Each year on June 29^th, we celebrate the Solemnity of Ss. Peter and Paul, the two great Apostles who gave their lives for the Lord on the same day in city of Rome, which was transformed by their teaching and witness from the source of pagan error and vice into the capitol of Christendom. This Spring, as we prepared for the election of a new Pope, reflecting on the life of the early Church in the book of Acts, we reflected on the importance of Rome for our faith as Roman Catholics. We saw our strong spiritual connection with the mother-city of our faith – the place where the Catholic faith was preserved in its purity, and through which that faith was handed on to us.

            Every seven years or so, this great feast falls on a Sunday, and we have the chance to celebrate it all together. This year more than ever we are spiritually Roman, as the whole Roman church celebrates together today our mother Church’s patronal feast. And it is propitious that we do so as Rome celebrates her greatest day for the first time with an American as her spiritual father!

            The past few months we’ve seen the importance of Rome, the city of Peter and Paul’s supreme witness to the Faith. So let’s look more closely at Peter and Paul themselves. The Book of Acts tells us about an imprisonment of St. Peter and how he is miraculously set free by the intervention of an angel. We’ve seen God’s particular concern for Peter’s fate, highlighting his unique role in the Church, underscored by the fervent prayers of the Church on his behalf. But a small detail shows us even more: This whole episode takes place at a certain time: “It was the feast of Unleavened Bread. … [Herod] intended to bring him before the people (that is, to put him on trial) after Passover.” Herod has learned his lesson about important trials during Passover! St. Luke is pointing out a clear parallel: The freeing of Peter from prison sounds a lot like the Resurrection of Christ. Peter is presented here as an alter Christus, another Christ, illustrating the legitimacy of his authority to act in Christ’s name.

            Likewise, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Christ asks Peter the pivotal question: “Who do you say that I am?” To ask this question – and for seemingly no other reason – Christ takes the Apostles to Caesare Philippi, 30 miles by foot out of the way in their journey. It is a pagan region where devotees performed lewd and obscene acts before the idol Pan, and human sacrificial victims were thrown into a cave known as “the gates of hell.”

Christ, then, picks this unlikely place to elicit Peter’s confession of faith for a serious reason. He wants the Apostles to confess faith in Him where it is most difficult and most unlikely, amidst a culture that rejects self-denial and sacrifice in favor of gratification of the basest desires and the abuse of the human person. While everyone around them asks themselves, “What do you need to be happy?” He asks them, “Who do you, say that I am?”

As a seminarian, I met an extremely bright, non-Catholic young man who had attended Catholic schools. For years, he heard his teachers expound on Catholic doctrine and affirm the most absurd things – that a good and loving God created the world, that the same very God had become man and shared the human condition, that suffering could bring joy. And that to access that supreme joy, he needed a very different kind of life. So he asked his classmates, nominally Catholics: Did they actually believe this crazy stuff? Half-hearted replies, at best, were all he received.

But there we sat over lunch on a school pilgrimage to Rome when it hit him – this guy actually believes all this crazy stuff. So he asked me, “Do you actually believe all this stuff?” And I looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Unqualifiedly, yes. I believe every single bit of it.”

That was the moment my friend Gordon decided that he wanted to be Catholic. He was only sixteen, but six years later I was present as another priest asked him, “Do you believe all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims to be revealed by God?” and he responded, “I do believe.”

Gordon asked me that fateful question, “Do you really believe this stuff?” in the city (Rome) hallowed by the pouring of the blood of the one who answered the most important question of all – “Who do you say that I am?” But the sad part is that Gordon shouldn’t have had to go all the way to Rome to meet someone who actually believed all of the Catholic faith: all the fellow students at Catholic school, teachers, professors, parents, coaches, etc. etc. etc. My brothers and sisters, the world is starving for your witness! How many coworkers, how many classmates, how many family members, how many people sitting next to you right now, are secretly asking themselves, “Does anyone really believe this stuff?” For them too, you could be the one called to courageously answer the question of Jesus Christ, really and truly present in our very midst today – “Who do you say that I am?”

To do so is not easy. St. Paul does not mince words: “I, Paul, am already being poured out like a libation, (like a sacrifice) and the time of my departure is at hand.” At the same time, Paul has confidence in the Lord: “The Lord will rescue me from every evil threat.” Yet, we know that in one sense the Lord did not rescue Paul from every evil threat, since he was beheaded as a martyr. Paul insists that the Lord’s promise will be true because the Lord “will bring me safe to his heavenly Kingdom.” Paul knows that the Lord’s protection goes deeper than the executioner’s sword.

One important word of caution is needed, though, when we consider the heroic witness and sacrifice of Ss. Peter and Paul, who rejected the world’s allures to follow Christ with zeal. They did so not out of hatred for the world, but out of immense love for those loved even more by Christ. Two days ago, we celebrated another great feast: The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, which recalls the revelations of Christ to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, of the immense love of His Sacred Heart for sinful men. Christ’s great response to the ingratitude and outrages committed against the love of His Sacred Heart, He emphasized to St. Margaret Mary, is to pour out His own life – to pour even more and more love upon the world, to answer injury with pardon, and hatred with love, longing that His generous love might win back a cold and thankless world.

            In his inaugural homily, Pope Leo XIV emphasized: “This is the hour for love.” This is the sense in which this is the hour for love: The world needs heroic witnesses, willing to give their lives for the salvation of the world in witness to the love of Christ, who will respond to the ingratitude, misunderstanding, and hostility of the men of this world with zeal and with immense charity. Our charity will always be the measure of our credibility, and for the world, our charity will be the measure of the charity of Christ.

            St. Paul tells us, “From now on the crown of righteousness awaits me, which the Lord, the just judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearance.” If we confess Christ and all that He teaches with the same zeal and charity, then we can say that we have longed for His appearance too, and that we await the same crown.

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

Solemnity of Ss. Peter and Paul, A.D. MMXXV