Hearing Christ through Peter, Chair of St. Peter, February 22, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Feast of the Chair of St. Peter
February 22, 2014
1 Pet 5:1-4, Ps 23, Mt 16:13-19

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, we have a double confession. Inspired by God the Father, Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. Jesus in return gives another, almost equally striking confession: You are kepha (the Aramaic means both the name “Peter” and the thing “Rock”), you are Rock and on this Rock, on you, I will build my Church and the gates of Hell won’t prevail against it. Jesus built his Church with an architectural plan and the foundation of the Church would be Peter. That means that if we’re going to be truly Christian, fully Christian, we need to build our faith in Christ on Peter. At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed to God the Father, “Grant that no tempests may disturb us for you have set us fast on the rock of the Apostle Peter’s confession of faith.” God has set us fast, made our faith steadfast, on the Rock’s confession of faith, and therefore our growth in faith, our deepening of the Christian life, is directed linked to Peter, to the office of the Papacy, and to the responsibilities Christ gave him he passed on to his successors.
• Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the “Chair” of St. Peter. Liturgically, it recalls the day he took up his episcopal ministry in Antioch, where he served before coming to Rome. He was Pope from Jesus’ ascension, but he didn’t immediately go to Rome. The early Christians not only celebrated Peter’s heroic martyrdom as a feast but also celebrated the day in which he started to guide the first Christians in the place Jesus’ believers were first called Christians.
• To celebrate the feast of St. Peter’s Chair, however, is something more specific than feting Peter’s ministry as a whole. The chair was the ancient symbol of teaching authority. Teachers would sit and all their students would stand, the exact opposite of what happens today. In the Gospel, the evangelists tell us on several occasions that Jesus “sat down and began to teach” the crowds. The chair became a symbol of teaching authority and in some ways that remains today, when we refer to the person who has the “chair of philosophy” or “chair of theology” or even the “chairman” of a particular meeting. To celebrate the feast of the Chair of St. Peter is to rejoice in the teaching authority Christ has given him for the sake of his body the Church. Jesus gave Peter the “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” to bind and loose on earth, and that even greater authority over the sacraments points to the authority he has to teach authoritatively in Jesus’ name. We retain the expression of the Pope’s teaching ex cathedra (literally “from the chair”) to highlight his most solemn teachings to us, applying Christ’s words and wisdom to the present age.
• Over my shoulder, we have a beautiful tapestry of the Holy Spirit, which is an image of the famous crystal and alabaster sculpture over the “Altar of the Chair” in the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. In the sculpture that hovered over the altar Bernini enshrined the chair that in the 1600s everyone said was the one used by St. Peter 1600 years earlier to teach the faith to the people of Rome. They were mistaken by a measly 800 years — history then wasn’t what it is now and archaeology basically didn’t exist — and the chair was actually given to the Pope around the year 800 by the emperor Otto II, but the reality to which the altar of the chair pointed was Peter’s authority, and Bernini illustrated the theology of that authority in this incredible sculpture. On top of the bronze-enshrined chair was the image of the Holy Spirit above my shoulder, showing that the Holy Spirit continued to guide Peter and through him the Church to “all the truth,” as Jesus promised during the last supper. Underneath the chair, pointing to and spiritually upholding the legs of the chair, are four great theologians, bishops and fathers of the Church, Saints Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom and Athanasius. Their presence shows how bishops and theologians are supposed to support the teaching authority of the Popes, not “chopping off” the legs by undermining that authority. And then on the front of the seat-back is a bas relief of Peter’s feeding Christ’s sheep and lambs, the commission Christ gave Peter at the end of St. John’s Gospel after asking him three times if he loved him. Peter’s love for Christ will be shown in his feeding Christ’s flock, and the first way he feeds the flock is through his authoritative teaching in Christ’s name. Just as the evangelists tell us that Jesus had pity on the crowds and began to teach them many things, so Peter, sharing in Christ’s compassion, teaches.
• The teaching authority of the Pope has been so important throughout Church history. We see even in the Acts of the Apostles how there were disputes about whether Gentile converts needed to follow the whole Mosaic law and how Peter intervened in the Council of Jerusalem. Much later there were huge issues with whether Christ was fully God and fully man, whether he was two persons or one person and two natures, whether he had the full complement of a human body, soul and spirit, whether he had one will or two wills, whether the Holy Spirit was divine, what the sacraments were and whether they were necessary for salvation, which sacred writings were truly inspired and binding, and so many other concerns. It was the work of the Popes and the early ecumenical councils to guide the Church through this time of confusion and division. The Pope was the central reference point. After Pope Leo the Great intervened with a famous “Tome” to guide the deliberations of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, many said, in a phrase that has since become famous, “Roma locuta est. Causa finita est.” “Rome [Peter] has spoken. The matter’s been put to rest.”
