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Question: Some have asked why do Catholics obey the Pope. They say that the Pope is anti-Christ, he is not the representative of Christ. They claim that he bears the devil's number 666. Answer: Well, the idea that the Bishop of Rome is anti-Christ appeared for the first time in the twelfth century of our era. There was a lot of increase in wealth in Europe, and the Pope was becoming very very strong even politically, and he raised up antagonistic feelings against him. So this is the beginning of the Waldensians and other such people who identified the Pope with the anti-Christ. The anti-Christ actually appears only in the Epistles of St. John in the New Testament. You get a lot of figures that are like the anti-Christ, but the name itself actually occurs only in the first and second Epistle of St. John. Now, who can ever say that the Pope is really anti-Christ? It is pretty ridiculous. Also, the number 666 had been applied to almost everybody under the sun. It had been applied to Luther, it had been applied to Mary Tudor, to Hitler, to persons simply because they were disliked by other people. Now, as you know, number 666 comes from Chapter 13 of the Book of the Apocalypse. It is generally held today that it refers to the Emperor Nero. Nero committed suicide in the year 68 AD. At the end of the century, there was another emperor named Domitian and all sorts of legends were circulating about Nero, that he was going to come to life again, and people believe that he had come to life again in the person of Domitian. Domitian was also a very cruel man, so they regarded Domitian as the second Nero. So, probably the number 666 applied both to Nero and to Domitian. So, we should be very careful in using the Book of the Apocalypse or as it is also known, the Book of Revelation. It deals with persecution in the first century and with the persecutors of the first century, and not with future events. So there are only two statements really in the Book of the Apocalypse. The first is that the church is suffering dreadfully and the second, that God is going to intervene and remove the suffering. It is thus quite unjustified to apply portions of the Apocalypse to figures in the remote future, a future that is remote from the concern and from the period of the sacred writer himself. Now, about the Pope, what are we to say? Well, we know that St. Peter's position in the New Testament is terribly important. I shall just mention three text to you. We think of the Pope as being especially connected with St. Peter. It was Leo the Great in the fifth century who formulated more or less the basic position of the papacy. Leo said that every Pope is the successor not of his predecessor but of St. Peter. When Paul VI visited the World Council of Churches in Geneva in about 1970, he startled his audience when he introduced himself saying, "My name is Peter." So there is a link then between St. Peter and the papacy which we have to realize. Now, some texts about St. Peter are very important in the New Testament. The most famous one I suppose is that found in Matthew chapter 16, "Thou art Peter, on this rock I will build my church." The second one is found in John chapter 21, "Feed my sheep, feed my lambs and so on...". Then you have Luke chapter 22, in which Jesus says to Peter, "Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you and to sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you are converted, confirm your brethren." So these are three famous Petrine texts, and the important thing about these texts is that they were all written down in their present form in our Gospels long after the death of St. Peter. There is nothing in the Gospels that is not relevant to the church at the time that the Gospels were written. So the meaning of this is that even after his death, St. Peter was a very important figure in the church and here we find the Biblical roots of the papacy. The position of the papacy developed in the second century and it became crystallized with Leo the Great in the fifth century, but the roots of the papacy are in the New Testament. So we believe then that the Pope is not anti-Christ. We believe rather that he is the Vicar of Christ and Catholics, then, are very happy to obey the Pope because he is the successor of St. Peter and the head of the church. His main function, I think, is to keep the church together. Now, you know that in the years since the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant body has fragmented into tens of thousands of bodies. There are literally tens of thousands of Protestant bodies in our world today. Reacting against this atomization of the Protestant body, the Catholic church strove to keep itself together. And what kept the Catholic church together under God and the Holy Spirit was the papacy. Clearly we owe the papacy an awful lot. Now the ecumenical movement as we know it today began with the Protestants at the beginning of the century. The ecumenical movement aims at a visible unity of the churches. I believe that the Catholic church was a spur to the ecumenical movement. The Catholic church more or less gives an example of what church unity could be, and the Protestants beginning the ecumenical movement wanted to have some form of a church like that found in the Catholic church, a church that was visibly united. This unity is as I have said, due to the papacy which kept the Catholics together with God's grace over the last four centuries. Therefore we do not regard the papacy as an imposition in the Catholic church. We regard the papacy rather as a gift from God, a means of unity in the church, and so we are very happy to obey the Pope, and we show him great respect. (Source: "Questions People often Ask", a booklet dealing with some questions people often ask about our Catholic faith. The answers are provided by Fr. Sean Kelleher C.Ss.R., a well known biblical scholar and writer, based on the questions put by Fr. Paul Pang C.Ss.R.) | Back to Main Page | |