Understanding the Chair of St. Peter

               Yesterday, I was cleaning out a drawer filled with old Magnificat books and found the following article from February 2001, (pg 318) that I wanted to share.

               Treat the Catholic Church as divine only and you will stumble over her scandals, her failures and her shortcomings.  Treat her as human only and you will be silenced by her miracles, her sanctity and her eternal resurrections.

               Of course the Catholic Church is human.  She consists of fallible men, and her humanity is not even safeguarded as was that of Christ against the incursions of sin.  Always, therefore, there have been scandals, and always will be.  Popes may betray their trust in all human matters; priests their flocks; laymen their faith.  No man is secure.  And, again, since she is human it is perfectly true that she has profited by human circumstances for the increase of her power. Undoubtedly it was the existence of the Roman Empire, with it is road, its rapid means of transit and its organization that made possible the swift propagation of the Gospel in the first centuries.  Undoubtedly it was the empty throne of Caesar and the prestige of Rome that developed the world’s acceptance of the authority of Peter’s Chair.  Undoubtedly it was the divisions of Europe that cemented the Church’s unity and led men to look at a Supreme Authority that might compose their differences. There is scarcely an opening in human affairs into which she has not plunged; hardly an opportunity she has missed.  Human Affairs, human sins, and weaknesses as well as human virtues, have all contributed to her power.  So grows a tree even in uncongenial soil.  The rocks that impede the roots later became their support; the rich soil waiting for an occupant has been drawn up into the life of the leaves; the very developed too its power of resistance.  Yet these things do not make the tree.

               For her humanity, though it is the body in which her divinity dwells, does not create that divinity.  Certainly human circumstances have developed her, yet what but divine Providence ordered and developed those human circumstances?  What but that same power, which indwells in the Church, dwelt without her too and caused her to take root at that time and in that place which most favored her growth?

Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson – was a British convert to Catholicism who is best known for his novels about the faith.