The Peculiarity of Papal Primacy
By Fr. Olek Stirrat
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:
To be pope is to take on a task that is, by precise theological definition, impossible. Like every other office in the Church, the papacy exists for the sake of holiness. The office, though, is a creature of time and space, and holiness is eternal. No one, not even a pope who is a saint, can fully satisfy the office’s demands. Yet the office, according to the Church’s faith, is of the will of God, and the office cannot fail, although the officeholder will always fall short of the mark. That distinction between the office and the man who holds it is a consolation to any pope. According to Balthasar, it is also “unutterably terrible.” The office reflects the unity of person and mission in Jesus Christ, of whom the pope is vicar. Every pope, the saints as well as the scoundrels, “stands at an utterly tragic place,” because he cannot be fully what the office demands. If he tries to be that, he arrogantly makes himself the equal of the Lord. If he consoles himself too easily with the thought that he must, necessarily, fail, he betrays the demand that the office makes of him, the demand of radical love. The Office of Peter always reflects Christ’s words to Peter “that, because of the depth of his love, he will be led where he does not want to go” (John 21:18).1
And so we come upon a tension-filled polarity, as opposed to an abstruse contradiction, between the person and the office. However, the question remains as to what papal primacy looks like. How ought this “impossible task” be played out?
Collegiality
The First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, Pastor Aeternus, from Vatican I, asserts the primacy of Peter and his successors visible in the Bishop of Rome.2 Joseph Ratzinger comments that
First, it is the certain teaching of the Church that the pope has immediate, ordinary, truly episcopal power of jurisdiction over the whole Church.… The [First] Vatican Council calls the primacy of the pope the apostolic primacy, and the Roman See the apostolic see.… Thus in the realm of doctrine the pope, in his official capacity, is infallible, his ex-cathedra decisions being irreformably ex sese and not in virtue of the Church’s subsequent confirmation.… So far as communio is concerned, the other pillar of the Church, it follows that only he who is in communion with the pope lives in the true communio of the body of the Lord, i.e., in the true Church.3
According to Vatican I, the pope enjoys primacy, but this primacy is not absolute for it is shaped by the communioof the Church. This becomes the ground upon which the relationship between the papacy and the episcopacy is played out. If the papacy has supreme, ordinary, and immediate power over the whole church, what role remains for the rest of the episcopacy? Do all the other bishops simply act as loyal subjects of the pope? Pastor Aeternusfocuses on the issues of primacy and infallibility but does not use the language of collegiality. The Council Fathers were unable to engage in a discussion of the episcopacy because of the invasion of the papal states and the subsequent suspension of the Council. However, it is interesting to note that there is a statement which speaks of the relationship between the papacy and the episcopacy in the following pericope:
This power of the Supreme Pontiff by no means detracts from that ordinary and immediate power of episcopal jurisdiction, by which bishops, who have succeeded to the place of the apostles by appointment of the Holy Spirit (emphasis mine), tend and govern individually the particular flocks which have been assigned to them.4
It is the Holy Spirit who appoints bishops, implying that the episcopacy is not the result of a papal delegation but sacramentally instituted. The Second Vatican Council in its Decree concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops, Christus Dominus, examined the role of the episcopacy in union with the papacy. According to the decree, the episcopal college is the successor of the Apostolic college, expresses its authority “with the supreme pontiff and under his authority,”5 and each bishop “should manifest a concern for all the churches,”6 for whom each bishop is responsible. The Decree encourages a more “catholic” approach in governance and recognizes the divinely instituted legitimacy of each individual bishop who has “all the ordinary, proper, and immediate authority which is required for the exercise of their pastoral office”7 in their given diocese.
Ratzinger comments that the phrase “‘Roman Catholic,’ expresses the dialectic of primacy and episcopacy, comprehending a wealth of relationships, in which one cannot exist without the other.”8 Put metaphorically, rather than a circle, where the pope is the absolute center with everyone oriented around him, Ratzinger proposes the image of an ellipse within which are situated the two principles of the primacy and the episcopacy. He states, “The church appears (to use Heribert Schauf’s words), not as a circle with a single center, but as an ellipse with two foci: Primacy and episcopacy.”9 These two principles come together in the person of the pope, who is the bishop of Rome. There is however, not a strict equality between the pope and the other bishops since the supreme pontiff is described as the “head of the college.”10 However, the authority of bishops is not in competition with the bishop of Rome either. Their authority is not dependent and mediated by the pope but is also divinely instituted. This is played out in the biblical witness: Jesus did not call Peter, who then called the other apostles. Jesus called each of the apostles personally and bestowed upon them his own authority.
