ROF8 – The Papacy: The Apostolic Throne – Roots of the Faith with Mike Aquilina – Discerning Hearts Podcast

DescerningHearts.com, in cooperation with the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology presents,

roots of the faith from the Church Fathers to you, with Mike Aqualina.

Mike Aqualina is the author or editor of more than 40 books on Catholic history, doctrine, and devotion.

He has co-hosted with Dr. Scott Hahn, eight series that air on the Eternal Word Television Network.

He has co-led pilgrimages to the Holy Land Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

He's a widely sought after Catholic speaker.

Roots of the Faith from the Church Fathers to you, with Mike Aqualina.

I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Mike.

I'm glad to be back.

The papacy.

I love it.

What a tremendous gift.

Why would we be hesitant to be excited about the Holy Father?

I know. It brings me back to the time you and I were standing in St. Peter's Square,

and we saw Pope Benedict pass just a few feet in front of us.

That was great.

A tremendous gift that goes back to our Lord Himself and an action that He did to provide this gift for us.

And I tell you, He said, to Simon, and I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,

and the gates of Haiti shall not prevail against it.

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven,

and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

What power?

What power?

And we look at that statement of our Lord, and it seems pretty clear that if He were to give that kind of power,

why would He do it for just one brief generation?

It sounds like something we need in the church as long as there is a church.

So if He's building on this foundation, that authority should be with the church as long as the church exists.

And indeed it has.

There's ample testimony of it in the fathers of the church that this office of Peter continued with certain authority,

and it was there throughout the time of the fathers.

It's there from generation to generation, and it was observed in many of the same ways we still observe it today.

Some of the struggle that the church over the last 2,000 years has been with maybe individuals who did serve in that capacity as the Holy Father,

that they did not live up to the expectation that we would hope of St. Peter.

Now that certainly was not a problem during the time of the fathers.

During the time of the fathers, most of the men who occupied that position, especially in the early years, died as martyrs.

Wow.

You know, one after another, they shed their blood for the faith just as St. Peter did.

Literally the hot seat.

Yes, well you think about it.

It probably was the most public, most conspicuous role that you could have in the church.

But it was also necessary.

Someone had to do it, so someone always did.

It wasn't a matter of power.

It's hardly worth the trouble if it's going to win you an early death.

But we always find people occupying the seat of Peter in the church.

And we look at the New Testament and we should see that it's something that's needed.

In the Acts of the Apostles, one man emerges in those early chapters as the main preacher in the church.

The main judge in the church.

The main healer in the church.

The spokesman for the church.

He's the interpreter in the church.

He's the guy who chairs the meeting and it's Peter.

And he's working with the authority that was given to him by Christ himself.

And this continued in the lives of his successors.

The early historians tell us that Peter named his own successor in Linus.

We remember him in the first Eucharistic prayer today.

And that one of his disciples took over for him.

But it didn't stop there.

And we remember all of those names in the Eucharistic prayer.

Linus, Cleedis, Clements, Sixth, Descornelius, you know, and so on down the line.

The genealogy is there and it was something that was lovingly preserved by Catholics, by the fathers of the church.

And it continues down to our own day.

Their martyrdoms, their sacrifices, their service.

Again, we have to recall that at that time in the church was not the power position.

That's right.

It wasn't a moment where they oversaw an empire.

No, if it hadn't been the command of Christ, you know, I don't think anybody would have wanted the job.

But it's something that had to be done.

And just as a father has to be there for the family in times of danger and the father has to lead the family.

Guide the family, console the family, provide for the family, defend the family.

Well, that's what the popes did in those early years.

So that we have that testimony of the special authority of the Church of Rome in the letter of Clement,

who was one of the early popes, and had certainly heard the preaching of both Peter and Paul.

We have that letter that Clement wrote to the far away church in Corinth.

Okay, so here's a guy who's in Rome and Italy, and he's writing to discipline a church in Greece.

And in order for that to happen, a lot of things have to be in place.

And what you find in that, that beautiful letter that Clement wrote, it's a very long letter,

and it's a deeply scriptural letter.

But when he's closing up, Clement speaks of his own authority in a way that would be considered arrogant if it were not true.

But you know, you read all of the letter of Clement, and it's marked by its mildness, and it's marked by its humility.

And then he gets to the end, and he says these things.

