18 January 2011

Patristic Quote of the Day

And I say unto you, You are Peter, and upon this rock will I build my Church;  that is, on the faith of his confession.  -- St. John Chrysostom, Homily 54 on St. Matthew

1 comment:

Past Elder said...

Crap, I'm a day late, too busy earning a living.

Anyway, isn't this a hoot. In the traditional calendar, this isn't the feast of the confession of St Peter at all, and now that's true twice over.

Before Vatican II, it was known as St Peter's Chair at Rome. The emphasis was on the Petrine leadership of the church, Peter personally and conserved in his successors, not at all on his confession.

That it is known in the "evangelical Lutheran church" as the Confession of St Peter rightly re-establishes that the Rock is the Confession, not Peter and not an office.

But the twice over comes in this: Vatican II did away with the thing, and combined it with the feast of St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February.

A Ninth Century text of the Martyrologium Hieryoranimianum gives the two dates as existing celebrations. And so they stood in my youth as an altar boy.

But John the Destroyer, aka John XXIII, removed the Chair of Peter on 18 January altogether in 1960, and also demoted the 22 February Antioch one. These changes survive in the hunk of dung 1962 Roman Missal, which is now the "extraordinary form" of the Roman liturgy, as bogus a sham of the Roman liturgy up to the 1960s as the "ordinary form" the novus ordo is.

So Rome, having missed the point about the confession altogether, eliminates the feast in one of its calendars and combines it with a similar feast in which it similarly misses the point in its other calendar!

Now typically RCC. Good to celebrate the feast in its Biblically correct context on its historically correct date, even though the Antioch one is left out in our current "Feasts and Festivals".

But even better what Loehe did, St Peter's Chair at Rome on 18 January and St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February, unapologetic -- the text stands on its own -- and unrevised from what it had been for a millennium, without attempting a correction but within a two-calendar calendar like Rome.

Or even better, like THE Lutheran Hymnal, which lists neither.

But in any of these three ways, better than Rome pre or post Vatican II which never ever celebrated the Confession because they don't get it. If you need a man rather than a confession for a Rock, go with Dwayne Johnson!