Feast of Peter and Paul, 1997

Who I am as a member of this community

The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul is of such liturgical magnitude that it displaces the regular Sunday. A and because of the somewhat parlous state of the Papacy today, to which the Pope has referred in an encyclical a couple of years ago, it might do well to look at what we call "the primacy of Peter" fairly closely. You remember that the Pope said in that encyclical, "That all be one", he needed help trying to figure out how the Papacy is supposed to work in the 21st century. This means that something’s wrong, obviously, or else he wouldn’t have asked for help, from everybody, by the way.

So we go to one of the major sources of the tradition, the Scriptures, and see what they have to offer us. It’s interesting, the association of Peter and Paul. The only historically accurate report of these two people getting together is in Paul’s Letter to the Church at Galatia. There Paul simply faced Peter down, called him a coward and a hypocrite, and told him that he was doing very destructive things to this nascent Christian movement. This is a far cry from what the Papacy has offered in regard to the role of Peter. There is no question that, certainly by the end of the first century, what we call the Petrine Office had begun to develop. There had to be somebody to chair the meetings, if you will, of the Church. That is pretty much what the Petrine Office was: the office of one man, unfortunately at that point a man, to get everybody organised. What happened subsequently, of course, is understood better not theologically so much as sociologically, and that’s what I’d like to talk about a little bit.

We should talk about Peter and Paul as symbols rather than in historical terms because we know very little about how they operated historically apart from that little incident in Galatians. I should add a footnote at this point because what Luke has to say about the relationship between Peter and Paul is pretty much discounted as historically reliable. But if we take Peter and Paul as symbolising two human impulses it might be helpful. I’d like to suggest that Peter represents a trend toward mystification and that Paul represents a trend toward demystification. "Mystification" is of course one of the great words that was added to the vocabulary by Karl Marx. Marx said that people mystified things when they took something from human history and then later added all sorts of significance to that event. And so the event grows in grandeur and is elaborated upon in all kinds of ways, until, what is a present manifestation of that development, seems to be divinely mandated . Marx of course applies this analysis to the distribution of capital and labour, to hereditary wealth, and all kinds of other stuff. And the Church too falls on his list. I propose we can see that process of mystification over and over, in religioun in particular. Because if you want to say that something is God’s intention, then very easily, and unfortunately very quickly, what we may read as God’s intention is elaborated in a way that is certainly not God’s intention. So it seems to me.

Let me give you a little example because this all seems fairly abstract. From the second century before Jesus they had to translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek to make them more available to people because there were masses of Jews all over the world who could no longer read Hebrew. The tradition has it that they took seventy copies of the Hebrew Scriptures and gave them to seventy scholars who were bilingual in Greek and Hebrew. These went into seventy different rooms, took seventy days, and then came out with seventy copies of the exact same translation of the text. That’s what I mean by mystification. Here the Scriptures take on a kind of magical aura. When we’re talking about leadership, mystification becomes an even more dangerous thing because leadership, as it is practised in the world, is always, as Lord Acton said, subject to terrible distortion. And out of that comes terrible violence: "Power corrupts, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely." If you put all this together with the great legitimisation of Christianity in 313 under Emperor Constantine you have the makings of a witch’s brew. If you have a tendency to glorify and mystify this role of leadership in the Church, plus the legitimisation of the Christian movement under the Roman Emperor (they had been persecuted them up to that point), and if you also have the political arrangement of the Christian Church taking on the precise form of Roman imperial structure, then you have problems. You have leadership understood, not as service, as it clearly is over and over in the New Testament, but as a form of domination and oppression. There is another interesting footnote to add. Every time that Jesus is depicted as mentioning authority it always comes with a warning. That is the thought of Lord Acton: authority and power are eminently corruptible. So that’s the mystification side of the thing. Now we have to look at the Paul side of it.

Paul basically demystifies things when he says: "Peter, you’re a fraud, you’re a coward, and you’re a hypocrite." What is the upshot of Paul doing that to Peter? Did he do it just to "one up" Peter? Or was Paul so concerned with the unity and the integrity of the Christian community that he saw in Peter’s behaviour the destruction of that unity? If so, then we have the only reason for demystifying the Roman primacy that is legitimate and truly Christian. Paul, in other words, is saying that hypocrisy, cowardice, and dishonesty make real community impossible. And if you’re going to be a leader in the Christian community, the whole function of leadership, as Jesus said over and over, is precisely to make community possible, to abet it from this particular position within the community.

So if you look at the tradition of the Roman Papacy, it is at least spotty. There is a well known theologian in Ottawa who, in a memorable first line of a book on the Papacy, said: "If you look at the long history of the Church, you can pretty much assume that the Papacy has done at least as much good as it has done damage." This is really important for us to hear on this feast. Normally our human impulse is to give way to somebody who wears fancier clothes, or has a more elevated title, or drives around big and fancy vehicles. So, is the Roman primacy essential to us as Roman Catholics? It certainly is. The present Pope has done a great service to us in making this implicit admission that something is not working very well right now and is therefore seeking help. What can we do? I don’t know. I’m not going to write a letter to the Vatican recommending that we dismantle the Curia and that the whole bureaucracy badly needs to be jettisoned and that we should start from the ground up again. But the purpose for this feast is much more modest: to try to understand who I am as a member of this community, and maybe get the courage to say something to the Pooh-Bahs, and above all redefine what Pooh-Bahdom is supposed to look like, and then to pray that we really, each of us in his or her own way, do what the whole New Testament and the career of Jesus are all about to bring us together.

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RT 5/9/97