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Introduction
One of the verses commonly used by Catholic apologists in defense of the Papacy is Luke 22:31–32. In this passage, immediately after the Last Supper and before the events of the Garden of Gethsemane, Our Lord says the following to St. Peter:
“Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”
Protestant apologists often respond to the quotation of this passage with “so what?” At first glance, it can seem quite arbitrary for Catholic apologists to quote such passages about St. Peter and then, by a hidden line of reasoning, arrive at “therefore the Papacy” at the end of it. Some time ago there was a “Johannine Pope” meme going around which demonstrated Ephesian supremacy by simply quoting verses about St. John. The implication is that the Papal methodology amounts to quoting any and every verse about St. Peter and then assuming a chain of reasoning it cannot substantiate.
In my opinion, Catholics should be sensitive to what is legitimate in this criticism. Frequently it is not made clear how these texts are being employed, or what precise line of reasoning would lead us to a conclusion as large as “the Papacy is true.” In order to properly construct an argument, the inference must be clear to the reader. That is a basic rhetorical and logical axiom.
Yet, as is often the case, the Protestant opponents of the Catholic case are not fair to the Catholic position either. They do not carefully research the exegesis of these passages, nor the explicit reasoning found in the manuals, polemical works, journal articles, monographs, and commentaries that would illuminate how we get from x to y. This does not require that the Protestant agree with that line of reasoning. It requires only that, for proper and fruitful disputation, such research actually be carried out. The inference has in fact been stated, ex professo and repeatedly, for the better part of seven centuries. To pretend as if our use of these texts only proceeded by a hidden line of reasoning without any real substantiation is defamatory.
Inflating the burden of proof
Another point in the dispute over “Papal proof-texting” that I believe gets misunderstood by critics of the Papacy concerns the burden of proof. A common line of argumentation employed by the Protestant critic of Catholic exegesis is simply to elevate that burden past anything the subject matter can bear.
We see crude forms of this everywhere in religious disputation. A famous example is the Muslim question, “Where does Jesus say, ‘Bow down and worship me’?” The demand presupposes that a doctrine can be proved only by a text in which the doctrine is verbally recited; yet, it is not incompossible that Christ both ought to be worshipped and that he did not say this in so many words. That Christ is to be adored follows demonstratively from the fact that He is God together with the fact that God alone is to be adored; and the first of those is established from what Scripture ascribes to Him, not from the verbal recitation demanded from our opponents.
Protestant apologists run a more respectable version of the same manoeuvre when they demand explicit scriptural testimony to each Papal prerogative taken singly, along with the succession and the location of the Roman Pontiff. This line of argumentation overlooks three facts that complicate the matter.
First, if we are disputing concerning the divine institution of the Church, then we cannot argue for an “abstract papacy,” but only one that concretely exists. Concretely, the Papacy that exists is the Papacy that holds Vatican I and will always hold certain dogmatic claims wholly incompatible with Protestantism. It follows necessarily that if the Papal office belongs to the divine constitution of the Church at all, then the “Vatican I Papacy” is true (or else divine revelation is false, supposing Christ to be a divine legate). There is no other Papacy except the concrete form in which it now exists.
There is a certain illusion in Protestant and Orthodox polemics that there exists some “third way” here—the Vatican I Papacy, a mitigated Papacy, and no Papacy—and that one may retreat to the middle term in order to save face before the vast historical witness to the Papal prerogatives. It is worth separating two very different things that go under that name.
The first is a mitigated Papacy understood as a human construct within the constitution of the Church: a primacy that grew up by custom, conciliar arrangement, or ecclesiastical law, and which may therefore be modified or dissolved. This is a coherent position. Catholics deny it, but we deny it as a matter of fact, on the historical and exegetical evidence.
The second is a mitigated Papacy said to belong to the divine constitution of the Church while lacking the prerogatives the office actually claims. This is not merely false; it is incoherent. In the concrete, such an office does not exist. The only papacy to exist is the one that the Catholics claim. Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that this mitigated Papacy did exist. Two things would follow. First, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, etc., would be false insofar as they lacked an element of the divine constitution of the Church. Second, Catholicism would be false insofar as it dogmatically defined certain divine prerogatives to be present in the Roman Pontiff that are not truly present. When the Protestant or Orthodox argue for the “mitigated papacy” in this way, they are refuting themselves and providing an incoherent line of argumentation for something that does not concretely exist.
Therefore, it is completely legitimate for Catholics to go from “x office is divinely instituted” to “x office is divinely instituted in its current form” since the office is something that is unique.
Second, it restricts the range of demonstration far too much. This point is closely connected with the first. In a dogma like the Papacy, where the thing has a determinate concrete form, the demonstration of something unique and proper to it is the demonstration of the whole. If I demonstrate the supremacy of St. Peter’s successors, I have demonstrated their infallibility. If I demonstrate the infallibility of St. Peter’s successors, I have demonstrated their supremacy. Any prerogative of the Pope that is proper to him is a demonstration of the entire dogma.
