During the season of Lent, we focused on the people of Israel, our forefathers in the Faith. Now, in the Easter season, we focus on the fulfillment of the people of Israel: the Church. From the Fall of Adam and Eve, God started gathering a people to be distinctly His own (the Jewish people), and then opened the boundaries of the Chosen People by re-founding the people of Israel on the foundation stones of the Apostles. We are all in some sense Jews – or Jews as they were meant to be, fulfilled in Christ.

            This is why the Church is essential to the message of Jesus, and why there can be no following of Christ without the Church. As we saw on Easter Sunday, Christ is truly alive and present in His Church. The Gospels record how He appeared several times to the Apostles and other disciples. But He didn’t come back just as He was before His Crucifixion. He no longer teaches crowds of five thousand on the shores of the lake. He appears to very specific people who He wants to be His witnesses, through whose testimony we would eventually come to believe.

            As we see the life of the Church unfolding in the Acts of the Apostles, we see a unique role for Peter, the Apostle singled out by the Lord as the Rock upon whom He will found His Church. As the Apostles confront the Jewish authorities after the Holy Spirit sends them out to teach and preach, it is “Peter and the Apostles” who respond to the Sanhedrin. So, it is fitting that we pray for the election of a new Pope this week, as the conclave to elect the 267^th successor of St. Peter begins on Wednesday.

            There is a church built over the site of Christ’s dialogue with Peter in today’s Gospel: the Church of the Primacy of Saint Peter. You would think that the site of Peter’s Primacy would more aptly be the place in St. Matthew’s Gospel where Peter receives the keys of the kingdom. But here we see the source of Peter’s primacy in the Church, and how that primacy is so different than what the world expects. It is the particular love of Christ for him, and the particular invitation of Christ to love and follow Him in turn. At the Last Supper, Christ told Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”

            In those lines, St. Luke shows us the first of the three essential duties of the Sovereign Pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, the Successor of St. Peter – the Pope. Christ has a particular and unique love for Peter. He is fiery, tempestuous, and deeply imperfect. And Christ chooses him not only despite it all, but in part because of those crazy predispositions that probably made him hard to get along with. He calls Peter not by the new name He has given him, the name that means “rock” and signifies the office he is to receive. He calls him by his birth name, Simon. His words must have pierced Peter’s soul: I know you. I know who you really are. I even know that you will fail. But I have prayed for you. I have prayed for you in a way that I have prayed for no one else. I have prayed for you, knowing that you will turn back, and that when you do, you will strengthen and lead the brethren I have chosen to preach my name under your headship.

            Returning to St. John’s Gospel from today, we see the second essential duty of the Pope: “Feed my sheep.” The Pope feeds the flock of the Church by teaching the fullness of the divine and Catholic faith. He feeds the Church by appointing wise and prudent Bishops who will form and ordain good men as Christ’s priests to feed the Church with the Body of Christ and to renew Her from within by the forgiveness of sins in Confession.

            St. John also shows us the third essential role of the Pope: “‘When you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.’ He said this signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God.” The Successor of St. Peter must be willing to die for his Master just as Peter was. He must face the martyrdom of public opinion, free from all obeisance to the powers and principalities of this world.

            On Wednesday, the Cardinal Electors of the Holy Roman Church will enter the conclave. One will emerge – likely before we gather again next Sunday – as the new Pope. Someone will promptly update his Wikipedia page to say something like, “Pope so-and-so is the head of the Catholic Church.” And Wikipedia will be wrong. It will be wrong because no Pope is head of the Catholic Church. The Church is not the Red Cross or the United Way or the United Nations. It is the mystical body of Christ. Her head is Christ, and Her members are the baptized.

            The Pope is the Vicar of Christ, the one who exercises power on Christ’s behalf here on earth. In God’s providence, both Saint Peter and Saint Paul ended their lives in Rome – according to tradition, on the same day, June 29, which happily falls on a Sunday this year, so we will celebrate Rome’s patronal feast together next month. Rome rapidly gained prestige in the early centuries of the Church not only as the place of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, but because of the purity with which the Apostolic faith was preserved there. In Constantinople, the other imperial city in the East, controversies raged about the divinity and humanity of Christ. But Rome offered a consistently clear witness and a bulwark of what had been conserved from the Apostles. As St. Leo observed in the 300s, Rome, the mother of error, the spreader of pagan error and vice, became the student of the truth of the Gospel. The Pope’s success is not measured by creativity and innovation, because his primary responsibility is to hand on what he himself has received.

            So just as we are all in some sense Jews, we are also Romans. It is from Rome that we have received the Catholic faith. Our Romanness is expressed in our use of Rome’s language, Latin, in our worship. It is expressed in the sobriety of our liturgy. In our parish church, the mosaic in our sanctuary is modeled on the famous apse mosaic of the Church of St. Clement in Rome, where St. Clement, the second successor of Peter is buried. As of last Sunday, our sanctuary is even more Roman with the new altar frontals, ambo falls, and tabernacle veils.

            We can think of these as vestments – vestments not just for Christ present in the priest, but for Christ symbolically present in the altar, and really present in Word and Sacrament at the ambo and the Tabernacle. This traditional practice gives a greater attention to the rhythm of the liturgical year even outside of the celebration of Mass by clothing the sanctuary in the liturgical color of the day, and reminds us how Christ is truly the One celebrating Mass: Christ present in His Real Eucharistic presence, Christ present in His Word, Christ symbolized by the altar, and Christ present in His priest. Just as Christ is the one who truly leads the Church through His vicar, the Pope, He is the one really celebrating Mass.

            Most likely, next Sunday, we will be welcoming the election of a new Bishop of Rome, and praying for this new successor of St. Peter. We will do so with a greater appreciation of who we are as Roman Catholics, as disciples of the Lord who have received the Christian faith through the profession of Peter, whose successors have seen to the evangelization of our mother lands and shepherded the Church through unpredictable and tumultuous centuries. May Saints Peter and Paul intercede for the new Bishop of their city of Rome, and may Mary, Mother of the Church, draw the new Pope closer to Her Son.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

III Sunday of Easter, A.D. MMXXV