Papal primacy
Papal primacy, also known as the primacy of the bishop of Rome, is an ecclesiological doctrine in the Catholic Church concerning the respect and authority that is due to the pope from other bishops and their episcopal sees. While the doctrine is accepted at a fundamental level by both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, the two disagree on the nature of primacy.
English academic and Catholic priest Aidan Nichols wrote that "at root, only one issue of substance divides the Eastern Orthodox and the Catholic Churches, and that is the issue of the primacy." French Eastern Orthodox researcher Jean-Claude Larchet wrote that, together with the Filioque controversy, differences in interpretation of this doctrine have been and remain the primary causes of schism between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. In the Eastern Orthodox churches, some understand the primacy of the bishop of Rome to be merely one of greater honour, regarding him as primus inter pares, without effective power over other churches. Alexander Schmemann, a prominent 20th century Eastern Orthodox Christian theologian, envisioned a primacy that sums up rather than rules over: "Primacy is power, but as power it is not different from the power of a bishop in each church. It is not a higher power but indeed the same power, only expressed, manifested, and realized by one."
The Catholic Church attributes to the primacy of the pope "full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered," a power that it attributes also to the entire body of the bishops united with the pope. The power that it attributes to the pope's primatial authority has limitations that are official, legal, dogmatic, and practical.
In the Ravenna Document, issued in 2007, representatives of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church jointly stated that both accept the bishop of Rome's primacy at the universal level, but that differences of understanding exist about how the primacy is to be exercised and about its scriptural and theological foundations.
Dogma within Latin and Eastern Catholic Churches
The Catholic dogma of the primacy of the bishop of Rome is codified in both codes of canon law of the Catholic Church – the Latin Church's 1983 Code of Canon Law and the Eastern Catholic Churches' 1990 Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. The Second Vatican Council's 1964 dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium declared that the "pope's power of primacy" is by "virtue of his office, that is as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church", and is "full, supreme and universal power over the Church" which he "is always free to exercise". The primacy of the bishop of Rome, according to John Hardon in Catholic Dictionary, is "primacy of jurisdiction, which means the possession of full and supreme teaching, legislative, and sacerdotal powers in the Catholic Church"; it is authority "not only in faith and morals but Church discipline and in the government of the Church."In canon 331, the "bishop of the Roman Church" is both the "vicar of Christ" and "pastor of the universal Church on earth". Knut Walf, in New commentary on the Code of Canon Law, notes that this description, "bishop of the Roman Church", is only found in this canon, and the term Roman pontiff is generally used in. Ernest Caparros et al's Code of Canon Law Annotated comments that this canon pertains to all individuals and groups of faithful within the Latin Church, of all rites and hierarchical ranks, "not only in matters of faith and morals but also in all that concerns the discipline and government of the Church throughout the whole world". Heinrich Denzinger, Peter Hünermann, et al. Enchiridion symbolorum states that Christ did not form the Church as several distinct communities, but unified through full communion with the bishop of Rome and profession of the same faith with the bishop of Rome.
The bishop of Rome is a subject of supreme authority over the sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches. In canon 45, the bishop of Rome has "by virtue of his office" both "power over the entire Church" and "primacy of ordinary power over all the eparchies and groupings of them" within each of the Eastern Catholic Churches. Through the office "of the supreme pastor of the Church," he is in communion with the other bishops and with the entire Church, and has the right to determines whether to exercise this authority either personally or collegially. This "primacy over the entire Church" includes primacy over Eastern Catholic patriarchs and eparchial bishops, over governance of institutes of consecrated life, and over judicial affairs.
Primacy of the bishop of Rome was also codified in the 1917 Code of Canon Law canons 218–221.
Development of the doctrine
The Catholic Church bases its doctrine of papal primacy on the primacy among the apostles that Jesus gave to Peter in : and in : "Feed my lambs Feed my sheep."While acknowledging that "the New Testament contains no explicit record of a transmission of Peter's leadership; nor is the transmission of apostolic authority in general very clear," it considers that its doctrine has a developmental history and that its teaching about matters such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and the union of his two natures in a single person developed as the result of drawing out from the original revealed truth consequences that were not obvious at first: "Thanks to the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the understanding of both the realities and the words of the heritage of faith is able to grow in the life of the Church 'through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts'; it is in particular 'theological research deepens knowledge of revealed truth.'"
Accordingly, it would be a mistake to expect to find the modern fully developed doctrine of papal primacy in the first centuries, thereby failing to recognize the Church's historical reality. The figure of the pope as leader of the worldwide church developed over time, as the figure of the bishop as leader of the local church seems to have appeared later than in the time of the apostles.
That the Christian scriptures, which contain no cut-and-dried answers to questions such as whether or not there is forgiveness for post-baptismal sins, and whether or not infants should be baptized, gradually become clearer in the light of events, is a view expressed, when considering the doctrine of papal primacy, by Cardinal John Henry Newman, who summed up his thought by saying:
Modern Eastern Orthodox writers such as Nikolay Afanásiev and Alexander Schmemann have written that the phrase "presiding in agape", used of the Church of Rome in the letter that Ignatius of Antioch addressed to it in the early 2nd century, contains a definition of that Church's universal primacy; but the Catholic writer Klaus Schatz warns that it would be wrong to read this letter and the even earlier First Epistle of Clement, in which the Church of Rome intervenes in matters of the Church of Corinth, admonishing it in authoritative tones, even speaking in the name of God, as statements of the developed Catholic teaching on papal primacy. It was only later that the expression of Ignatius of Antioch could be interpreted as meaning, as agreed by representatives of both the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, that "Rome, as the Church that 'presides in love' according to the phrase of St Ignatius of Antioch ], and that the bishop of Rome was therefore the protos among the patriarchs".
The same agreement stated:
Basis of claims to primacy
Peter and Paul
The evolution of earlier tradition established both Peter and Paul as the forefathers of the bishops of Rome, from whom they received their position as chief shepherd and supreme authority on doctrine. To establish her primacy among the churches of the Western half of the empire, the bishops of Rome relied on a letter written in 416 by Innocent I to the Bishop of Gubbio, to show how subordination to Rome had been established. Since Peter was the only apostle to have worked in the West, thus the only persons to have established churches in Italy, Spain, Gaul, Sicily, Africa, and the Western islands were bishops appointed by Peter or his successors. This being the case then, all congregations had to abide by the regulations set in Rome.Primacy of Peter the apostle
Because of its association with the supposed position of Peter among the apostles, the function that, within the Catholic Church, is exercised by the Bishop of Rome among the bishops as a whole is referred to as the Petrine function, and is generally believed to be of divine institution, in the sense that the historical and sociological factors that influenced its development are seen as guided by the Holy Spirit. Not all Catholic theologians see a special providential intervention as responsible for the result, but most see the papacy, regardless of its origin, as now essential to the Church's structure.The presence of Peter in Rome, not explicitly affirmed in, but consistent with, the New Testament, is explicitly affirmed by Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus of Lyon and other early Christian writers – and no other place has ever claimed to be the location of his death. The same witnesses imply that Peter was the virtual founder of the Church of Rome, though not its founder in the sense of initiating a Christian community there. They also speak of Peter as the one who initiated its episcopal succession, but speak of Linus as the first bishop of Rome after Peter, although some hold today that the Christians in Rome did not act as a single united community under a single leader until the 2nd century.