Questions on the "rocks"
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Catholic Church Apologetics Index Authority Ex Cathedra Magisterium One Authority First Pope Peter=Rock Gates of Hell
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Question: Why would Jesus found His Church on Peter when Jesus calls Peter Satan?
Satan? Answer: In Mt. 16:13-23, Jesus, first asks the Apostles, "who do men say that the Son of man is? Then, he asks Peter; "Who do say that I am?" Peter replies: v. 17 "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him: "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven." Then Jesus promises to established His Church on Peter. After, Jesus says in v. 21 "that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things.." Peter says: "God forbid Lord! This will never happen..." But Jesus said to Peter: "Get behind me, Satan!
You are a hindrance to me..."
Jesus is pointing out that Satan is talking through Peter now, trying to oppose the perfect will of God. By using the "eyes of men" Peter is blind to the reality of the situation. Jesus is not truly saying that Peter is Satan. In v. 17 Jesus said that the Father was speaking through Peter. That would mean that the Father was speaking through Satan! READ John 21:15-19 substituting Satan for Peter:
v. 15, "Jesus said to Satan , "Satan, ..., do you love me more than these?"
Q. Peter was never in Rome. In Paul's 2nd Letter to Timothy, written from Rome, Paul says "only Luke is with me" [2 Tim 4:2] evidently Peter was not in Rome. So, how could the bishops of Rome be his successors?
A. First, if Peter was never in Rome that point does not disprove the Papacy.
If the line from Timothy proves Peter was not in Rome, it also proves there were no Christians, other than Luke and Paul there. Yet we know from our study of Acts 28 that there was a community of believers in Rome. Were they all out of town that day?
Peter writes his First Letter and signs off in v. 13 as being in Babylon, which was a code word for Rome in the early Christian Church. p. 201, William A. Jurgens, in his three volume set, The Faith of the Early Fathers,includes thirty references to this question. i.e. Dionysius of Corinth, writing to Soter, the twelfth Pope, about 170 A.D., said: "You have also, by your very admonition, brought together the planting that was made by Peter and Paul at Rome."Speaking of their martyrdom.
Q. Some of the popes lived dissolute lives, this is proof that they were not heads of the Church Christ founded.
A. Either the office of the papacy exists or it doesn't, whether the people in the office are holy or not would not make the position null and void. If that were true, we could say that Judas was not an apostle because he handed Jesus over to the Jews, or Peter wasn't an apostle because he denied his Lord. The reasoning behind this question makes no sense.
The popes that did live sordid lives never bothered with the teaching of the Church.
Q. How can you say that the rock on which Jesus promised to build his Church was St. Peter, when St. Paul said that: "the rock was Christ"? [1 Cor. 10:4]
A. First, let me say that I am glad that you pointed out this verse.
1 Corinthians 10:1-4; " I want you to know, bretheren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them and the Rock was Christ."
Before I answer your question, I would like to point out that this reference to the Rock that followed the Israelites in the desert can not be found in the Jewish Bible, in other words in our Old Testament.
This reference to the Rock that followed the Israelites in the desert is part of Old Testament Oral Tradition. St. Paul was using Oral Tradition as well as Written Tradition when he preached, both were equally accepted by his audience. Which gives witness to the Catholic and Orthodox Church's teaching on both Written and Oral Tradition!
Now to your answer:(7) p. 211, "If the rock really did refer to Christ, as fundamentalists claim, why
did Matthew leave the passage as it was? Matthew must have realized that his readers would conclude the obvious from "Rock...rock". If he meant Christ to be understood as the rock, why did he not say so? Why did he construct his sentences so awkwardly that contortions would be required to elicit the fundamentalist interpretation? The reason of course, is that Matthew knew full well what the sentence seemed to say was just what it really was saying. It was Simon-weak, Christ denying Simon-who was chosen to be the first link in the chain of the papacy. The scandal, to fundamentalists, is that Christ would chose as his Vicar the weakest of the apostles, not the strongest. But God seems to enjoy working through the lowly in order to confound the mighty, ..."
Q. Jesus spoke in Greek not in Aramaic, we know that this was the language of Jesus' time. Because they wrote the New Testament in Greek, so the common man could read it. So your explanation of petros & petra doesn't hold water.
A. (6) p. 200 "Actually, if the Evangelist had intended to contrast Peter the "stone" with Jesus the "Rock", the obvious word to use for Simon Peter would have been lithos, the more common Greek word for stone of small rock. This would have eliminated any possible confusion between Peter and Jesus. On the other hand, the deliberate use of petros and petra points to an attempt to translate an Aramaic pun into Greek, which of course is precisely what Catholics contend. Interestingly, Jesus himself is called lithos (e.g. Mt. 21:42, 44) four times more often than he is called petra (12 times to 3, a fact which doesn't dissuade Peter from characterizing all believers as "stones" [lithoi]in 1 Peter 2:5.)
Q. What about Pope Honorius?
A. (3) p. 150 There is no doubt that Pope Honorius I (625-638) was personally orthodox. However, through his prohibition against speaking of two modes of operation (speaking on the divine & human nature of Jesus) he unwittingly favored the Monthelite error. The Sixth General Council wrongly condemned him as a heretic. Pope Leo II (682-683) confirmed his anathematisation but not for the reason given by the Council. He did not reproach him with heresy, but with negligence in the suppression of the error.
Infallibility
Q. (CC)Some bishops, including popes, have erred in 'small matters", such as whether the earth revolves around the sun. If we cannot trust them in such matters, how can we ever believe anything they say about "big matters" like how to attain salvation or Jesus' Real Presence in the Eucharist?
A. The reason we trust the bishops when they teach collectively (not individually) is that we have a promise from our Lord that he would not leave us orphans (John 14:18), that we would know the truth (John 8:32), that he would be with us always (Mt. 28:20), and that he would guide us into all truth (JN. 16:13). We believe that Jesus keeps his promises, and since it is his task (and therefore the Church's task) to lead us to salvation, the Magisterium is kept free from error when the bishops dogmatically define a matter of faith or morals, such as at an ecumenical council.
Once it has been established that Scripture does not teach (as it does not) which body moves around the other, it is a matter for science - not for the Church - to establish whether the earth moves around the sun or vice versa. It is a matter that falls outside the Church's infallibility, which applies only to matters of faith and morals, not to matters of physical science. It is not that this is a "small matter"; it simply is outside the Church's area of infallibility. Christ did not will that the pope and the bishops be infallible about things simply to answer the questions of the curious, but to make them effective shepherds in leading souls to God; hence the area in which they are protected by the Holy Spirit are circumscribed. Topics such as how to be saved and the Real Presence have everything to do with salvation and our relation to God, so they fall within the Church's area of infallibility.
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