The importance of this concept, as it pertains to the Church’s understanding of her own role in the world, cannot be overemphasized, and is absolutely essential knowledge for anyone who would attempt to grapple with, or evaluate, her validity and her integrity as those things reveal themselves to be through whatever actions or stances are sanctioned by the Church as she moves through history.
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And here is where I might say something again about the ‘Petrine Primacy,’ for when we use the word “successor,” as it pertains to the office of pope, and the person who occupies it, what we are referring to is the line of succession in which participate all of those figures who have at some point been, or will one day be, bishop of Rome (which is the actual position that the pope fills), going backward through time, to the first century, and the very first bishop of Rome, the apostle Peter, who ended his life there, in martyrdom (under the Roman Emperor Nero), and to whom Christ himself had said, years before, when they were still in Galilee, if we are to believe what is written in the Gospel of Matthew, the following words: “And I tell thee this in my turn, that thou art Peter, and it is upon this rock that I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it; and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
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The most striking visual representation of this disparity, if you ask me, can be seen when the College of Cardinals, consisting entirely of men, all of whom are dressed in those unmistakable red and white vestments, with the red skullcap called a zucchetto (the color of which is meant to remind them that they should be ready to shed their blood, as martyrs, for the Church) convenes at the Vatican, in the days following the death or renunciation of a pope, during what is called conclave, to elect, from among their number, a successor.
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However, it is indicative of a shameful disparity in how men and women have been allowed to serve the Church, and it is also indicative, I think, of a great loss that has resulted from how the male leaders of the Church, throughout the ages, have underestimated or ignored the minds and the imaginations and the spiritual energies of the women who love her.
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This absence of women, in more visible roles, is not indicative of some disordered perspective that the Church has formulated toward them, though I cannot say that I do not understand how such an impression exists, when that is approximately what it looks like.
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For one thing, there are far more men, everywhere you look, in positions of leadership, relative to women. In the College of Cardinals, and in the worldwide priesthood, which abides by the tradition (which isn’t to say dogma) of ordaining only men, there are no women at all. And in the Roman Curia, which is the administrative arm of the Holy See, which can include members of the laity, there is, at the time of this writing, only a handful of women, some of whom I believe were appointed by the current Bishop of Rome, Pope Francis. Women can serve as Abbesses, or Mother Superiors, in convents, where nuns take vows, and devote themselves to lives of cloistered holiness, but, in diocesan life, and in the Mass, where the laity is concerned, they have been limited mainly to provisory roles. This in spite of the fact that more than half of the world’s Catholics are women.
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Now, when I say “optics,” I am not referring to how things appear to the eye alone, and neither am I endorsing a separation of how a thing is in actuality, or in substance, from how it is seemingly, or visibly. What I mean is, beyond some of the other problems that ail the Church, and that can be attributed to the corruption inside her, as well as to malicious elements that exist outside of her, and that would like to see her harmed, there has been a disconnect between what she actually values, as far as the universality of her name would indicate (“catholic” meaning “universal”), and what she seems to value, based on how we who belong to her have often chosen to give outward expression to her nature.
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In other words, while the truths to which the Church belongs cannot change, because they have to do with the revelation of God in human history, and thus are immutable, the manner in which she sets forth those truths can change. Which today, to me, a layperson who does not have much power to effectuate change in the Church, but who loves the Church enough that, were she to sink, as a ship could sink, would rather go down with her than exist in a world that does not have her, means that those within her fold who are in positions to effectuate change (I’m referring to clerics, and perhaps to those in bureaucratic roles, but also to anyone who can do something) should be thinking about her appearance. Or, to put it candidly, her optics.
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This purpose, as described by Pope John XXIII, in the statement he delivered at the Council’s opening, in 1962, went like this: “What is needed is that this certain and immutable doctrine, to which the faithful owe obedience, be studied afresh and reformulated in contemporary terms. For this deposit of faith, or truths which are contained in our time-honored teaching, is one thing; the manner in which these truths are set forth, with their meaning preserved intact, is something else.”
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If ever it can be said that the Church needs to be mindful of the regenerative quality of tradition, as Merton describes it in these quotes, and of the difference between tradition and convention, I don’t think it hasty to say she needs to be so now. I state this with the full realization that hardly fifty years have elapsed since the Second Vatican Council, the whole purpose of which was to address the relationship of the Church to the modern world.
