Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier Lesson 9: The Church (Part 1)

We are going to cover one of the most important topics, especially of our day, and that is the topic of ecclesiology. The word ecclesiology means “the study of the Church.” That comes from the Greek word ekklesia. Ekklesia means “an assembly, a gathering, a community” – or the Church. It means a convocation or a meeting of people. When we talk about the Catholic Church, the word Catholic means “universal, complete, whole, total,” or something along those lines. The word Catholic is not used anywhere in Sacred Scripture.

The first time we see it in writing is in the year 107 in a letter written by Saint Ignatius of Antioch. We know that it was used very early on, but it is not something which is scriptural.

This assembly of people is some kind of society which is universal in character and spiritual in nature. This includes all those who are baptized into Jesus Christ and profess their faith in Him. I should point out that when they translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, they translated the word kahal as “ekklesia.” Kahal is a Hebrew word that is translated as “the people of God,” the whole community of the Israelites. So what we are talking about is this new people of God.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 9: The Church (Part 1)

[Class begins with the recitation of the Our Father]

Kahal is a Hebrew word that is translated as “the people of God,” the whole community of the Israelites. So what we are talking about is this new people of God. Just as God had chosen for Himself a people in the Old Testament times and in that people one could speak on behalf of all (as Moses was able to do) or all could speak together, that is what this kind of group is all about. God has founded a new people of God. When we look in Sacred Scripture, Saint Paul talks about the New Israel, and we hear about the New Jerusalem and names like that for the Church. What we are dealing with here are the new people of God that Jesus Himself has chosen because in Matthew 16 it is the word He Himself uses: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build My “ekklesia.” There is a new people of God that is formed. There is a head and there are members. One can speak on behalf of all, which is what the Vicar of Christ is all about, or all can be united as one, either way.

It is an article of faith that Jesus Christ founded the Holy Roman Catholic Church. To say that He founded the Church means that during His earthly life He personally laid down all the essential elements for Her teaching, Her sacraments, and Her visible structure. Now there are some who will deny the institution of the visible structure. Others accept that but they might deny the papacy. There are differing groups of Christian people who fall into different categories with regard to that, and we need to be able to address all of those issues.

One thing we need to address right away is the question: Who is the Church? That is a very important question because it is not a question of what – it is a question of who. The Church is a person. The Church has the mind of Christ and the Church acts as Christ. Only a person can have a mind and a will; therefore, the Church is a person. If the Church has the mind of Christ and the will of Christ, the Church must be Christ. The Church is the Person of Jesus Christ in the world today, obviously not the historical, physical person of Christ, but rather the Mystical Person of Christ. We see this identification in Sacred Scripture. We hear in the Acts of the Apostles, for instance, when Saul of Tarsus is going around gathering up all of the Christians and putting them in prison, Our Lord appears to him from heaven and says, Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? Saul was not persecuting Jesus – He had already risen from the dead and was in heaven – he was persecuting the followers of Christ, the members of the Church. But Jesus identified Himself with those people. He Himself said, Whatever you do to the least of My brothers, you do to Me.

Well, Saint Paul, understanding fully what Our Lord was getting at, when he writes to the Corinthians who had broken up into different little camps, he says, Some say, “I belong to Peter.” Some say, “I belong to Apollos.” Some say, “I belong to Paul.” And others say, “I belong to Christ.” Then he says, Is Christ thus divided? In other words, if there is a division in the Church, it is Christ Himself Who is divided, and how can Christ be divided? That is the point. That is why Pope John Paul II, a number of years ago, said that the greatest scandal in the world today is the division among Christians, that there is unity in Christ yet there is no unity among Christians and how can this be if we are baptized into Jesus Christ and we make up the Mystical Person of Christ? That is where the scandal comes in. If there is a division in the Church, what we are doing is dividing Christ.

