This is the first in a series that will explore the various figures who have sat in the Chair of Peter and served as the Head of the Roman Catholic Church, the Servant of the Servants of God, the Vicar of Christ on Earth, the Roman Pontiff. These fascinating figures have come to be seen as The Great Popes of History.
A series on Great Popes couldn’t begin elsewhere than on the founder of the Petrine ministry himself. Originally named Simon-bar-Jonah, Jesus chose to call this stubborn and often obstinate man, Cephas, (Aramaic for “Rock”), which has come to be anglicized as Peter. The trials and successes of this all-too-human saint resonate with the simultaneity of faith and doubt, submission and will to power, courage and fear which typify the life of discipleship in the believer of any generation.
When the uneducated and exhausted fisherman used his weathered hands to drag his nets to the shore after yet another unsuccessful night attempting to eke out a living by the Lake of Gennesaret, do you think he was pleased to hear the call of a local itinerate preacher? You can almost hear his exasperation when this stranger told him to get back in the boat, put out to deeper waters, and resubmerge his nets: “Sir, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. [insert annoyed sigh here.] Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
In this initial positive response to God’s call, Peter embodies the standard to which all Christians are held, in whatever state of life we find ourselves.
But Peter’s next sentence speaks even more powerfully to the reality of what the Lord wants from each of us. When he realizes that this unusual, if not downright crazy, character was correct in his angling advice, Peter responds with the sentiment repeated from the time of the prophets to our twenty first century, “Depart from me Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
How many times have each of us said in hearts “Surely, you can not want me with all my frailties and petty shortcomings, to do you any service? Wouldn’t it be perhaps better to let me go back to my ordinary life and to choose one those great spiritual giants found in Assisi or Calcutta, or for that manner anywhere else on the planet, to do whatever it is you’re looking to get done?” How human was Peter’s response to Christ’s call for metanoia, the turning and reorienting of our hearts!
Could Peter have imagined where his acceptance to have Christ make him “a fisher of men” would lead? He would follow this unique Person on his ministry of healing and liberation, to jail and eventual martyrdom, and then on to represent for untold millions the hearing but misinterpretation of the most essential elements of Christ’s message. Was this more than he bargained for when he told Christ to wash not only his feet but his whole being so that he could have his share with him? He asked to be crucified upside down because he was not willing to defile the cross by dying in the same manner of his Lord, and now a statue of him as the Rock upon which the church is built has its toes rubbed smooth by the hands of penitent pilgrims in Rome. He was and continues to be a man of contradictions.
In his book “My Life With The Saints,” Father James Martin speaks to this Peter of contradictions: “He is headstrong, doubtful, confused, and impulsive…[Yet,] Peter is among the greatest of the saints because of his humanity, his shortcomings, his doubts, and, moreover, his deeply felt understanding of all these things. Only someone like Peter, who understood his own sinfulness and the redeeming love of Christ, would be able to lead the infant church and lead others to Jesus. Only someone as weak as Peter could do what he did.”
It is precisely in his imperfections that we come to love and relate to this first pontiff (from the Latin for “bridge-builder” — as in linking God and humanity).
This year I will be blessed to be spending the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, June 29 visiting my college roommate, whose family and mine have become extensions of one another’s, with other friends and relatives on an island off mainland Spain. I find it a particular blessing to have the opportunity to witness such a devotion, which I’ve been told includes a procession of the statue of the saint to the shores of the Mediterranean and fireworks, in a sea-side town still somewhat dependent on fishing (along with a booming tourist industry from America and Europe!). I’m sure it will provide a memorable atmosphere and a perfect time to reflect on what God is calling me personally to do in the next stages of my life. I would invite all Christians to do the same whenever possible.
Peter, the first pope, continues to inspire men and women of our generation to accept in faith what the Lord plans and has in mind for each of us, the living presence of God’s love in the world. As Gerard Manley Hopkins says, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/ To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
Whether the rough and rope-scarred hands of a fisherman, the manicured medieval scholar’s paging through scores of ancient manuscripts, or the fingerpaint-stained ones of a mother patiently teaching her child to write for the first time, all of us are called to be “lovely in limbs” as Peter was, and is, for Christ.
Michael M. Canaris of Collingswood is a Ph.D. candidate in systematic theology at Fordham
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