He says, render obedience unto the things written by us through the Holy Spirit.

Whoa, render obedience? He's telling them this.

Far away church. It's not even his own church, unless he's the Pope, unless Rome has that special authority.

He says, render obedience unto the things written by us, and he says, through the Holy Spirit.

So he's saying that the Holy Spirit is acting in him in a special way, and that they are answerable to the Holy Spirit for their obedience or their disobedience.

And he says, if certain persons should be disobedient unto the words spoken by Christ through us, let them understand that they will entangle themselves in no slight transgression and danger.

So he's not trying to lured it over them, but he's trying to tell them the truth here.

What I'm telling you is not my will. It's God's will. He's invoking the Holy Spirit. He's invoking Jesus Christ himself, and he's saying that this teaching is not coming from me, or just from me, but coming from God himself, and he's holding them accountable.

It's a powerful thing, and when was that written? Probably around 67 AD. The latest it was written is around 97 AD.

But we're talking about that first generation after the apostles, and already we have this strong, authoritative voice coming from Rome.

We don't like the term obedience. We're Americans. Exactly. But it is obedience, and its true sense is deep listening.

Oh, yes, it is. And it's something that's necessary in a family, and it's necessary in the church. I mean, think about those letters of the apostles, where this is something that they assumed that they could demand of their congregations, that they assumed they had an authority, and that people would recognize this, and they would listen to what they had to say.

Because they were speaking for Jesus Christ. They were speaking in the name of Christ. We live in a country that was begun by a revolution, and that was marked midway by a rebellion.

We just have this kind of ingrained in our character that nobody's going to tell me what to do, because heck, one of my fundamental rights is liberty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Well, I'll tell you what makes me happy. It's being able to do whatever I want. And that's the American attitude. It's not a Christian attitude. It's not a Catholic attitude. That's for sure.

Because we believe that this hierarchy itself is a gift from God, that authority is a gift from God. He knows our human nature, and he gave us what we needed. He gave us a guide.

If you're in a strange city where you don't speak the language, you're a lot more free if you're able to follow the instructions of a map. That's an important thing to have.

You want to obey what the GPS is telling you, and when it's telling you to turn right, and that sort of thing, you're not more free if you choose to do something else.

The hierarchy we have in the church is really an aid to our full freedom on earth, and it's to get us to the end of our lives so that we can be more able to get to our heavenly destination.

It has eternal consequences, and it takes us down a road that forks off into two different directions, once to heaven, and the others to hell.

The fathers weren't politicians. They weren't trying to win people over the way candidates win votes today. They wanted to tell them the truth, and they wanted those people to get to heaven.

They wanted the entire church to be reunited in heaven at the end of this life, and you know, martyrdom was always a real possibility, especially for the early fathers.

Persecution was a present reality. It was something they were dealing with, so they didn't mince words, and they did not hesitate to invoke authority.

At the same time, the fathers who were in the far-flung places like Antioch and Alexandria, they did not hesitate to acknowledge that an authority that transcended their own local authority.

And that was the authority of the Bishop of Rome, who served in the place of Peter as the vicar of Christ on earth.

So we had these letters of Ignatius of Antioch, and so often in the series we come back to these letters because they are early documents of the church, in which we find a rich theology that's worked out, but also a rich theology that's just assumed in so many ways.

And Ignatius always assumes that he has an authority because he's a Bishop.

So when he's writing to a congregation, he writes as a Bishop, and he writes as one with authority.

But when he's approaching Rome, and he's addressing a letter to the Church of Rome, it's a different kind of letter, whereas the others had been letters that assumed his authority,

his letter to the Romans assumes the authority of the Roman Church, and it's a letter of deference to the Roman Church.

And it piles on so many compliments, so many titles to the Church of Rome.

He addresses it to the Church which has obtained mercy through the majesty of the Most High Father, and Jesus Christ is only begotten Son.

The Church which is beloved and enlightened by the will of Him that wills all things, which are according to the love of Jesus Christ our God.

And he goes on at great length piling on title after title after title, and he refers to this Church as presiding.

And he says that this Church presides over love.

What does that mean? It's a very curious statement.

Well, it means that it presides over the communion of love that we know on earth, and that is the universal Church, the Catholic Church.