Now to say that the Church is the Person of Jesus Christ in the world today is not to say that the Church is the incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. It is not. If that were the case, we would all be God because all of us are members of the Church. We make up the Church, so the Church is clearly not the incarnate Second Person of the Trinity because we clearly are not God. The Church, as I mentioned, is the Mystical Person of Christ. Saint Paul teaches that the Church is the Body of Christ. But you have to understand the Hebrew understanding of the body. The Greeks are the ones who were able to talk about this distinction between body and soul, but for the Hebrew mindset that was not much of an issue. When Saint Paul talks about a body, he is not talking about a corpse. He is talking about a living body united with the soul, the whole person, in other words. Since the body is an integral part of who we are as persons and the body expresses the person (as we have already seen, when we make an act of the will, that is expressed in and through the body), that is exactly what the Church does. The Church, the Mystical Person of Christ, expresses in the world today the will of Christ. The function of the Church is the same as the function of Jesus Christ.

So what was the function of Christ? Why did He come? There are lots of reasons we can give. He came to show us the Father, He came to redeem us, He came to show us how to act, and we can go on and on with the list. But we can ask ourselves: Has anyone seen Christ in our day? No. If it was two thousand years ago that He came to show us how to do these things, what do they mean for us today? How are we supposed to be able to follow His example today? What we know of Christ is known through Sacred Scripture, but who interprets Sacred Scripture? The Church. So the Church is the teacher now. Jesus is the Teacher, and the Church is the Mystical Christ; therefore, the Church is the teacher. In fact, the Church is known as Mater et Magister – “Mother and Teacher.” She is to teach the faithful.

By His life, death, and resurrection, Our Lord merited for us the fruits of redemption, but those fruits must be applied to each and every one of us individually. It is not enough to say that Jesus died generically for everyone. It is true that He did, but not everyone is going to accept what He did. In other words, not everyone is going to go to heaven. He did die for everyone, but each person must accept Christ personally. The fruits of His redemption have to be applied to each one of us individually. And so how do we come into contact with the grace of redemption today? Through the Church. If it were not for the Church continuing to offer the sacrifice of Christ, the only people who could have been saved would be a very small group of people standing around the Cross two thousand years ago, because they are the only ones who would have had that individual union with Christ. We have to be able to have that somehow, and we do. The Church exists to show us who we are, to bring us into contact with redemption, to show us the Father, to teach us how to act, etc. The task of the Church is to continue the work of redemption until the end of the world.

The Holy Spirit works through the Church today just as He worked through the prophets and evangelists of old. He inspired the prophets and evangelists, and He continues to inspire the Church. Jesus said that He would send us the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to lead us into all truth. That is the purpose of the Holy Spirit, to make us holy and to lead us into all truth. What a gift that there is something beyond ourselves to make it possible for us to know the truth. If it is just my opinion versus your opinion, what good is that? We can both sit there and banter back and forth about our own opinion, but the beauty about being Catholic is that it is not about my opinion or your opinion – it about an objective truth. What we have to understand is that the truth is a person. When we are talking about the Catholic faith, we are not talking about a whole series of little syllogisms that we are asked to give intellectual assent to. We are talking about a person. God is truth. God is also love. God is a person, and a person is made up of a mind and a will, so God is truth – the mind, and God is love – the will. He has made us for Himself, and we are called to be conformed to Jesus Christ. That is why Saint Paul would say: Do not conform yourselves to this world, but conform yourselves through the transformation of your mind into Jesus Christ. We are supposed to have a transformation of the mind so that it is united in truth with Jesus. And what did Jesus tell us about it? You were made for the truth and the truth will set you free. That is what He came for. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When we are talking about this truth, we are talking about a person.

