Sunday Reflection: 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time -

Sunday Reflection: 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Sunday Reflection: The 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time St Peter's confession of faith is a gift from God, and what Jesus goes on to promise his apostle (vv. 18-19) is also a grace; he promises to confer on him the power to bind and loose in the Church he founds, and later on he confers on Peter this authority (cf. In 21:15-23 and note). "The Lord adds: 'And I tell you..." -that is: as my Father revealed my divinity to you, I will reveal your great honour to you. 'You are Peter." I, the unbreakable stone, the cornerstone that made two peoples one, the foundation of all things, the one without whom nothing can be built, I tell you, Peter, that you too are rock. You will be strengthened with my power; you will share in the power that is mine. On this rock, I will build my Church, and the powers of hell will not prevail against it. That is: on the strong foundation of Peter's faith, I will build the eternal, sublime temple, the Church, which reaches up to heaven" (St Leo the Great, Sermo 4 in anniversario ordinationis suae, 2-3). Elsewhere in the Gospel (18:18), the disciples, too, are promised the power of binding and losing (v. 19). For this reason, Tradition has seen in Peter a sign of unity in the Church: "The ministry of this power was also granted to the other Apostles and to all the bishops of the Church, but the fact that it is given to one in the name of all is significant: the power is granted to Peter in a special way because Peter is the head of all the pastors of the Church" (ibid.). From the beginning, this gift to Peter has been interpreted as something that is inherited by his successors, the bishops of Rome. This doc-tine of the primacy, together with that of the infallibility of the Pope when he speaks ex cathedra, was defined as a dogma of faith in the Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus of the First Vatican Council, and it has been reaffirmed in later documents: "The bishop of Rome, in whom rests the function given in a unique way to Peter, the first of the Apostles, and which he passed on to his successors, is head of the college of bishops, the Vicar of Christ and Pastor of the universal Church on earth; he has, therefore, by virtue of his function, ordinary power which is supreme, full, immediate and universal in the Church, and which he can exercise freely" (Code of Canon Law, can. 331; cf. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, 18). The saints have seen love for the Church and the Pope as a true sign of love for Christ: "He who disobeys the Christ on earth [the Pope], who acts for Christ in heaven, will not partake of the fruit of the blood of the Son of God" (St Catherine of Siena, Epistolae, 207). This excerpt is from The Navarre Bible: New Testament.