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Upon this rock ...
archived from: 2013-03-22
by: David Mills

God continues to rely on weak human beings — like Peter

Catholic Sense

If I were God, I would not have created the Catholic Church. If I’d been hanging around Palestine in the year before the Resurrection, I’d have told Jesus to end human history with the Resurrection and then roll the credits. Letting history keep going was only going to end in tears. Let’s quit while we’re ahead.

But, as my friends would leap to say and my wife would say more gently, it’s good I’m not God. God kept history going. Jesus ascended to heaven, the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost, and the small group of Jesus’ friends and followers formed a band of men and women dedicated to Christ and each other.

This band began to spread around the world, developing its worship, writing its founding documents, working out the finer details of its belief, refining its offices, explaining its morality — all the things a group needs if it’s going to survive from generation to generation. In other words, God kept history going and gave us the Catholic Church to take us through it.

Of course, this has an apparent downside. Creating the church means giving people a huge amount of responsibility and letting them decide lots of crucial matters that change other peoples’ lives for ill and for good. We’re talking about sinful human beings. Sinful, limited, human beings. Sinful, limited, vain, inattentive, vengeful, selfish human beings. (People like you and me, which isn’t really reassuring.)

If anyone had asked me, way back in the first century, I’d have said that giving people that much power and authority was a bad idea. That will end in tears, too, I would have said.

The choosing of the new pope reminded me of this. Many Catholics were worried the cardinals would choose badly. God has given men, and a fairly small number of men, the authority to choose the vicar of Christ on earth.

Some people said that the Holy Spirit would make sure the cardinals chose well, but we had no guarantee of that. As then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said on German television in 1997: “the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote.”

“Probably,” he said, “the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined. There are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit obviously would not have picked.”

When I was a new Christian, a Protestant who had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than I had of living on Mars, I took comfort in reading about Peter because he was such a screw-up. I could identify. But why anyone would put such a man in charge, that I couldn’t understand. Then I read G.K. Chesterton.

Jesus chose for the church’s cornerstone “neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward — in a word, a man. Peter. And upon this rock he has built his church, and the gates of hell have not prevailed against it.”

Here’s the twist. “All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.”

Pope Benedict pledged to his successor, whoever it would be, his “unconditional reverence and obedience.” He didn’t say, as I would have been tempted to do, “if the cardinals pick the right man.” The next pope might have been a very weak link. There are lessons there, when a man like Benedict submits himself so wholly to someone else’s decision without knowing what it would be.

One lesson is that God remains in control. Another is that, having left us in history, he works for our good in ways we don’t understand. He writes straight with crooked lines, as someone has said. Like Peter. Like Benedict. And like you and me.

Mills is executive editor of First Things. The quote from Pope Benedict is taken from John Allen’s “A Quick Course in ‘Conclave 101.”

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