An analogy to Christology makes this clear. Suppose we sought to demonstrate the true humanity of Jesus Christ. If we demonstrated the reality of the physical parts of human nature in Him (a human body and a rational soul) we would thereby have demonstrated His true humanity, without needing to descend into the particular faculties and properties that follow from that nature. Or suppose we sought to demonstrate His true divinity. A single divine act (creation, say) or a single divine attribute (omnipotence) would suffice, without proving one by one every action and attribute proper to God.
Third (and to my mind this is where the debate truly lies) the demand ignores the objective standards for judging continuity and discontinuity between the Apostolic and the Post-Apostolic Church.
On the particular exegesis of the Petrine passages, once all passion is removed, the unique office and prerogatives of St. Peter are quite clear. A great deal of the exegesis historically given to these passages by anti-Papalists is driven by its usefulness in anti-Roman polemic rather than by the text itself.
Yet this is not where the more important question lies. The more important question is whether the unique office and prerogatives of St. Peter continue in his successors, not in whether the unique office and prerogatives existed in St. Peter. It matters little how securely we rest on our exegesis of these passages if we cannot go the distance and demonstrate the continued presence in the Church of what those passages contain.
This point has not been adequately recognized by many Protestant apologists. Often they will grant, for the sake of argument, that certain unique prerogatives and a unique office were given to St. Peter, and rest their refutation on a denial of the continuity of that office. Yet, the bare denial usually arrives without any alternative account of continuity and discontinuity. In order to be convincing, such an account would have to: a) explain the points of continuity and discontinuity that they themselves affirm and deny in the New Testament; b) apply consistently to the cases they accept and reject, while still excluding the Papacy; and c) be grounded in theological reasoning or authority, so as to be true and non-arbitrary rather than merely convenient.
Until those three are supplied, the denial is of no weight.
The problem, stated
At first glance this might seem a simple matter. It is in fact a peculiarly complex question, and it underlies many debates between Catholics and Protestants, and a great many debates among Protestants.
How are we able to discern between continuity and discontinuity from the Apostolic to the Post-Apostolic Church?
Every Christian affirms some discontinuity. The standard example is the unique mission and extraordinary prerogatives of the Apostolate: no college of twelve was ever reconstituted in the Church with that mission and those prerogatives. And every Christian affirms some continuity. Few Christians deny that there is some permanent clerical order in the Church descending from the Apostolic age.
What few have reckoned with is the arbitrariness with which the justification for this line is usually supplied. Everyone has the distinction on his lips; very few can state an objective standard for why this endures and that does not. The problem surfaces constantly in intra-Protestant disputes over the interpretation (or rather the application) of Acts, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and the Pastoral Epistles, where ecclesiological questions are most concentrated. This diversity is, more than any other single cause, responsible for the diversity of contemporary Protestantism.
One solution to this problem, and a particularly minimalist one, is to restrict the points of continuity to those which Scripture explicitly says are continuous.
This labors under a difficulty concerning the very purpose of many of the books of the New Testament. These books are occasional in their primary intention and composition: they are addressed to particular communities about particular difficulties at particular moments. The ecclesiastical structures the Apostles establish therefore rarely if ever come with an explicit or even implicit indication that they belong to the divine constitution of the Church. This rule fails on both practical and on theoretical grounds.
The Catholic answer
It may be an interesting project to collect each of the disputed points and compare how each proposed solution handles them. Here I am using the problem only to frame the question and to offer the Catholic solution, which I believe is the most sensible one. This is also one, it is to be noted, that, from my reading, is presented quite frequently among classical Protestant authors.
It should be noted before I continue that the Catholic solution is a solution in point of principle. It often happens that different Catholic theologians will apply the same clear rule differently to the more obscure texts of Scripture. There was, for instance, a real controversy over how the prayer “that your faith may not fail” is or is not fulfilled in the Roman Pontiff. Some read it as an extraordinary and personal prerogative of St. Peter; others as a personal prerogative of St. Peter and of his successors; others as a personal prerogative of St. Peter and an official prerogative of his successors, that is, in the exercise of their office.
The solution itself is relatively simple and intuitive.
When we look at any institution (a mission, an office, a law, a precept, etc.) its reason for existing is some end. An accountant is hired so that the finances of a business may be squared away. Sanitation services are set up so that a city’s garbage may be collected. A tutor is employed so that a student may learn a subject. The Catholic looks at the end of the institution and judges its perpetuity by that end.
If we consider the tutor, without knowing anything else about the arrangement, we understand that the tutor continues as long as the student requires that end, and that his work ceases when the end is no longer in place (e.g., when the student passes the examination or graduates). A tutor is, by his end, something temporary; and so tutors are ordinarily hired temporarily.
If we consider the accountant, his end is the finances of the business, and those continue as long as the business continues. So if a particular accountant quits, dies, or is dismissed, he must ordinarily be replaced by another accountant doing the same job. A business does not “outgrow” having an accountant, because it does not outgrow having finances.
