The Peculiarity of Papal Primacy
What we need now is to remove our postmodern lenses, so as to see the whole episcopacy, along with the primacy of the papacy, as oriented toward holiness—our holiness.
I am often amused by my Protestant friends when they, with great excitement and intrigue, say, “Have you heard what the Pope said?” to which, after hearing them out, respond, “I think you care more about the papacy than I do.” Upon hearing this, their faces betray a kind of perplexed, vacant, slack-jawed bewilderment, as though they had been struck by a sudden and incomprehensible revelation, to which they were struggling valiantly to make sense of without much success. For a Catholic papal primacy is vital, but not absolute.
Biblical Basis
The biblical basis for papal primacy is grounded in the Davidic kingdom. King David and his successors ruled with the assistance of twelve other ministers (cf. 1 Kings 4:1ff). One of the twelve was a prime minister who would rule in the absence of the king (cf. Isaiah 22:19–23) and held the king’s authority, symbolized by the keys of the kingdom of David. He was to be called the father of the people of Judah and would become like a peg driven into a firm place; a throne upon which the honor of the house would rest (cf. Is 22:23). This is the Old Testament context for understanding the office of St. Peter found in Matthew 16:18–19, where Jesus builds his Church upon the rock, which is Peter, giving him the keys of the kingdom of heaven to bind and loose. However, in a few verses Peter rebukes Jesus for proclaiming the necessity of the Paschal mystery. Jesus, rather than referring to Peter as the rock upon which the Church has been built, now calls him a stumbling block and satan (cf. Matt 16:23). It is of interest that the Petrine stumbling block in Greek is σκάνδαλον (skandalon). Peter the rock is ambiguous and has the potential of being scandalous.
This grounds our understanding of the scandal of Peter in that he has a unique and singular participation in Jesus’ own authority, which bears with it the responsibility to suffer in service as a witness to Christ. To the extent that this does not happen, it becomes particularly scandalous because the corruption of the highest is the worst (corruptio optimi pessimi). However, even though Peter may become proud or corrupt, it does not mean that he is not the pope. The potential problem that the rock may become a stumbling block does not undermine the fact that there is a rock, upon which Christ builds his Church. Yes, one may be scandalized when one reflects upon the papacy in the history of the Church and how it has been abused, but the papacy is scandalous precisely because it is a divinely instituted office built upon human frailty. This is an office, divinely instituted, and occupied by a person who is sinful and fallible. George Weigel sums up Hans Urs Von Balthasar’s distinction between office and person in the following manner:
More: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2025/01/29/the-peculiarity-of-papal-primacy/
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