That is exactly what we need to understand with regard to this point of ecclesiology. There is a huge difference between the way that we as Catholics will see ecclesiology and the way that Protestants will look at ecclesiology. If we first start with the Protestant model, it is the “me and Jesus” thing; you hear about it all the time. If you sketch it out, Jesus is at the top and you are at the bottom. And where is the church? It is wherever you want to be. I remember when I was assigned as a hospital chaplain in the seminary. The first day we were there, we went around the table and introduced ourselves. I was the only Catholic among the group. There was one kid who was the child of a Lutheran pastor, and the rest of them were all from various Protestant denominations. The Lutheran and myself were the only two who had been the same religion our entire lives. One had been Methodist and Baptist and Presbyterian. Each person, as we went through, rattled off all the different groups they had belonged to over time. At one point, I said, “I guess I don’t understand this. I was born Catholic, I was raised Catholic, I am Catholic, and I’m going to remain Catholic. I don’t understand the idea of going from one religion to the next to the next.” One woman (I have to give her credit for being honest) looked at me and said, “You don’t understand. For Protestants, it does not matter what Protestant denomination you’re part of. All that matters is that you’re not Catholic.” Okay. They will go where they feel like they are being fed, or on the other end of it, where their ears are being tickled. If they really want something, they are going to find a preacher who is going to preach to them what they believe to be the truth. If, on the other hand, they want to do what they want to do, they will find somebody who will tell them what they want to hear. The church is off to the side. It can be the little church on the street corner, or it can be some mega church where it is all the feel-good stuff. It does not matter as long as you are part of one of these groups. The church element is on the side because what really matters is “me and Jesus.” You have to have the personal relationship with Jesus.

Now let me say this: You do have to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. If you do not, there is no possible way you are going to go to heaven. How can you go to heaven to be with Jesus if you do not know Him, if you do not have a relationship with Him? He is a person. You do not deal with a person in an objective way. You deal with a person in a subjective way. He is the truth, so there is the head knowledge we can know about Jesus (that is what we are doing with these classes), but that is not enough. We need to know Jesus. We do not just need to know about Him; we need to know Him. We need to enter into a relationship with Him. On that level, what the Protestants are saying is absolutely correct. You need to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. However, from a Catholic perspective, it is not just a “me and Jesus” thing.

So let us look at the Catholic ecclesiology. Again, sketching it out, Jesus is at the top and you are at the bottom. And where is the Church? It is right in the middle. The only way you can have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is if you are a member of the Church, because the Church is Jesus Christ. The Church is not something off to the side wherever you can find a place that you like, but rather the Church is integral to this. You are a member of the Church; you are a member of Jesus Christ. It is not something off to the side. It is not something that is optional. If you can find somebody who says what you like to hear that is not good enough. Rather you are baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ because the Church is Jesus Christ. This is a critical point for understanding where the difference lies. You still have to have that personal relationship with Jesus, and the only way you can do that is because you are a member of the Church, which makes you a member of Jesus Christ. Therefore, you can have a relationship with Him. That is the Catholic view of what ecclesiology is all about.

We said earlier that the Church is not the incarnate Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Then we have to ask ourselves: What are the differences? If the Church is the Person of Jesus Christ, albeit the Mystical Person, then what are the differences between the historical Person of Christ and the Mystical Person of Christ? There are three differences. If we look at the Incarnation, what was united in the Incarnation? He is only one person, but He has two natures, so it was the divine and human nature that were united in one person. And who did the uniting? Ultimately, of course, it is all three Persons because it is outside of the immanent Trinity, but particularly it is God the Son, so it is the Second Person of the Trinity that did that. Remember that the union of the two natures in Jesus Christ is called the hypostatic union. Then if we look at the Church and we ask: In the Church, what is united? It is persons who are united. It is not two natures in one person, but rather it is each one of us as a member of Jesus Christ. It is persons who are united, millions and billions of them, for that matter. And who is the one responsible for that unification? Who does the uniting? Objectively, it is all three Persons of the Trinity, since it is outside the Trinity that this is taking place, but particularly it is the Third Person of the Trinity. God the Holy Spirit is the One Who does the uniting. How does this happen? What is the mode of union? It is sanctifying grace, which is the very life of God. In Jesus, it is grace that unites things, and the result is the Person of Christ. The result in the Church is the Mystical Person of Christ. It is a mystical union of persons who are united together.