An institution endures as long as the end for which it was instituted endures. If the end is proper to a passing state of affairs, the institution passes with it. If the end is one the society will always have, the institution is permanent, and the death or removal of the man who held it is the occasion for appointing another.
The reason this works is that every institution is correlative to its object. Battle formations are drawn up for the battle; the army exists for the defense of the nation. The formations last as long as the battle; the army lasts as long as the nation must be defended. Correlatives posit one another: where one is given, so is the other. If we can identify the one, we can determine the other.
The leaves us with a relatively clear principle for interpreting texts. We simply must investigate whether the reason given by the text (or draw from the nature of the thing) is something perpetual or is something temporary. If it is perpetual, then the grant is perpetual. If it is temporary, then the grant is not de facto perpetual (although, from the Divine Will, God may establish it as perpetual if he so wills).
The rule applied
Catholic theologians apply this standard to the institutions of the Apostolic age. After Our Lord’s Ascension, the Church had not yet been spread among the nations. She could not have functioned on ordinary governance alone. She required a foundational age in which the Gospel was carried through the whole world, churches were founded, a governmental structure was established, and the Scriptures were written. Our Lord therefore founded the Apostolic college, in which the Twelve were given certain unique charisms and a universal jurisdiction enabling them to act independently, led immediately and directly by the Holy Spirit. We can therefore reasonably conclude that the extraordinary mission and charisms of the Apostles were not handed on, but died with them.
On the other hand, consider the ordinary pastors of the local churches which the Apostles established. Is ordinary day-to-day governance and pastoral care something peculiar to the extraordinary circumstances of the founding era — or is it something required for as long as there are flocks to be governed? Plainly the latter. We can therefore conclude without difficulty that it is the will of God that the Church continue to appoint local clergy to govern her at the local level.
St. Thomas applies this precise principle to the continuity of the power of orders. The power of orders was given for the edification of the Church. Edification is something the Church continuously needs. Therefore the power of orders is something the Church continuously needs:
“It is not, however, to be said that this power was given to Christ’s disciples in such a way that it was not to be derived through them to others; for it was given them unto the edification of the Church, as the Apostle says. Therefore this power must be perpetuated for as long as it is necessary that the Church be edified—which is necessary after the death of Christ’s disciples, until the end of the world.” (Summa contra Gentiles IV, c. 74, n. 3)
The same principle sorts a case everyone already grants is discontinuous. Of the four items in the decree of Jerusalem, abstention from idolatry and from unchastity belong to the moral law, and are perpetual in the Church for that very reason. Abstention from “what is strangled and from blood” is another matter. What was the reason for that precept? It was given to facilitate unity between Jew and Gentile in the Apostolic Church: the Jews would have been gravely offended had the Gentiles eaten strangled meat or blood, and so the Apostles forbade an otherwise indifferent thing. Consider the end of the law, and you see at once that the end was temporary. So, therefore, was the law and the Church does not keep it now.
This is the exact argument given by the First Vatican Council for the perpetuity of the office of chief shepherd and rock bestowed on St. Peter:
“That which our Lord Jesus Christ, the prince of shepherds and great shepherd of the sheep, established in the blessed apostle Peter, for the continual salvation and permanent benefit of the Church, must of necessity remain for ever, by Christ’s authority, in the Church which, founded as it is upon a rock, will stand firm until the end of time.” (Pastor aeternus, c. 2)
So when Catholic theologians interpret the particular texts about St. Peter, what they are looking for is whether the prerogatives and the office given there rest on something perpetual in the Church or on something temporary. And when we look at those texts, the exegetes argue convincingly that the metaphors themselves establish a visible exercise of authority, and that the reasons given are perpetual ones. The office established is therefore perpetual as well, and not merely transitional for the founding era.
Office and mission
In a particularly useful application of this rule, the theologians distinguish between an office and a mission.
A mission concerns the sending of a legate for some particular task, as when the Pope sends a legate to an ecumenical council he cannot personally attend. A mission is by its very nature contracted by two factors. First, it ends with the completion of the task: the legate’s existence as legate is measured by the duration of the task, and when the task ends, the legation ends. Second, it depends immediately on the will of the sender for its existence and continuance. A legate who falls ill and cannot continue does not have authority of himself (though it may be deputed to him) to name a successor with the fullness of his own authority. The legation depends immediately on the sender, who may revoke it whenever he wishes.
An office has no such temporality. An office is constituted for the governance of a society, and it is coextensive with the society governed. Nobody questions the propriety of an office continuing under a new office-holder; it is assumed to continue unless the competent authority abolishes it.
This is simply the previous distinction between temporary and perpetual institutions, applied to what is given to a man. Theologians use it to explain why we distinguish so sharply between the continuance of St. Peter’s office and the uniqueness of his mission. As Cajetan puts it (quoted below), there is no successor to St. Peter in his Apostolic mission, which was temporary, but there is a successor to St. Peter in his office as chief pastor of the universal Church.
NOTE. This article is not directed at anyone in particular. This is just something I’ve noticed in the common discourse.
To thank my members, I have added a handful of texts below that illustrate what I stated above:
