructed an institutional life out of what was at first a spontaneous and unstructured experience. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the institutionalization of Christian life was a betrayal of the original message of Jesus. Such a notion is historically untenable, and represents an attempt to read back into the early Church ideas that no pre-modern person, and certainly no early disciple of Jesus, would have found intelligible. Followers of Jesus knew that they were being invited into an organized body of people with a clear structure of leadership and a common way of life. There were certainly developments and applications of the Church’s institutional arrangements over time, but its fundamental structure was evident from the beginning, and was considered by the Church part of the deposit of revealed truth handed on by Christ. If we consider the Church of the first five centuries, we will find that while it was troubled by many fierce doctrinal controversies, there were few significant battles over the institutional structure of the Church such as have dogged the post-Reformation Protestant world during the past five centuries. There was a near-universal embrace of the government of the Church in the hands of bishops, members of an ordained clergy surrounded by priests and deacons, who carried on the office of the Twelve Apostles in union with the successor of Peter. There was a shared understanding of the nature of high worship in the sacrifice of the Mass. What can account for such a relatively peaceful agreement, unforced by coercive action on the part of any temporal government, and stretching across thousands of miles and among many different languages and cultures? Their own explanation was that they received these institutional arrangements from the Apostles, which is to say from the Holy Spirit, and they were therefore not to be tampered with. It is hard to see what else could have produced such agreement about these matters from the beginning, a common mind that has proved so elusive to those who have denied the authority of the extra-Scriptural apostolic tradition. Here is the testimony of a notable Churchman of the second century, Irenaeus of Lyon. Irenaeus was originally from Asia where as a young man he had known Polycarp, the great bishop of Smyrna and disciple of John the Evangelist. He spent a good bit of time in Rome, and he ended as a bishop in the province of Gaul, far to the west. He was thus personally familiar with Christians from many different parts of the world. He wrote:
Since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the succession [of bishops from the apostles] of all the churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the succession of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul, that church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the apostles. With that church, because of its superior origin, all the churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world, and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the apostolic tradition (Against Heresies 3:3:2).
The Church has thus held from the beginning that it was God who gave us the institutional form of the Church, including its special care under the successor of Peter, the one upon whom Jesus said he would build his Church. We can now go back to our original question: Why did God give us a Pope? If the Church’s structure were the result of human calculation and experience, it would be natural to subject that structure to examination and critique, and to alter it or discard it as we thought circumstances might dictate. But the fundamental structure of the Church is not a human construct; it is a gift from God, and God’s gifts are to be treated differently. While we need to steward them and constantly purify their operation according to the truths of the Gospel, we do not sit in judgment over them as if it were up to us to determine whether or not they are of use. It is in the nature of God’s gifts that we often only realize their significance over time as we see them in operation. Recognizing that God’s thoughts are far above our own and that he no doubt has reasons for his way of ordering things that go beyond our understanding, we might still reasonably look for evidences of the wisdom of what he has given us, in order to more faithfully cooperate with it. What then might be some of God’s reasons for building the Church on the rock of Peter? Here is a partial list of plausible responses to that question.
- God is the fountainhead of all knowledge, including the knowledge of how human life can best flourish. He is the one true expert on humanity. In the Church he has given us an institutional structure that suits our being. It is both strong and supple in its workings, such that it has been able to maintain continuity in all important matters while enjoying the flexibility to adapt itself to very different ages and cultural arrangements. The Papacy has functioned differently in different times. It would be possible, for example, to chart the exercise of the office as it was differently handled by Peter himself, by Clement I, by Leo the Great, by Gregory VII, by Innocent III, by Pius V, by Leo XIII, and by John Paul II. The fundamental charge from Christ has been the same throughout, but the arrangements needed to fulfill that charge have differed, and the Papacy has had the ability to adapt itself to those changing demands while maintaining essential continuity.
- Jesus said that he was establishing a kingdom that would be in the world but not of the world. How was it to be structured such that it could avoid the obvious temptation on both sides of that spiritual equation, either to be too much “of the world” by imitating wrongly the ways of fallen humanity, or to no longer be “in the world” under the influence of an ethereal disembodied spirituality divorced from the course of the world’s history? How best to secure a functional kingdom that insisted on its authority to teach but that had renounced the worldly tendency to coerce? How to maintain the life of a body whose authority derived from its moral and spiritual qualities rather than from its political and economic power, and that secured its greatness by becoming the servant of all? How to assure the continuance of a communal organism that intended to influence the course of human history by consistently raising the eyes of humanity to a destiny that went beyond this world? The Papacy has proved an admirable aid for these crucial tasks. The Pope has been at the head of a significant human institution that has found its way into the life of cultures and civilizations, and yet has done so in a manner quite different from the kingdoms of the world.