The word mystical is meant to indicate the spiritual, transcendent, or hidden character of the union between Christ and the faithful. Mystical does not mean that the Church is a spiritual body only, that is, one that is united only by the internal bonds of faith, hope, and charity. It is much more than that. The Church is a body because She is a communion of persons who have the same purpose and who share the same divine life. She is mystical because Her purpose in life is supernatural; it belongs to the realm of grace. That means it is something beyond what we can do by ourselves. We cannot unite ourselves together; only God can do that. He gives us His life, which is obviously beyond what is natural to us – it is supernatural – and that is what unites us, which also then tells us the kind of attitude we have to have toward others. Jesus gave us a commandment that we are to love. Why? Because if we both are members of the same body and we both share the same life, how can we not love? How can we hate somebody? Saint John asks the question: How can you say that you love God if you hate your brother? If you do not love the brother whom you can see, how can you love God Whom you cannot see? This is what he is basing it on. If we have all been chosen by God and incorporated into Christ and we are all part of the same body, how can we have this kind of division? How can we have hatred for one another? How can we fail in charity toward one another?

Each one of us needs to look at that in our own conscience and examine that point within our own selves so we can start to overcome these things. It is the only way this is going to be brought back together the way Jesus prayed that it would. Look in John 17, the High Priestly Prayer of Jesus; He prays, Father, that they would all be one as we are one. Well, we are hardly that. So we need to be working toward that, and it is something that is absolutely critical for all of us individually, as well as for the Church universally. We have to be striving for that oneness in Christ.

When we talk about this point of unity, you can even take it a step further. Think about the fact that we receive Holy Communion and that is Jesus Christ. If Jesus Christ loves you so much that He would give Himself entirely to you and He loves the person next to you so much that He would give Himself entirely to that person, and now the exact same Person of Jesus Christ is present in you and in the person next to you, are we going to hate the person Jesus loves that much? Are we going to have a problem with that person, even though the Lord loves that person so much? If Jesus loves them, why don’t we? There are some people who are very difficult to love, admittedly, but love is not about gushy feelings – love is a virtue. Jesus did not say, “Have happy feelings about everybody.” He told us: Love your enemy. If they are your enemy, they are obviously not your best friend and you are not going to have warm, gushy feelings about them. But He said, “Love them.” To love them means to desire what is the best for them. It means, number one, to treat them with charity; and, number two, to desire that they will be holy and be able to go to heaven.

One of the most tragic statements I have heard (and I have heard it many times) is “If that person goes to heaven, then I don’t want to.” Well, there is only one other alternative, and if you do not want to go to heaven, you are in trouble. Would you keep yourself from heaven because God would allow somebody else to go there? Would we actually hope that somebody would not go to heaven? People ask the question all the time: “Well, what about the people who do these horrible things? What about Hitler?” If they repent, they too can go to heaven. Why not? They have committed heinous sins, but is there anybody here who has not? Maybe we did not commit as many of them. Maybe the sins we have committed were not quite that bad. But that does not mean we are innocent. If we can repent and be forgiven, so can they. We have to hold out the possibility of salvation for every person.

This is why the Church has never put a name on anybody in hell, including Judas. Now you can make a pretty good case for the idea that Judas went there. Jesus Himself said it would be better if he had been never born, and there is only one place that would be worse than that, so we can make a good case for it. But the Church has never said that Judas is in hell. The Church does not say that Stalin is in hell. The Church does not say that Hitler is in hell. Individually, we might assume that they are, but the Church is not going to put a name on anybody there because the potential for conversion is always there in every single person. We have to hold that potential out; otherwise, we have to cut ourselves off and say, “I sinned too, so I guess I can’t go to heaven either.” That would mean Jesus and Mary can be in heaven and the rest of us are out of luck. But that is not the case. If it is okay for us to repent, it is okay for others to repent. We have to have that kind of charity to desire their repentance.

Think about what Jesus said. If it gives God greater glory that one sinner would repent instead of having ninety-nine righteous people who have no need to repent, think what kind of glory it gives God when somebody who is a heinous sinner repents. Think, for instance, about a guy like Dr. Bernard Nathanson. He committed 75,000 abortions. He killed 75,000 babies. His wife was Catholic and she prayed for him. She prayed for his conversion, and he had a conversion a number of years ago. He has to live with the fact that he killed 75,000 babies, but now he is 100% pro-life and is out talking about these things. Just as God can convert a man like Saul of Tarsus and make him into a Saint Paul, so God can convert an abortionist. God can convert anyone if they are willing to open their hearts to the truth. We have to be willing to pray for people so that they will be willing to come to the truth and open their hearts to the fullness of what Our Lord wants to offer them. Saint Paul talks about all these different people, then he talks about himself and calls himself an extreme case, and even goes so far as to call himself an “abortion.” They clean it up in Scripture, but that is the Greek word he uses there. He is trying to say: “I am the least, I am the worst, I am the most extreme, and if God can have mercy on me, He can have mercy on you too.”

