A chara, – It is disappointing that Professor James P Mackey’s series of five articles (Opinion, August 3rd) about the Church in Ireland began with a piece that misses the mark regarding the theology and history of the papacy.
His picture of a Christ who – like an indecisive personnel manager – hires and then promptly sacks St Peter is a novel reading of the passage that jars with the consensus of early Christian texts (scriptural and non-scriptural), which give Peter a unique position of pre-eminence amongst the twelve apostles.
His assertion that “there is no scene in the New Testament that describes Jesus reinstating Peter as pope before he died” seems to miss Luke 22:31-32, when Christ gives him the task of “strengthening the brethren” despite his imminent threefold denial.
The qualification “before he died” seems designed to exclude, for whatever reason, the post-Resurrection sayings of Jesus such as John 21:15-19, when Peter’s mandate is re-affirmed.
Professor Mackey’s criticism of a “secular papacy” and his analogy between Constantine and Pope Benedict XVI serves only to confuse things.
Whatever was “consummated” with Constantine’s conversion wasn’t the kind of papal imperium that Professor Mackey hints at, and the real history of the papacy in the millennium or so after Constantine shows the development of papal authority as a struggle to liberate the Church from simony, corruption and venal secular interference in spiritual affairs.
It’s a complicated history with plenty of shades of grey, but it bears little resemblance to the idea that Pope Benedict, with his 110 acres of sovereign territory, is some kind of latter-day Constantine.
Finally, Professor Mackey’s linking the idea of the Pope as “absolute monarch” and the idea of papal infallibility gives the impression that the papacy claims some kind of role as an “infallible governor”.
By failing to outline the precise scope of the Pope’s special charism and responsibility to teach authoritatively in matters of faith and morals (one he shares with the college of bishops as a whole) Professor Mackey gives a misleading picture.
Why didn’t Professor Mackey engage with what the Church actually teaches – in Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium, for example – rather than tilting at a historical and theological straw-man? Is mise,