Popes on the Papacy

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

The Popes Speak About the Papacy

The Continuity of the Papacy

"When, as the Gospel has just told us, the Lord asked his disciples whom they believed him to be (since many held various views on the question) and blessed Peter had answered saying, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, the Lord said, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee, but my Father in heaven. And I say to thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven. But the dispensation of truth perdures, and blessed Peter, persevering in the strength of the rock which he has received, has not relinquished the position he assumed at the helm of the Church. For daily throughout the Church Peter says, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God, and every tongue that confesses the Lord is imbued with the teaching of that voice. This faith vanquishes the devil and breaks the bonds of his prisoners. This faith plants in heaven those who have been uprooted from the earth, and the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. For it is armed in such solid strength that heretical depravity can never corrupt it nor pagan belief overcome it. And so, dearly beloved, we celebrate today's festival with reasonable obedience, that in my humble person he may be acknowledged and honored who continues to care for all the shepherds as well as sheep entrusted to him, and who loses none of his dignity even in an unworthy successor."

Pope St Leo I Sermon 2 on the anniversary of his elevation.

The Will of Christ and the Will of Man

The Pope's Lot is to be obedient to Christ's Will - And if he is not....le deluge !

"The Lord Jesus, the Founder of Holy Church, directs all that happens with wisdom power and indescribable goodness according to his own pleasure and for the greater good of his elect who form his Church, his beloved mystical Bride.

No matter how much events seem to be working against the good of the Church I must preserve a perfect tranquility, which however will not dispense me from grieving and from imploring that ‘thy will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven’.

I must beware of the audacity of those who, with unseeing minds led astray by secret pride, presume to do good without having been called to do so by God speaking through his Church, as if the divine Redeemer had any need of their worthless cooperation, or indeed of any man’s.

What is important is to cooperate with God for the salvation of souls, and of the whole world. This is our true mission, which reaches its highest expression in the Pope.

'Iin all things look to the end.' I am not thinking here of death but of the purpose and divine vocation to which the Pope has been summoned by a mysterious decree of Providence.

This vocation is shown in a three-fold splendour: the personal sanctity of the Pope which gives its own glory to his life; the love which the holy universal Church bears to him, in the measure of that heavenly grace which alone can inspire him and assure his glory; finally, his obedience to the will of Jesus Christ, who alone rules through the Pope and governs the Church according to his own pleasure, for the sake of that glory which is supreme on earth as in the eternal heavens.

The humble Pope’s most sacred duty is to purify all his own intentions in this light of glory, and to live according to the teaching and grace of Christ so as to deserve the greatest honour of all, the imitation, as his Vicar, of the perfection of Christ; of Christ crucified and, at the price of his blood, Redeemer of the world, of Christ the Rabbi, the Master, the only true Teacher of all ages and peoples.

Journal of A Soul - Blessed John XXIII,
New York, 1964 pp 310 & 311

Human Frailty and the Papacy

"We have seen that the New Testament as a whole strikingly demonstrates the primacy of Peter; we have seen that the formative development of tradition and of the Church supposed the continuation of Peter's authority in Rome as an intrinsic condition. The Roman primacy is not an invention of the popes, but is an essential element of ecclesial unity that goes back to the Lord and was developed faithfully in the nascent Church.

But the New Testament shows us more than the formal aspect of a structure; it also reveals to us the inward nature of this structure. It does not merely furnish proof texts, it is a permanent criterion and task. It depicts the tension between skandalon and rock; in the very disproportion between man's capacity and God's sovereign disposition, it reveals God to be the one who truly acts and is present. If in the course of history the attribution of such authority to men could repeatedly engender the not entirely unfounded suspicion of human arrogation of power, not only the promise of the New Testament but also the trajectory of that history itself prove the opposite. The men in question are so glaringly, so blatantly unequal to this function that the very empowerment of a man to be the rock make evident how little it is they who sustain the Church but God alone who does so, who does so more in spite of men than through them. The mystery of the Cross is perhaps nowhere so palpably present as in the primacy as a reality of Church history. That its center is forgiveness is both intrinsic condition and the sign of the distinctive character of God's power. Every single biblical logion about the primacy thus remains from generation to generation a signpost and a norm, to which we must ceaselessly resubmit ourselves. When the Church adheres to these words in faith, she is not being triumphalistic but humbly recognizing in wonder and thanksgiving the victory of God over and through human weakness. Whoever deprives these words of their force for fear of triumphalism or human usurpation of authority does not proclaim that God is greater but diminishes him, since God demonstrates the power of his love, and thus remains faithful to the law of the history of salvation, precisely in the paradox of human impotence. For with the same realism with which we declare today the sins of the popes and their disproportion ro the magnitude of their commission, we must also acknowledge that Peter has repeatedly stood as the rock against ideologies, against the dissolution of the word into the plausibilities of a given time, against subjection to the powers of this world.

When we see this in the facts of history, we are not celebrating men but praising the Lord, who does not abandon the Church and who desired to manifest that he is the rock through Peter, the little stumbling stone: "flesh and blood" do not save, but the Lord saves those who are of flesh and blood. To deny this truth is not a plus of faith, not a plus of humility, but is to shrink from the humility that recognizes God as he is. Therefore the Petrine promise and its historical embodiment in Rome remain at the deepest level an ever-renewed motive for joy: the powers of hell will not prevail against it..."

Called to Communion - Understanding the Church Today,
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius, 1996 pp 72- 74