Again, think of somebody today who is extraordinarily popular, a great speaker: Father John Corapi. If you have not heard him, I highly recommend him to you. Father Corapi goes around telling his conversion story, which is very extraordinary. Now he even goes into prisons and speaks to the prisoners. He says that the prisoners will oftentimes look at him and say, “You know what, if God can have mercy on you, He can have mercy on me because I’ve never done anything as bad as you!” They got caught and went to prison, but he did not. You see how God takes the ones that are the worst and then turns them into the best.

That is exactly what He will do with us. When you go home tonight, look in the mirror. What you are going to see is somebody who better not think that he or she is the best. “God picked me because He couldn’t find anyone better.” Ha! God picked each one of us because He could not find anyone worse. If He could have, He would have. He could not, so He picked us. It is just that simple. What does Saint Paul say? God chooses the lowly. He chooses the weak to shame the strong. He chooses the lowborn to shame those who are highborn. He chooses those who are nothing to shame those who think they are something. That’s us! God picked us because we were the worst. People who think they are better do not think they need God. So if we are willing to actually admit that we need God, it is because we know we cannot do it by ourselves. Not that anybody else can either, but they think they can. We need to thank God for the grace to make us little, to make us small. That is not the American way of thinking about things. We like to think of how great we are and how impressive we are, but that is not the way God looks at it. We are little, we are nothing, but God raises us up to be something. He is the one who has to get the glory, not us.

You read the saints and every one of the saints will tell you the exact same thing: “I myself am the worst.” They will all tell you that. Saint Paul says it; it is right there in Scripture. All the other saints say the same thing. They look at themselves in the light of Christ and they cannot imagine that anyone could be a worse sinner than they. If that is what the saints look at, what about us? Most of us are probably far from being saints right now, and if the saints think they are the worst sinners on the face of the earth, then that puts things into context for the rest of us because we are not saints. It gives us something to ponder, and it gives us a point where we cannot stand in judgment of anyone else. Saint Augustine said some sixteen hundred years ago, Were it not for the grace of God, there go I. That is what we can think about. We are capable of anything that anyone else is capable of. We cannot point a finger at somebody else and condemn them, because we are equally capable of doing whatever it is that they did. When we see somebody else, what we need to realize is that if we had been given the grace that person has been given, and that person had been given the grace that we have been given, that person would probably be a saint right now. We would be in a lot worse shape than that individual if you simply invert the two. You have to look at it in that way. You have to have compassion and pity on people that are suffering like that because they do not know. We need to pray for them rather than condemn them because it is not our job to condemn them anyway. That is the mercy we need to extend to others. But it has to start within. Well, enough of the homilies for now.

What we were saying before I went off on that tangent is that all the members of the Church have a common purpose and they share the divine life. What is the purpose? It is to get to heaven, eternal life. But is eternal life just a goal that we have? The answer is “no.” If it is, then we are no different from a company or a ball team. Think about a ball team. A bunch of people get together and the goal is to play a ball game, and hopefully even to win it. In a company, the idea is to put the widgets together and get a paycheck, to make money so the company keeps operating and everybody is content. That is not what this is about. The principle of union in this case is life. It is not that we have this common thing that is separate from us (making widgets or winning a ball game), but the principle of union is life. This union is more than a moral union, like a ball team, but it is not a physical union either; that would be a family united by blood. We are not, and so the best we can say is that it is a quasi-physical union, It comes from that Old Testament idea of the corporate personality, the kaḥal or the ekklesia. As I mentioned earlier, this whole group was thought to be one person. It was the people of God, a cohesive group; therefore, they could all act together or the leader could act on behalf of them all. That is the idea Saint Paul was drawing on.