- It is natural for humans to respond most readily to leadership that is personal as well as rational. While we do not want to be ruled by arbitrary personal whim, we all seek leaders whom we can in some sense personally know, who can become a center around which our loyalty, affection, and respect can be fixed. Even the worlds of politics and business know the need for an executive, a figure who can galvanize activity and represent the whole. This inclination for personal rule may be an echo of our creation as beings fashioned to follow Christ, the logos made flesh, reason endowed with a personality, truth itself that can be known and loved as well as obeyed. Committees have their important place, but no one wants to be governed by a committee. In giving us the Papacy, God has provided for this very human quality. Christ is the one true King, and he dignifies his followers by exercising his kingship in many different human guises, an important one of which is the successor of Peter.
- In establishing his Church, Jesus told us that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. The separation of Church and state, when understood rightly, is a Christian idea that runs counter to the customs and inclinations of our world. Fallen humanity has never liked this separation between the rule of Caesar and of God. We are prone to want to unite all spiritual and temporal authority in one office. It might be to cede to Caesar the whole field and allow the temporal authority to rule peoples’ souls, as has been the case of most great pagan empires. Conversely it might be to give to the representatives of God Caesar’s temporal and often coercive task, as in Islam or Tibetan Buddhism. Either way the result is the same. How can the dominant structures of worldly power be kept to their proper limits? Only a strong expression of “what belongs to God” could provide an institutional counterweight that would be capable of resisting the drag toward unitary power. The one institution in history that has had the ballast to effectively press some kind of limit upon worldly governments is the Papacy. When it has worked well, it has provided the best context for a just and reasonable society, one that gives attention to temporal matters but that is open to the infinite. Had it not been for the office of the Papacy, our whole tradition of limited government and the rights of individual conscience would never have had the breathing room to arise.
- God’s kingdom is to be founded on truth. The Church has been sent by Christ into a world dominated and enslaved by deception, and Jesus has told us that he came to bear witness to the truth, and that the truth would set us free (John 18:37; 8:32). How is that truth to be secured through time and across space among confused and forgetful humans? Peter’s office has been designed to meet that need. The Pope has not been given the task or the ability to invent doctrine; he is the servant of the Christian tradition and the representative of Christ himself from whom all his authority is derived. Yet he has been given the grace to be the authentic interpreter of revealed truth, a living voice that can speak to each generation and can confront particular distortions of truth as they arise.
- Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper that the unity of his followers would be a sign of God’s presence in a world of disunion. How could that necessarily visible unity to be expressed and preserved? The Papacy has provided a key part of the answer. To be in living communion with the successor of Peter has allowed the followers of Christ to be a genuinely and visibly united people, a sign of God’s presence in the midst of the Babel of a fallen world.
The office of Peter has been a great gift from God, one that the Church’s faithful should honor with gratitude and reverence. Yet this recognition does not place individual Popes beyond all criticism or leave them immune from wrongdoing or imprudence. All God’s gifts are exercised within the scope of human freedom, and as such can be either used or abused. All God’s gifts, whether of intellectual ability, physical strength, fertility and sexuality, or human friendship, are meant to find their place in a context of love and wisdom. Any of those gifts can be misused by fallen humans in inadequate and sometimes deplorable ways. But the failure of individuals does not annul the goodness or purpose of the gift. If food becomes poisonous it may be necessary to purify it and remove the toxin, but it would be no solution to respond to poison by abolishing food. So with the office of Peter: if there have been lacks in the wisdom or holiness of the holder of that office at different times in its history, the Church has responded, not by devising a different way of arranging the God-given architecture of her life, but by setting her gaze with increased intensity on the purpose of the gift, and re-invigorating its genuine exercise.
The Church, like Christ himself who inhabits it, is shrouded in mystery. It is a human institution, but with a divine life coursing through it. It is deeply engaged in time and place, but in its essence it transcends all times and places. It is governed by fallen humans, but Christ ultimately rules its fortunes and leads it to its fulfillment. Peter’s place in the Church participates in all of its mysteries, in its human character and in its divine life. The more we understand the nature of this choice gift of God, the better we will be able to respond to the Spirit’s action in the world, and to receive the graces it brings according to God’s often hidden purposes.