Papal Supremacy: Quotations and Commentaries

By David W. T. Brattston

Under what authority does the Pope reign over the Roman Catholic Church? What are the ecclesiastical and theological underpinnings of the papacy? How did early Christians view the authority of the Roman bishop?

Dr. Brattston answers these questions by examining Biblical and early Christian sources from the first three centuries of the Chur

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Polycarp Publishing House
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9781947707290

David W. T. Brattston

Dr. David W. T. Brattston is a retired lawyer residing in Lunenburg, Canada, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He holds degrees from three universities, and his articles on early and contemporary Christianity have been published by a wide variety of denominations in every major English-speaking country.

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Contents

ForeWord

By Dr. Thomas P. Scheck

In his encyclical Ut unum sint (1995), Pope St. John Paul II invited leaders and theologians of churches not in union with Rome to engage him in patient and fraternal dialogue, in the hope of finding a way of exercising the primacy [of the bishop of Rome] which, while in no way renouncing what is essential to its mission, is nonetheless open to a new situation (UUS 95). Although David W. T. Brattston does not refer to the Pope’s invitation in his book, Papal Supremacy: Quotations and Commentaries, and granting that he is severely critical of that pope’s manner of governance of the Catholic Church, nevertheless Brattston has produced a piece of scholarly work that merits attention in the light of this invitation. The use of the term Supremacy (as opposed to Primacy) in his title, however, is not an auspicious one for fraternal ecumenical dialogue; nor is Brattston’s claim that the Roman Catholic hierarchy is probably not validly elected; nor is his concluding demand that the present pope should transfer all his powers, rights, and responsibilities to a council of elected elders. Yet the honesty and zeal of Brattston’s scholarly investigation commends itself to me as deeply and passionately Christian.

I first encountered David W. T. Brattston as the author of the first published review of my own first English translation, that of Origen’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (2001/2002). Dr. Brattston charitably commended my scholarly efforts, and it became clear that he and I shared a common passion for Origen of Alexandria. Since then in his other scholarly efforts Dr. Brattston has exhibited a zeal and hunger for detailed knowledge of the early centuries of the Church’s history. The present book represents the fruit of at least two decades of intensive systematic reading and notetaking on the Bible, the Church Fathers, the New Testament Apocrypha, and official Church documents. It is also obvious that Brattston is thoroughly familiar with various forms of Catholic and Protestant apologetics in the media, especially YouTube.

To me the strongest parts of the book are the historical and textual parts in which Brattston surveys the theme of Rome’s Supremacy in the first two and a half centuries of the Church. From what I can tell, the author has stockpiled and commented upon all the significant texts from the Christian authors and theologians of this period, choosing as his point of termination the Decian persecution of ca. 250 AD. In these chapters he provides good and original insights into both the New Testament and early Christian literature of the period. He recognizes that the early patristic sources do indeed claim that Peter himself was the rock on which Christ established his Church, but those same sources do not admit direct succession in power or the right to govern the international Church in both general and specific cases, to appoint bishops in other churches, to infallibly declare doctrine and morals, to possess immunity from judgment by other clerics, etc.

In my opinion Brattston is fully justified in challenging the simplistic and historically misinformed arguments of some of what passes for Roman Catholic apologetics in the United States. Especially in chapter 6, for instance, he discusses the popular Catholic apologetic use of Isaiah 22 as allegedly requisite background to interpreting Matthew 16, according to which Jesus appointed Peter to be his prime minister who holds the keys. Brattston rightly exposes the flaws of what amounts to Americanized Protestant fundamentalism dressing itself up as sound Catholic defenses of the faith. His knowledge of Canadian parliamentary democracy aids his ability to expose the weaknesses of some of these fragile arguments.

My biggest regret is that Dr. Brattston gave up in his initial enrollment in the RCIA, when he encountered a priest who refused to deny Catholic teaching on the papacy. I regret this because I think that the way Brattston reads the claims about papal primacy found in Pastor Aeternus (1870) as standing in irreconcilable contradiction to the interpretations of the earliest period of the Church is flawed. These very late 19th century papal claims and the early patristic interpretations are addressing entirely different historical situations. All Catholic historians today recognize (with pain and regret) that until very recently in the Catholic Church the methods and resources of critical history did not exist, and that theologians and those concerned with the protection of the faith tended to regard candid criticism as potential heresy. The best Catholic scholars today would admit with Brattston that the Apostolic See did not stand out clearly as the effective head and center of the Church’s administrative life until half the course of Church history was accomplished. And even after that date the Eastern church, though not acknowledging Roman supremacy, was regarded in the West as a part of the Church, schismatic but not formally heretical. Is the way forward to ask the See to renounce and reverse its own development? Or would it be better to interpret that development in more irenic terms? Yet in my view no one in possession of Brattston’s passionate love and admiration of the early Church can be anything but a dearly loved brother in Christ.

Dr. Thomas P. Scheck

Associate Professor of Theology

Ave Maria University

Introduction

This book resulted from a question that has been on my mind for decades. The importance of the issue is that while I would have agreed that the pope holds his present powers by human right, such as voluntary conferral by ecumenical councils over the centuries, I could see that the current Roman Catholic arrangements did not match those in the Bible or the earliest church writers. I thought that God might permit Christians to modify their governmental structures from time to time. This would allow the present structure of the papacy, as a product of the evolution of Christianity over the centuries, and capable of amendment or abolition. Not being part of the eternal plan of God, it was changeable as dictated by human wisdom in changed circumstances. However, the Roman Catholic Church insists that an applicant for membership must believe that the Supreme Pontiff has always possessed them, including all-inclusive papal supremacy over all clergy and laity, from apostolic times by divine right, and the papal institution remains unalterable from the first Christian century through all time.

There is much good in the Roman Catholic Church. There must be many benefits to becoming a member of it. She has always treated me well, and even provided summer jobs.

Most Christian denominations purporting to use only the Bible oppose formulating set rules as to the workings of church procedure, and in church government and administration. As a result, such rules are dispersed among a multitude of pamphlets, CDs, books, unrecorded precedents, or just not communicated to the followers in advance. In contrast, Rome’s 1983 Code of Canon Law has brought together, interfiled, and edited the scattered, partially outdated, diffuse, sometimes-unworkable, and at times self-contradictory morass of constitutions, decrees, rulings, canons, and other binding documents of church law and procedure, which had been unsystematic and unconsolidated for centuries. The procedural and administrative rules of the Latin Rite are now as easy to use and ascertainable as in secular jurisdictions now employing the Napoleonic Code, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty of the sects and much of the laws (British) Commonwealth of Nations. The Catechism of the Catholic Church also clarifies many aspects of one’s Christian duty in particular situations. It was finalized in 1997 and serves as the template for various national editions, while Lutherans and Calvinists make do with catechisms drafted in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In the Latin Church, you always know what to do and where you stand, unlike the frustration and arbitrariness of denominations that pride themselves on being free of laws and legalism.

For me, a much stronger attraction is Rome’s ability to motivate the lifelong self-sacrifice of priests, nuns, and friars who devote their entire adult lives in ministering to the poorest, least educated, least promising, and least attractive people of the earth. I had hoped to share in the company of such believers.

I began researching the New Testament and other Christian literature before AD 250 to see if Christians of this period regarded the bishop of Rome as somehow above them, or as their supervisor, or as the ultimate authority in the church. I examined especially Bible verses like Matthew 16:16-18, Luke 22:32 and John 21:15-18, in both English and Greek, to ascertain whether they really did regard the pope as having the powers and jurisdiction ascribed to him by the Vatican Councils and current papal documents, and that adherence to them is an obligation in conscience on Roman Catholics. I also studied such patristic sources as Irenaeus’s famous statement that in the AD 180s congregations throughout the world conformed themselves to Rome’s oversight and doctrinal pronouncements as the head of all churches. Given the high status of Simon Peter in the New Testament, my question focusses more on the Roman argument that giving him the keys necessarily entails a heredity office, or alternatives such as whether the keys have been shared by all Christians since the first century. The crucial issue is whether Christ constituted him to be the first of a line of successors in office for perpetuity.

I did not confine myself to reading in solitude about various beliefs and practices, but actually lived many of them, under the guidance of their clergy. Shortly after settling permanently in Nova Scotia and seeing it would be my home for the rest of my life, I attempted to undergo instruction (now called Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) with a priest whom I knew from work, but the sessions broke down within the first five minutes because he assumed that the eternal status of the pope was a well-known fact that nobody would dispute, and thought it too obvious for undertaking research.

Occupying several years, I read and made notes from all writings by or about Christians dating from before the mass apostasy of AD 249-251 that I was able to read in Latin or in English or French translation; to my knowledge, the only one lacking is Origen’s In Matthaeum commentariorum series. Then I extensively pursued material by Roman Catholics in print or on YouTube.

While the results were not as I might have hoped, I did discover a solution, which I hope will benefit other seekers.

Chapter One

Outline of This Book and Recommended Procedure for Study

The State of the Question

Several claims are made for the uniqueness and paramountcy of the pope or bishop of Rome, as the alleged successor of Simon Peter. The four main ones are:

First: Primacy, or first among equals among bishops and other Christians, a primacy of dignity, precedence, or honor. Most mainline Christian denominations concede this, but limit his uniqueness to this alone.

Second: Impeccability: this implies that the pope has never and cannot make a personal mistake, provide a bad example, or commit a sin. Nobody believes this, but some Protestants mistakenly believe impeccability is a corollary of infallibility.

Third: Infallibility, which is the gift of definitively deciding and giving judgment on matters of doctrine and morals. Such charism applies only in the limited circumstances set forth by the First and Second Vatican Councils. Infallibility is inextricably linked to papal supremacy because it posits that the pope possesses all the powers of the Apostle Peter and, although this is not generally admitted, can be infallible when he governs and judges the church. After all, a pope could infallibly pronounce that he is supreme in the government of the church.

and Fourth: Supremacy, which is the absolute and unchecked monopoly to manage and govern and judge in the church, in all aspects, to appoint and dismiss all personnel, both generally and in specific cases, even contrary to the wishes of bishops and congregations, immunity from judgment by anyone, and potential of infallibility when he judges faith and morals. The present book takes particular issue with this fourth claim, on which rests much that is distinctively Roman Catholic today.

Outline of the Search

After the present chapter outlining the source of my quest, the following book begins with quotations from Scriptures that are most used in support of assertions of papal supremacy and its basis in sacred history. Then the book quotes similar passages from Christian writers who flourished before the major ecclesiastical upheavals of AD 249-251. These are intended to demonstrate the attitudes as to what we would now call papal supremacy or papal primacy as they were actually held by the people closest to the beliefs and practices of the Christian church while the Bible interpretations and unwritten teachings of the Jesus and the apostles were still fresh in Christian memory and had not been corrupted, but rather represent a consensus of pristine Christendom. I hope the collection of quotations will serve as a ready reference to which readers can turn while reading this book to obtain the fullness of meaning.

The third chapter reproduces relevant excerpts from conciliar and papal documents that I hope accurately represent the current Roman Catholic teachings on papal supremacy. They frequently quote from material found in the preceding chapter as the basis of official Roman Catholic interpretation of them. Most of the book consists of evaluations and discussions of the biblical and patristic material at greater length and depth. Then one short chapter concerns papal infallibility. Then comes a disquisition on the importance of papal supremacy in talks promoting Christian unity.

Last of all is a narrative on why this study ends in the middle of the third century AD, rather than the time of the First Council of Nicaea or any other watershed in church history. I would have placed this chapter as the first or second, but readers without knowing the issues involved would find it dry and meaningless, and require them to pretty much memorize it, to make full sense of the other chapters.

Some readers may take exception to the number of repeated quotations in this book, especially where a mere citation might do. However, I repeated to save readers the discontinuity and break in the course of their reading which is often attendant upon searching elsewhere in the book for the content or wording of the quotation and thus interrupting the flow of reading. To the same end, I quote Scripture passages in full, instead of giving a mere reference, to save readers from interrupting their flow of thought by finding and consulting a Bible, then trying to find the sentence where they had left off reading.

Recommendations for Proceeding

The reader is cautioned to detect and disregard many writers’ tenuous leaps of logic, and speculations not squarely in the center of the evidence. There are generally fewer in Roman Catholic literature than in the publications of small sects that make wide-sweeping claims for themselves from disjoined Bible verses. However, some occur in RC literature, which constitute my main grievance with them. Much of the following book will point out Roman Catholic errors in evaluating the writings of New Testament and early patristic authors and the grand assumptions (presented as scholarly observations) far beyond what the texts can reasonably bear.

Running throughout modern-day writings, both for and against the status of a particular denomination as the one true church, is the erroneous assumption that the particular denomination is totally unique and that its doctrines and practices are not shared by any of the other thirty thousand churches of Christendom. In actual fact, there is much overlapping of doctrines, practices, and claims to definitive authority. None of the thirty thousand stands alone as possessing an exclusive, self-contained collection of truths unknown to the others. The tenets of one denomination shade over to others on a spectrum, while many truths (and errors) are identical between them. Just because Rome claims a line of bishops, or teaches against abortion, does not mean that other churches do not. Rome recognizes apostolic succession in some other denominations, and that most hold some truths. This indicates that, even using the logic of the Roman Catholic Church alone, many a denomination close in doctrine and practices to the Roman Catholic might similarly qualify as a true church.

A particularly noticeable example of these errors and defects in reasoning is the process some Roman Catholics use to argue for a doctrine of the pope’s supremacy in all aspects of church life. They take one truth from Scripture or tradition and add a lot of their own wishful eisegesis to it, in an attempt to interpret it. Or extend its meaning far beyond what the text