There are two corporate personalities. There is a corporate personality of blood and a corporate personality of religion. The corporate personality of religion is stronger. The reason we can say that is because we can all look at it and honestly admit that some people in our own bloodline may not go to heaven. Hopefully they all will, but they might not. If they do not, and some of us go to heaven but some of us do not, then the corporate unity is no longer there. But in heaven, everyone is united. So the bonds of religion are the ones that will remain for eternity. They go beyond the bonds of blood, because, even at that point, those who are related by blood are still going to be related to every other person who is in heaven in the bonds of love and grace. The corporate personality of religion, then, is stronger than that of blood.

If there is a point in this Mystical Body where there can be one person speaking on behalf of all, it obviously has to be a leader, a head. In the Old Testament, God chose Abraham, Moses, and David. They were leaders of God’s people who could speak on behalf of the people. Jesus also did the same. When we look at the primacy of Saint Peter, it is clear in Scripture that Peter is the head of the apostles. In fact, every single time the apostles are mentioned except one (when Saint Paul talks about who he met when he went up to Jerusalem, he says that he met with “James and Peter and John”) Peter is first. It is clear in Acts that he is the one who speaks on behalf of the apostles. He is the one who is the head of the Apostolic College, in that sense. The Church also teaches that Peter was appointed by Jesus as the visible head of the Church. At the same time, He gave to Peter primacy of jurisdiction in the Church. This means that Peter possessed full and supreme legislative, executive, and juridical power in the Church.

From the earliest times, the Church has claimed this authority for Peter and his successors. In fact, the earliest list of the popes that we have is from Saint Eusebius, around 215. The only apostle they kept track of was Peter and his successors. They did not look at Saint John and who followed him, the beloved disciple. They did not look at the other apostles and who they had appointed, not even Saint Paul. The only one they kept track of was Peter and his successors in Rome. That is what they were concerned about because they needed to know who the head of the Church was. You can see this, for instance, if you read the letters of Saint Clement, the fourth pope. The bishop in Corinth, which is the church that Saint Paul founded, wrote to Saint Clement to try to deal with his problems. There were churches right up the road; Saint Paul founded many churches in Asia Minor, so there would have been an opportunity to go to one of the other churches. But that is not where he went. He did not go to one of the churches that Saint Paul founded, but instead he wrote to Rome to ask the Pope to intervene in their problem and solve this issue for them. So you see right from the very beginning that they looked to Rome, to Peter and his successors. That has been in place from the earliest times in the Church.

All of this authority we see in the words that Jesus addressed to Peter at Caesarea Philippi when He says, You are Peter and on this rock I will build My Church, and the jaws of hell will not prevail against it. Whatever you hold bound on earth will be held bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. To you I give the keys to the kingdom of heaven. All these points are there. It is a fascinating passage.

The place where Jesus was at Caesarea Philippi is right at the base of Mount Hermon. It is the place where the Jordan River starts. The snow on top of the mountain melts and goes through the cracks, then it comes up from underneath in many little springs all around. It is an absolutely gorgeous place. It reminds me of northern Minnesota; it is cool and absolutely beautiful, green and wet. The underground springs there form the beginning of the Jordan River, and at the base of the mountain is a cliff and a cave. As you look at it from across the way, the cave would be to your left and the cliff to your right. In the cliff, they had carved a lot of little niches. It was a pantheon, a place for all the gods. That is what the word pantheon means: “all the gods.” They had their little statues of all their false gods there. Jesus goes to that place and says to His apostles, Who do people say that I am? There He is and the backdrop is all the little false gods. Who do people say that I am? So Jesus took a poll – and they were wrong (something Americans need to learn). “Oh, some say you’re John the Baptist; some say Elijah; some say you’re Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” And He says, Who do you say that I am? Peter says, “You are the Messiah. You are the Son of God.” Jesus says to him, Blessed are you, Simon son of John, mere flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but My Father in heaven. It is Peter who recognizes Who Jesus is. In the face of all the false gods that are there, Peter is able to say: “You alone are God. These are all false.”

