In my previous Theological Soapbox article I said that the role of leaders in the Roman Catholic Church is the same as the role of leaders in any human society. Leaders and those who follow their directions freely co-operate in order to attain common goals. In so far as they lead, leaders do not coerce. According to my definition and understanding, dictators, in those instances when they impose their will through coercion, do not act as leaders. The chief qualification of  leaders is that, in the sphere of activity in which they exercise leadership, they adequately grasp their society’s goals, and adequately understand what has to be done in order to achieve those goals.

I distinguish leaders from prophets and visionaries. Through prophets God speaks directly to people for various purposes. Visionaries proclaim goals for a society that go beyond the goals that the society has. If the society accepts the new goals, then leaders will co-ordinate activities within the society to attain those goals. Some, but not all, prophets and visionaries have the practical qualifications to be leaders. Moses, for example, was a prophet, visionary and leader.

Having seen that leadership in the Church functions in the same way as leadership in other societies, it is time to look at leadership in the Church from a theological viewpoint. Before I  address the topic of leadership in worshipping communities, which is my main concern, I would like to clear away the notion, common among Catholics, that the hierarchical structure of leadership in the Roman Catholic Church has been established by God and cannot be changed. This notion comes from theologians who hold that Jesus appointed St. Peter to be the supreme leader of the Church. These theologians consider St. Peter to have been the Church’s leader par excellence, and they hold that the Petrine ministry, regarded as a ministry of leadership, is the patrimony of every pope. But if we look at the evidence of the New Testament, such claims cannot stand.

First, let’s look at the claim that Jesus appointed Peter as leader over the community of disciples. A key text is from Mt 16:17-19. I recommend that readers take a look at Michael Zarb’s commentary on this passage in the August 1999 issue of The Journal. As he cautions, this passage presents a viewpoint on Peter that has elements unique to the Gospel of Matthew, and may not represent the way Peter was viewed in the Church as whole. Here is the passage as translated in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:  

 “ ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.’ ”

Here is the passage again, paraphrased along lines suggested by Michael Zarb:

“ ‘Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, indeed you are a building stone, since the Father revealed this to you; and in addition, on this bedrock [the revelation of the Father], I will build my community. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.’ ”

For present purposes I will follow the NRSV translation, but it will be evident to readers that the interpretation of this passage put forward by Michael Zarb in his article, no less than my interpretation, counters those who would use Matthew to establish papal supremacy. 

Even if Jesus called Peter “the rock” in the sense of bedrock, that in itself did not anoint him as leader of the Church. The passage says that Peter will serve as a source of rocklike stability upon which the Church may be built, but does not specify how.

The meaning of “the keys of the kingdom of heaven” is explained by what follows: “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  Jesus does not declare this role of binding and loosing to be Peter’s exclusively. Jesus uses the very same words in Mt 18:18 to declare that the Church as a whole exercises this role. 

A passage in the Gospel of John, parallel to Mt 16:17-19, has the risen Jesus declare to all the disciples gathered in a house, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained” (John 20:22-23). 

The weight of scriptural evidence is that Jesus declared the role of binding and loosing to belong to the Church as a whole, not to Peter personally. When Peter bound and loosed, he did so as one representing the Church. Jesus’ statement (Mt 16:19), “Whatever you bind...,” although addressed to Peter, applies to anyone representing the Church.

Jesus did single Peter out. But Jesus did so, not to give him a role different from the other disciples, but to call him to be stronger than the others, and to assure him that he would not fail (Luke 22:31, John 21:15-19). From that time forward the other disciples would, in the face of difficulties and persecution, draw strength and inspiration from Peter’s rock solid commitment to Christ. 

When we examine the New Testament further we find that Peter did not regard himself as the Church’s leader. In Mt 28:19-20 and Acts 1:8, Jesus assigns to the disciples the task of bearing witness about him to the peoples of the earth, “teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” In the speeches made by Peter in the early chapters of Acts, he makes it clear that that he and the others disciples “cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20). In Acts 6:1-6 the Twelve find that administration of the daily distribution of food to widows was taking them away from their primary responsibility: “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.” 

It seems clear that Peter and the rest of the Twelve regarded themselves as commissioned by Jesus chiefly to bear witness to what Jesus said and did, in particular to bear witness to Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. They were, first of all, witnesses of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and preachers of the Way of Jesus (see Acts 9:2 for an example of the distinctive Christian use of the “the Way”). They avoided leadership roles in order to concentrate on preaching the faith. They also tried to follow the teaching of Jesus not to act like rulers who lord it over others.  “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:43).

So we find in Acts 15 at the so-called “Council of Jerusalem,” that it is James, the kinsman of Jesus (not to be identified with either of the two James belonging to the Twelve) who chairs the meeting, and gives directions to the Church based on the council’s deliberations. Peter speaks in the council as a preacher of the faith, not as the leader. His view prevails, but he does not issue commands. That is left to James. 

