22 February 2020
Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle
The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola both presume and promote a reverence for Church authority. For example, when giving advice on how to make a choice of a way of life, it says that “it is necessary that all matters of which we wish to make a choice be either indifferent or good in themselves, and such that they are lawful within our Holy Mother, the hierarchical Church, and not bad or opposed to her” (SpEx 170). Elsewhere, the Exercises tell us not only that “we must praise the regulations of the Church” (SpEx 359) but even that “we must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy Mother, the hierarchical Church” (SpEx 353). Saint Ignatius is proposing a remarkable degree of love and admiration for the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. This is extraordinary, given that St. Ignatius had, himself, been jailed by the Spanish Inquisition.
Today the Catholic Church observes the feast of the chair of St. Peter, the apostle. The institutional church on this Earth has a leader in heaven, namely, Jesus Christ. One of Christ’s disciples on Earth serves him as leader of his Church on Earth, and that is the pope, the man who sits in the chair of St. Peter, the apostle. The pope is not above God, or above sacred scripture or above tradition. He is only a servant of God, and he serves scripture and tradition by leading the Church in preserving them and promoting them. The Spiritual Exercises are not an airy recipe for floating up into the clouds of personal preferences, but rather a way of joining heaven to Earth, and at the center of this, investing ourselves more and more in one particular institution, governed by one particular man.