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He distinguishes this from convention, of which he says: “Tradition is living and active, but convention is passive and dead. Tradition does not form us automatically: we have to work to understand it. Convention is accepted passively, as a matter of routine. Therefore, convention easily becomes an evasion of reality. It offers us only pretended ways of solving the problems of living — a system of gestures and formalities. Tradition really teaches us to live and shows us how to take full responsibility for our own lives. Thus tradition is often flatly opposed to what is ordinary, to what is mere routine. But convention, which is a mere repetition of familiar routines, follows the line of least resistance. One goes through an act, without trying to understand the meaning of it all, merely because everyone else does the same.”
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Here is the quote, which is from his book, No Man Is An Island: “Tradition, which is always old, is at the same time ever new because it is always reviving — born again in each new generation, to be lived and applied in a new and particular way.”
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To begin with, I will recall another quote from the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, who happened to be American, and who lived in the twentieth century, which I mention because of the bearing I think it has on the idea that Catholicism is some old and dusty irrelevance, when really it belongs not only to the past, but to contemporaneity, and not only to contemporaneity, but to eternity. Which cannot be said of anything that the secular world will offer us, at least where the secular world allows its achievements to be guided by fashions and trends, which by definition have something of a ‘sell by date,’ though if we do not incorporate such trends into our lives, as they appear on the cultural horizon, and inhabit or possess them as if they had some permanence, we can expect to be ignored, if not ostracized, by those who would regard the abiding by of them as indicators or measures of a person’s worth.
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The choice of the word “Primacy” here is unfortunate, given the way that many people feel when they look at the Church, as she exists in the world today, and see what appears to them as a structure and an identity that are so exclusionary and out-of-touch that it might be comical, were the repercussions not so serious. But there is a reason for that word, which I will try to explain. And I do think that what the Church appears to be, to many people, is not what she essentially is.
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There is, I think, in Peter’s personality, as it reveals itself throughout the gospels, something worth considering, insofar as it is through him, by way of a concept that Catholics call the ‘Petrine Primacy’ (which originates in an utterance of Christ, to Peter, that has come to be known as the ‘keys of the kingdom’ passage, appearing where it does in the Gospel of Matthew) that the Catholic Church maintains the tradition of the papacy, if not her entire hierarchical structure.
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It’s an important detail, because, if they’d felt no urgency, the one disciple, being friends with the other, would’ve slowed his pace so they could remain in each other’s company. For that is what friends do, when they are hurrying toward some destination, and the destination does not matter more to them than the fact that they are going to it together. Unless they are having a footrace, to see who is faster, which is not what these two were doing. No, it was merely because Peter was older, slower, and probably a little out of breath, that he was outrun by the other disciple, though you can be certain he was going as fast as he could.
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It is not for lack of urgency that Peter is outrun, for the next line tells us that the disciple who outran him does not enter the tomb, but stops at the threshold, perhaps out of fear or reverence (it is difficult to say which) and that Peter, on arriving, goes right in, headlong and assured, which isn’t to say rash, and views the scene in its entirety.
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And then there is this detail, which always makes me smile, for there is no reason to include it except to bring into our consciousness, by way of its commonplaceness, the urgency of the situation as it was felt by the disciples, and the reality of the personalities that formed what became the early Church: “…Peter and the other disciple both set out, and made their way to the tomb; they began running side by side, but the other disciple outran Peter, and reached the tomb first.”
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The very fact that it is women, rather than men (the other gospels state that Magdalene was accompanied by two other women) who are first to discover the empty tomb is noteworthy in and of itself, in that it reveals, almost accidentally, a sort of absence of heroism that was general among the male disciples in the wake of Jesus’s death, as well as, conversely, a beautiful, if unsurprising, devotion on the part of the women, who had waited a day, until the sabbath was over (as was the Jewish custom) before going to the tomb, with spices, so that they could anoint the dead body of Jesus.
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I love, for instance, how Mary Magdalene, on finding the tomb empty, is so guileless and unassuming in the way she reports the fact to the disciples. Her immediate thought is not that Jesus is resurrected (which he’d more than once indicated, when he’d still been alive, would happen) but that some nameless “they” have taken him away, perhaps the soldiers who’d been tasked with guarding the tomb, perhaps some other people. It is the very ordinariness of her actions, which are in keeping with a person who isn’t fabricating a story, but who is genuinely astonished and bewildered, and is trying to use logic to understand a thing that confounds them, that helps us see the reality of the event to which she is witness.