But do the bishops then provide checks and balances upon the papacy? Can the bishops correct the pope? Collegial episcopacy qualifies papal primacy, and is intrinsically related to it, since one of the episcopoi is the pope himself. To put it more particularly, Ratzinger proposes seven limits to papal primacy:
The pope cannot arrogate to himself the episcopal rights, nor substitute his power for that of the bishops;
The episcopal jurisdiction has not been absorbed in the papal jurisdiction;
The pope was not given the entire fullness of the bishops’ powers by the decrees of the [First] Vatican Council;
4The pope has not virtually taken the place of each individual bishop;
The pope cannot put himself in the place of a bishop in each single instance, vis-à-vis governments;
The bishops have not become instruments of the pope;
The bishops are not officials of a foreign sovereign in their relations with their own governments.11
Another way to look at the question of papacy is to see how the alternative has played out in Protestant churches. Johann Adam Möhler states that
Protestantism is papism carried to the extreme, that is, complete egoism in principle. In Papism each gives himself unconditionally to one person: in Protestantism, each one is in a position to oppose all others (in so far as he makes of himself the principle of interpretation of revelation).12
The Code of Canon Law of 1983 expresses the theological basis of collegiality in the following manner: “Just as, by the decree of the Lord, Saint Peter and the rest of the Apostles form one College, so for a like reason the Roman Pontiff, the successor of Peter, and the bishops, the successors of the Apostles, are united together in one.”13 Thus there are two subjects of the same universal power.14 In this understanding the episcopacy is divinely instituted and thus constitutive of the Church.
Christological Constellations
To put it in more political terms, the papacy is more akin to a constitutional monarchy than an absolute monarchy. Ratzinger himself comments that “the primacy cannot be patterned on the model of an absolute monarchy as if the pope were the unrestricted monarch of a centrally constituted, supernatural State called Church.”15 This analogy, however, raises the question as to what the constitution is in an ecclesial context? What provides a scaffold to shape papal primacy? What Ratzinger calls communio, Balthasar calls Christological Constellations, which are grounded in Scripture and Tradition. Balthasar comments,
As shepherd who has to pasture the whole flock, he [the pope] has a right to claim authority (in doctrine and leadership) and to demand unity. This prerogative is his alone. But it does not isolate him from the others who have founding missions and who, in their own way, have no less a continuing life and representation in the Church.16
What Balthasar is hinting at is that various missions within the Church go on to make up a tension-filled unity… a communion. He refers to the Church as a “multi-dimensional reality”17 and refers to the “force-fields that bear upon the Church”18 as well as the “network of tensions in the Church.”19 His vision of the Church is based upon the relationships that Jesus Christ formed with different people, endowing them with different missions that are constitutive of the Church. The problem for us with the papacy today is that we, with our postmodern lenses, tend to view the Church through the prism of power, and thus relegate all other ministries as unimportant or see them as conflicting with the Petrine principle or primacy. However, for Balthasar, it is not the Petrine principle (primacy-governance) which is fundamental but the Marian principle (lay holiness), which is the orienting goal for primacy. Primacy exists for the sake of ecclesial unity, authority for the sake of service. Balthasar states that “what Peter will receive as ‘infallibility’ for his office of governing will be a partial share in the total flawlessness of the feminine, Marian Church.”20
In 1988 in an essay to honor Pope John Paul II, Hans Urs Von Balthasar said the following:
The Successor of Peter, who as the Bishop of Rome has to care for the unity of the visible Church, intrinsically refers to this Marian principle of Church unity as Bride of Christ; the two ecclesial principles—both of them expressly assigned to their role by Christ himself—are inseparable and can be divided from each other only with very great harm to the organic unity of the Church. Mary as Mother and model of the Church cannot usurp ministerial functions any more than the papacy and any other ministerial office can perform its duties without regard for the womanliness and motherliness of the Church.21
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. We need to spend more time in prayer, beseeching God that we may be granted some share and fellowship in the communion of saints. Even though it is fascinating to try to ascertain who the next pope will be (I certainly will be following the intrigue when it occurs!), from the perspective of eternal life, the most important thing is holiness. And since it helps if the pope is personally holy as well, let us pray for his holiness and ours.
Fr. Olek Stirrat, born in Poland, is a priest of the Archdiocese of Adelaide. He was ordained in 2022 and is currently ministering in South Australia.
George Weigel, “The Unique Impossibility of the Papacy,” First Things, March 6, 2013, accessed January 11, 2025.
Vatican Council I, Pastor Aeternus, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, 1–3.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God’s Word (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 15.
Vatican Council I, Pastor Aeternus, 5.
Vatican II Council, Christus Dominus, Decree concerning the Pastoral Office of Bishops, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. A. Flannery (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1975), 2.
Ibid., 6.
Ibid., 8.
Ratzinger, God’s Word, 38.
Ibid., 19.
Catholic Church, Code of Canon Law Annotated, n. 330.
Ratzinger, God’s Word, 17.
Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolik, Volume 2 (Cologne and Olten: Hegner, 1958), 698, quoted and translated in von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, 172.
Catholic Church, Code of Canon Law Annotated, n. 330.
Ibid., n. 336.
Joseph Ratzinger, “The Pastoral Implications of Episcopal Collegiality,” in
Concilium, vol. 1: The Church and Mankind (Glen Rock, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1965), 51.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church, translated by Andrée Emery (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986), 158.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 167.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “A Pontificate under the Banner of Mary: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Pope Saint John Paul II,” Catholic World Report, October 22, 2021, accessed January 11, 2025.