• That teaching authority is just as important today. Whereas in the early Church, most of the disputes were about dogmatic issues, today most of the confusion concerns moral issues, what love for neighbor really means with regard to abortion and euthanasia, to love, marriage, sexuality and family, to care for immigrants and the poor and so on. There are many people, including some Catholics, who think they know better than the Holy Spirit what is the truth with regard to these issues. That’s why the Pope’s voice is so important. The question for us is do we base ourselves on Peter’s continual confession of faith in Christ when he speaks on these controversial issues or do we think we think that his teaching is just an opinion no more valuable than ours or even a bright theologian’s who disagrees with the Pope? To be truly Catholic, we need to hold fast to Peter’s confession of faith, especially in the “tempests” of the world.
• For most daily Mass goers, thanks be to God, if there were a material disagreement between what they hold and the Pope teaches, most would re-align their belief to the Pope’s. But there’s another way that daily Mass goers and others are called to heed the Pope’s words in Jesus’ name. It’s to pay attention and to heed what the Pope teaches us as an echo of the voice of the Good Shepherd. There are many Catholics — not just laity but sadly many priests, religious and consecrated — who simply blow off what the Pope teaches. When the Pope publishes an encyclical or an exhortation, the vast majority of Catholics, I’ve discovered, ignore it. They treat it as if it’s irrelevant to their life of faith. Priests can treat it as if it’s superfluous to how they’re supposed to guiding that portion of Christ’s flock entrusted to them. Many catechists, Catholic school teachers and parents figure that what the Pope is writing is not germane to their mission to pass on the faith to the next generation by word and example. I don’t think this problem comes from Catholics’ being opposed to what the Pope is saying or making a choice to refuse to read it. They simply begin with an attitude that what the Pope says doesn’t really matter to their day-to-day following of Jesus Christ. They’re not excited when the Pope comes out with a new document because they’re not holding fast to the Pope’s confession of faith, they don’t think they need it in the “tempests” of life. And this is an attitude that needs to be addressed and fixed. Christ gave us the Petrine teaching authority precisely to feed us with the faith in every age and if we’re not digesting what the Pope is giving us, we’re simply spiritually malnourished.
• We’re living in one of the greatest ages ever to be Catholic because, thanks to new technology, we  have incredible access to everything the Pope teaches. Every morning about 7 am here on the East Coast, we’re able to read what he’s preached that day in the Vatican. We’re able to watch, or read, or listen to his Wednesday audiences and Sunday Angelus meditations live and on video-on-demand. The Vatican has several great websites that give us immediate access to what he’s teaching. For this reason alone, I think it would be worth it for someone who doesn’t have or use a computer or iPad or smart phone to get one, simply so that we can have almost immediate access to the teaching of the successor of St. Peter shepherding us in Christ’s name today. This is a tremendous gift for us to grow in faith, but we need to see it as a gift and take advantage of that treasure. Today’s feast of the Chair of St. Peter is an opportunity for us to make a resolute to hold fast to what the Pope teaches and to commit ourselves to following that teaching.
• I want to finish today by a reference to the second way Peter feeds Christ’s flock, which is by giving us Jesus’ body and blood. Peter is the one who gave the great confession of faith in Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist. After Jesus told us that we needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood to have life in us, after many of the disciples abandoned Jesus because they found that teaching too hard to endure, and after Jesus turned to the apostles and asked whether they, too, would abandon him, that’s when Peter stood up and said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter didn’t know better than anyone else how Jesus would give us his body and blood — he wouldn’t until exactly a year later when during the Last Supper he would totally change bread and wine into his body and blood and give himself to us to eat — but because he believed in Jesus, he believed in what he said. We hold fast to that confession of faith in Christ. At St. Peter’s Basilica this relationship between Peter and the Sacrament of the Eucharist is depicted artistically. The tabernacle in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel is a replica of a famous Church dedicated to St. Peter elsewhere in Rome, called San Pietro in Montorio. The Church at the time wanted to show the connection between Peter and the Eucharist and thought that it wouldn’t be attracted, for example, to have a tabernacle shaped like a man with a key in the belly button and taking out the ciboria from the peritoneum. Instead they took a Church that symbolized Peter and placed Jesus within, to show that without holy orders, without the priesthood that finds its source of unity in Peter, there would be no Eucharist. So at the Mass, we have the double feast of the liturgy of the Word and the liturgy of the Eucharist and in both Peter’s authority is key. He nourishes us first with the Word of God and the applications of that Word to Christian life and then he nourishes us with the Word made Flesh. Peter was present at the first Mass and then celebrated the Eucharist for the early Christians with the table of the Word and the table of the Eucharist.
• Today we thank the Lord for the gift of his work, his Church founded on Peter, his teaching through the Pope, his giving of the Sacraments, and we ask for the grace to hold fast to his continual confession. And we pray in a special way for the 266th Peter, Pope Francis, that his faith may never fail, that he may strengthen us his brothers and sisters with Jesus’ teaching, and help us all to confess Jesus in the world to be the Messiah and Son of God.

The readings for today’s Mass were: