THE P RTAL
February 2017 Page 9
The importance of the Feast of The Chair of St Peter
Fr Julian Green has been thinking about the unity of the Catholic Church
It was a source of amusement to me to discover , when I was a seminarian , that the ‘ Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ’, was actually the invention , not of the well-meaning World Council of Churches , but rather of a Catholic friar , Fr Paul Wattson , himself a convert from the Episcopal Church of the USA . This Octave of prayer , instituted by the Popes , was later adopted by Protestant leaders .
What amused me most was that the dates chosen by Fr Paul were the week that linked the feast in the older calendar of the Chair of St Peter ( 18th January ) and the feast of the Conversion of St Paul ( 25th January ). The meaning of such dates , linking fidelity to the Petrine succession and conversion , is self-evident and not the sort of ecumenism that non-Catholics would be promoting .
In the current calendar of the Roman Rite , the feast of the Chair of St Peter has been moved into February , being celebrated in the ordinary form on 22nd February . It is a fully-fledged feast coming in a somewhat liturgically spartan month .
The name of the feast day , the Chair of St Peter , evokes thoughts of the great Bernini chair which adorns the apse of St Peter ’ s Basilica in Rome , beneath the equally evocative window of the Holy Spirit . The original chair of St Peter , which is contained within the Bernini bronze , is the symbol of the teaching authority of the one to whom was given the power to bind and loose in earth and heaven by Our Lord himself .
The feast day celebrates the abiding presence in the Church of that authority vested in the one who is elected to the See of Rome , which holds that Petrine primacy as a patrimony communicated to its Bishop . It is the clarity of authentic teaching and sureness of faith which , through the ages , has been the principle of unity which has held the Catholic Church together as one , and has saved it from the splintering effect of separating oneself from her .
Those who have left the unity of the Catholic Church ,
end up either placing their faith and practice in the deep freeze of history like the oriental churches , or becoming isolated in a confidence in the purity of the nuances of one ’ s own interpretation of the Bible , as in evangelical sects , or becoming a collective mishmash of differing or opposing views , such as we see in the liberal Protestantism so characteristic of the Church of England .
There is a terrible danger in the current position in the Catholic Church in regards to the admission to sacramental Communion of the divorced and remarried . It is not that the Magisterium has enshrined within it a clearly distinguishable heresy . Rather , it is that varying versions of teaching and practice can be sustained based upon the same grey and hazy words , seemingly written in order to be hard to define . Challenges aimed at dispelling the mists of obfuscated statements are ignored to allow the confusion to remain . This has only one end in sight .
Luther ’ s insistence on the ability of the individual to interpret Scripture is the foundation upon which the doctrinal fragmentation of Protestantism was built . If the Catholic Church allows a similar personal interpretation to reign supreme in matters of faith and morals , then the Church will follow a path similar to that of Anglicanism , and will end up being just as irrelevant . So , on this feast of the Chair of St Peter , we must pray for the unity of the Church . I do not refer here to the quest for greater ecumenical unity , but rather the unity of the Catholic Church , our mother and teacher , for we are in a time of grave danger .
The Feast of The Chair of St Peter is on 22nd February