That's what he means. It's obvious that Ignatius considers the Roman Church supremely important, and he's doing this in 105, 107 AD, the very beginning of the 100s.

He's doing it not too long after the death of the last Apostle, but he's doing it because he knows that this is the Apostolic faith.

He's writing to the Church in the city where the two great Apostles, Peter and Paul shed their blood, and they consecrated the city by their blood.

And ever after we look upon the occupants of the office of Bishop as the successors to those Apostles, certainly Paul, but most of all Peter.

We'll return to roots of the faith with Mike Aqualina in just a moment.

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Thanks and God Bless!

We now return to the Roots of the Faith with Mike Aqualina.

There's something for us to really ponder in our hearts as well, isn't there Mike?

The importance of the sacred, holy ground.

In America, we kind of have a unique appreciation of that now with our discussions about what should happen on the site of the 9-11 attacks in New York.

We know that there's something so sacred there that that has to be taken care of in a very precious way.

Even more so for the Church in what occurred in Rome.

That's right. And it's interesting, though, the way the Church received that piety.

If we look at the New Testament books that were authored by the Evangelist Luke, we have the Gospel of Luke, and we have the Acts of the Apostles.

And what we find in those books, if we look at them as a dramatic narrative, we see that their drama sweeps us over territory from Jerusalem to Rome.

That's the destination of Peter. That's the destination of Paul. That was the destination of their earthly pilgrimage.

That's where they ended their days. They both went there to preside, but they both went there to die and to consecrate the ground by their blood.

In imitation of the death of their master Jesus Christ. They went to Rome, and during the reign of the Emperor Nero, Peter was crucified upside down, and Paul was beheaded.

And the witnesses of their deaths lovingly preserved the record of what happened there.

And they continued to revere that ground, and it's interesting that in the days of the early Church, shortly after the time of the Acts of the Apostles, Jerusalem was leveled.

And the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem. It was very hard to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem. They became a very paganized city. They renamed it. The Romans renamed it.

And they did not want any rebellion happening there again, so they really Romanized the city. They made it kind of a colony.

But when Christians wanted to make pilgrimage, they went to Rome. So we find so many of the early fathers of the Church making Rome their destination of choice.

Okay, we've already talked about Clement. We've talked about Ignatius making his way to Rome to die. What about Ignatius's friend, Paulicarp of Smirna?

Paulicarp was a disciple of the Apostle John, and Paulicarp, when he was a very old man, made pilgrimage to Rome so that he could accelerate the mass with the Holy Father and solve some of the problems the Church was facing during that time.

So Paulicarp of Smirna made his journey from what the lands that are today Turkey to Rome. After Paulicarp, we have Paulicarp's disciple, Irenaeus.

And Irenaeus made that same pilgrimage. He was living in Leone in what's now France, and he made the journey to Rome to try to make peace in the Church and to settle some of the problems we were having with sysms and heresys during his own lifetime.

Think about Justin Martyr, who was raised a pagan in Nablus in Palestine. Justin Martyr made his great pilgrimage teaching along the way until he finally made it to Rome, where he set up a school of philosophy there in that holy city.

Why did all of these men want to make pilgrimage to that site? Because it was holy ground. It was consecrated by the blood of the Apostles Peter and Paul, and it was really the earthly capital of the Catholic Church, which they gloried in, whose faith that they were living in their distant lands.

It doesn't stop there. We find origin of Alexandria making the same pilgrimage to Rome. We find many others after him, and then we find the fathers of the Church, the Eastern fathers, who made appeal to the popes of Rome to try to settle disputes in their land.

What did St. Basil the Great do when he was having problems in the Church that was entrusted to him? He appealed to Rome, he appealed to the Pope, and even asked the Pope to come and visit him, make a pastoral visit to our country, intervene in our affairs.

He was begging the Pope to intervene in the affairs of far away Caesarea as his predecessor, Clement had done with the Church of Corinth. We find St. John Chrysostom begging the Pope in Rome to come to his assistance when he was being persecuted by his fellow bishops and by the Christian emperor.

We find St. Augustine in North Africa appealing to the Pope to settle matters disputes with the heretics, especially the Pelagians, and we have Augustine giving us this great principle that when Rome has spoken the matter is settled.

We appreciate, as humans, the need to have that capital source of the culture, whether it's in our political systems in a country, we have Washington DC is the home of our administrative facilities.