Then Jesus goes to the next step. Now the false gods are basically all knocked down, so now let us go to the cave. In front of the cave is a boulder that is about 10 feet in diameter. It is actually set about 30 feet in front of the cave, but if you are standing across the river, it looks like it is right smack in front of it. The cave looks like this huge mouth about to engulf the boulder that is in front of it. In the ancient world, that cave was thought to be the gates of hell because the water was rushing underneath it and there was no floor. They had tried to plumb the depths of it but were never successful in doing so. A couple of people were known to have fallen in and they were never seen again. Of course, the rushing of the water pulled them in and they got stuck underneath there and never came up on the other side. So they said, “This must be the gate to the netherworld. We’ve tried to plumb the bottom and we can’t. There’s no bottom to this thing, so this must be the opening to hell.” There stands Jesus saying to Peter, You are rock. Then with this boulder standing right there in front of this big cave, He says, The jaws of hell will not prevail against it. It looks like the jaws of hell are going to clamp down on the boulder that is there, on this rock, and He says, The jaws of hell will not prevail against it. That is the image Our Lord is using and that is the setting where He goes to be able to tell Peter who he is. He is speaking to Peter alone at that point. He asked all of His apostles: Who do people say that I am? But then He speaks to Peter alone and says, You are Peter and on this rock I will build My Church. Peter is the rock.

Again, we need to be able to look at this in context. In the Old Testament, there is only one person who is ever called a rock, and that is God. Jesus now is the rock. In Scripture, He is called a stumbling stone, a cornerstone, and a capstone. Jesus is The Rock, but now He is giving to Peter a share in that. You are rock. He changes his name and calls him a rock. The word Peter means “rock.” We can look at it even further because in the Old Testament God is the King of Israel. When the people asked for a king, God told Samuel, They are rejecting Me as their king. God then gave to Saul, and to David and his successors, a share in the kingship. God is the rock; God is the king; God is also the shepherd. The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want. It is all over the Old Testament. We read about how God is the shepherd of His people Israel. So God is the King, the Shepherd, and the Rock. Jesus is the Good Shepherd; Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords; Jesus is the Rock. Just as that office of God was shared in the Old Testament with the one who would be the king, the shepherd, and the rock, so now in the New Testament the one who has that position of being the head of the Church has a share also. What does Jesus say to Peter? Do you love Me? Feed My sheep. Do you love Me? Tend My lambs. Peter is a shepherd. And what does Peter say in his second letter? Shepherd to the shepherds. He recognizes the fact that he is a shepherd, but then he talks about the Great Shepherd, Who is Jesus.

In the passage of Matthew 16, we also see that Jesus shares with him His kingly office. He gives to Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. If you go back to Isaiah 22, you are going to see the same basic thing. You have Shebna and Eliakin, and the keys are the symbol of the prime minister. The prime minister, as the title says, is the first minister in the kingdom. So you have the king and then you have the prime minister. The prime minister actually wore the king’s signet ring, which is the ring that would have the official seal. When they would seal a letter, they would put the wax on it and then put the king’s signet ring into the wax to say “This is from the king.” The prime minister could make laws and he could dispense from laws. The prime minister was the one who was in charge of running the day to day life of the kingdom. The king had his own duties that he had to be about, so the prime minister actually ran the kingdom day to day. That is what Jesus is giving to Peter: To you I entrust the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Just like in our military, you can tell who the officer is because his rank is worn on his shoulder. That is where they wore the keys. The keys were the symbol of the prime minister. As we can see in Isaiah 22, the prime minister there was not doing his job, so God is taking him out of his office. He took the keys from him and He is going to give them to the other.

The prime minister is the office of succession. If the prime minister dies or is removed from office, then the keys are passed on to the next one. That is exactly what we see with the Pope.

It is an office of succession. He is the Vicar of Christ, the spokesman on behalf of Christ. He runs the day to day life of the kingdom. Jesus is the King, but there needs to be a visible head because the head of the Church is invisible – it is Jesus Himself – and there needs to be a visible head. That is what Peter’s role is. He is the prime minister in the kingdom of Christ. If we understand it that way, we see that he represents or takes the place of Christ on earth. Again, the invisible head of the Church is Jesus, and the visible head of the Church is Saint Peter and his successors, the ones to whom the keys have been passed on.

[End of Lesson 9]

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