The role of the Twelve as witnesses to Jesus was a more exalted role than that of leader of the Church. But remembering Jesus’ words that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, Peter chose to follow the directions of James in matters of community discipline, as we see in Galatians 2:11-14. 
That Peter was one of the most influential people in the early Church - perhaps the most influential - cannot be denied. It may well be that the leadership of the Church was his for the asking. But that was not the mission Jesus gave him. Hard as it is for Catholics of today to imagine, there are roles in the Church more important than that of pope.

With the death of Peter, his mission of bearing witness with immovable fidelity to what he had seen and heard -  what made him “the rock” - came to an end. Is there any sense in which he can be said to have successors?

I believe that anyone who bears witness to what Jesus Christ has done in their life carries on the mission of witnessing that Peter had. Unlike Peter we do not walk in the physical presence of Jesus, but we do live in the spiritual presence of Jesus. The God who revealed who Jesus was to Peter (Mt 16:17) reveals Jesus to people of faith today. The Petrine ministry of witnessing to Jesus Christ is carried on today by anyone who proclaims publicly what they have personally experienced Jesus to be doing in them and in the world around them. The greater the faith and love and constancy of the preacher, the more rocklike and Petrine their ministry becomes.

The Petrine ministry is more than just preaching the doctrines of the Church. It is bearing witness to Jesus Christ as one has personally encountered and come to know him through a life of discipleship. One does not do Petrine ministry simply by holding an office, even the office of pope, and one does not do Petrine ministry simply by repeating what others have said about Jesus. The one who does Petrine ministry is the one who can truthfully speak the words of the First Letter of John, “We declare to you ... what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).

There are many who do Petrine ministry in the Church. Some are ordained or have vows of religion. Some preach professionally. But most of those who do Petrine ministry are lay people who, although they would never think of themselves as “preachers,” live knowingly in the company of Jesus. They have heard Jesus command them, “Feed my sheep.” And they obey. 

Apart from teaching his disciples that, among them, the leader must be last of all and the servant of all, Jesus said nothing about how leadership should be structured in the Church. The Church has a free hand in setting up its leadership structures. In the first century, up to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the Church adopted a leadership structure parallel to that among the Jews. The church in each city had a council of elders (as did the synagogue). Missionaries like St. Paul sometimes  supervised, or appointed supervisors, over the churches and councils of elders they established. By the end of the first century it was common for one member of the council of elders of a church to be recognized as the chief leader of the church (the bishop). In the beginning the council of elders of the Jerusalem church functioned as a kind of Sanhedrin, with power to “bind and loose” for the whole Church. After the dispersal of the Jewish population of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. the Jerusalem council of elders could no longer exercise oversight over the whole Church, a role which the elders and bishop of the church of Rome took more and more to itself over the next three centuries. With the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity and the subsequent fall of the Empire in the west, the Church in the west adopted an imperial system of leadership in which the pope (the Bishop of Rome) took the place of the emperor and the bishops took the place of the provincial governors. In the east the Byzantine emperor continued to dominate Church government and the Patriarch of Constantinople served as a counterweight to the the pope in Rome. With the great schism between east and west, the ascendancy of the pope to the status of absolute monarch of the western Church continued. The Protestant reformers, reacting against the centralization of power in the papacy, assumed leadership in part of the Church, and the part of the Church which followed the pope continued to centralize leadership in the papal office, and, with Vatican Council I and the doctrine of papal infallibility, and the subsequent code of canon law, brought the pope to the pinnacle of ecclesiastical power.

None of this was ordained by Jesus. The Church created the papacy and the Church can abolish it. All the ways in which leadership is exercised in the various Christian churches are consistent with the teaching of Jesus. Reason demands that leadership in the Church be structured in the way that best allows the Church to carry out its mission to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, and reason tells us that structures of leadership may have to be changed to accommodate changing conditions in the world. How leadership should be structured, is a matter to be decided by consensus of all the faithful, for there is no greater instrument for discerning the will of God than the entire body of those among whom the various gifts of the Holy Spirit have been distributed.

Before looking at the role of leaders in the parish or small faith community setting, it has been necessary to critique the theology of papal supremicism that sometimes clouds the thinking of Roman Catholics. With the Petrine ministry properly defined as witnessing to Jesus Christ, not leadership, it becomes possible to see that the true centre of leadership in the Church is found among worshipping communities, such as parishes and Basic Church Communities, where faith is nurtured and sustained.

In my next article I will return to the questions with which I concluded the first part of this series: Can we continue to look to priests for leadership in our worshipping communities? Will the role or characteristics of the priest have to change in order for the priest to be an effective leader? Should leadership in parishes shift from the priest to elected lay leaders? What is the relationship between leading and providing sacraments?