You see it throughout the world in many different areas in our hometowns, we have places that serve as seats of gathering and discernment whether or not how a law is distributed, i.e. our courts or our civil buildings.

In this greater context of the Church, Rome, the city, the location has become because of that birth of the Church through martyrdom of so many, i.e. so many that has become the seat and that's where Peter would be and his successors would have their chair.

That's right, and as I said earlier, we get this from even from the trajectory of the Acts of the Apostles, that this isn't something that just happened coincidentally, it was there in the plan of God, that's the trajectory of the Acts of the Apostles, it's where God wanted to establish that seat of Peter, and it's funny that you should mention it as a matter of governance, that there's this authority and it's recognized throughout the Church.

I talked about how all the fathers looked to Rome to settle disputes, Cyprian of Carthage in a time of persecution in the 200s, appealing to Rome, and the one time he decides he bucks Rome's authority, history proves him dead wrong because he came down on the wrong side of the re-baptism controversy.

But the fathers of the Church acknowledged the authority of the Pope of Rome, and of course we would expect them to because they were Catholic Christians, and we recognize our faith and their faith.

But you know, even the pagans looked at the Church and they said the Church is recognizable because of that Pope that's at the head, and one time there was a dispute over possession of a Church in Syria and these rebellious Christians in Syria.

In Syria decided to do something audacious, and they appealed to the pagan emperor to settle the dispute.

Well, as the emperor are really in, and he made the decision, which seemed just logical to him, that they should go with whatever the Pope decides.

So you have this decree that shows us the pagan emperors recognizing the authority that had always been there in the Christian Church.

The pagan persecutors knew a Christian when they saw him, and they knew what the Christian Church looked like, and they knew that the true Christian Church had the Pope at the head of it, and they were willing to acknowledge that even there in the third century.

I think you've brought up a really important concept, a paradigm, that all Christians must remember when given salvation history, and in particular the history of the life of the Christian Church, it's that trajectory.

That God is moving it to a certain point, and even along the travels of that, there will be blips, there will be bumps, there will be problems.

And we've had that as you have illustrated in a previous work of yours, the Resilient Church, that even those occur, but that trajectory has been designed by God, and it will survive even those bumps, those potholes.

If we look at the late 100s, it was a difficult time for the Church, and it was a time when the Popes had to deal with a lot of persecution on the one hand, but also just some things that came along with growth, growth pains for the Church, growing pains for the Church, and the Popes in Rome made some difficult disciplinary decisions.

We talked about them in another one of these shows, and people didn't like them.

Tertullian out in North Africa thought the Popes were being too lax with the people, and that they should be a lot more severe.

But you know, just a little bit before Tertullian was writing that, we have Irenaeus, who was a disciple of Policarp, who was a disciple of the Apostle John, and when he talks about the Bishop of Rome, he talks about it as the ultimate authority on Earth.

He refers to the Roman Church as that greatest, most ancient, and universally known Church, founded and organized at Rome, by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul.

The faith that Church preaches comes down to us through succession of the Bishops.

For every Church must necessarily look to this Church, the Church of Rome, because of its more powerful authority, through which the Apostolic tradition has been preserved continuously by the faithful everywhere.

This is Irenaeus writing. Again, he's a grandchild of the Apostles, right? His Master had been a disciple of one of the Apostles, and he's writing with such clarity about the papacy.

And just in case that's not clear enough for us, he lists the genealogy of the papacy, beginning with Peter, and going to the Pope who ruled in his own day.

He lists those popes one after another, down to his own time, as if he's reciting ancient history, but you know, he's only doing this a little bit after the time of the Apostles.

He preserved that record for us, he preserved that faith for us, and he passed it on in his own Church.

And the people who received it from him passed it on, and then they passed on through the generations, and that's how it came down to us today.

And that's why, Chris McGregor, you and I could stand there in St. Peter Square, in 2007, we could stand there together and venerate that man, who is the vicar of Christ on Earth.

And we could thank God for the office, that he exercises in the Church, because it's such a mercy to us.

You've been listening to The Roots of the Faith, from the Church Fathers to you, with Mike Aqualina.

To hear and are to download this conversation, along with hundreds of other spiritual formation programs, visit DescerningHearts.com.

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I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

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