This is about the feast of SS Peter and Paul which marks the end of the month of June. We keep the feast on the 29th, but many parishes keep it on the Sunday following the feast. Whenever we keep it, let's celebrate it with gratitude and a sense of the wonderful continuity of leadership which Christ himself inaugurated in the Church.
Would we have chosen either Peter or Paul for leadership roles in the newly-formed ecclesia of the First Century AD, I wonder. A poor fisherman from Bethsaida with an impetuous tongue which often landed him into trouble, a habit of telling Jesus what to do, and a lack of courage which led him to deny that he even knew his Lord at the moment of his greatest need... The first Pope? " Oh no, we will have to cast the net a bit wider!" we might have thought... He didn't tick any of the boxes! And Paul? A narrow-minded bigot who spent all his time and energy persecuting the members of the Way, as the First Christians were called. Undoubtedly well-read, intelligent and trained in oratory and disputation, but a leader in the Church? "Impossible!" would be our conclusion. "He had vowed to annihilate the lot of us, anyway!" So that ruled him out....
But they were both chosen by Christ, both forgiven and encouraged to use their gifts of leadership for the building up of the young Christian communities throughout Judea Asia Minor, the countries around the Jordan, on through the Greek enclaves of Antioch, Cyprus, Pisidia, Iconium, Samothrace, Caesaria, Philippi, and on to Rome, which they thought of then as the end of the world! What wonderful-sounding names! The reality was perhaps not so wonderful; it was difficult, full of dissension and opposition from the authorities, particularly the Jewish and Roman authorities, who bitterly opposed the Christians.
But the wonder of it all, was the courage, the witness and the sheer joy of those men, women and even children who braved persecution, floggings and sometimes death for what they believed in. "See how the Christians love one another!" was not said by one of their supporters, but by those who opposed them. They transformed the people about them, and won reluctant approval from the Romans at times.
That was up to superb leadership, which brings us back to Peter and Paul, and the choice of Christ which seemed to go against many of the norms that usually are asked for when looking at possible leaders today. Christ saw below the surface, he knew they would not fail him. Perhaps the two outstanding qualities they showed were first of all their love of Christ and secondly their faithfulness to what he taught. Paul's conversion was to say the least, unusual, but once convinced that Christ had indeed appeared to him on the road to Damascus, he never looked back, and we owe him so much. He gave organisation and a firm basis of theology and spirituality to the embryonic Church which we can see later on in the teachings of the early Fathers, and right up to the present day Paul's letters are as fresh and vibrant as they were when they were first penned by him in prison when he was in pain, in tribulation and facing death.
Peter's influence was incalculable. We have only to read the letters to the communities in Rome who were suffering persecution and martyrdom daily, to see the care he had for each person individually, the encouragement he gave them without in any way masking the truth that many of them were likely to end up as prey to the lions in the amphitheatres or die at the hands of the Romans after torture. The influence of young girls like Agnes, Agatha, Cecilia, Lucy and many others is still felt today. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church " has often been proved to be true.
I remember once in Rome, passing the great door of the Basilica of St. Peter's on the feast of SS Peter and Paul and seeing an ordinary fishing net stretched across that imposing entrance to the greatest Church in the world. A fisherman's net! Yes, that was where we started, with a small band of men, most of them local fishermen around the shores of Lake Gennesereth. A sharp reminder of our origins and a challenge to live up to the ideals set by Christ himself.
As Pope Francis reminds us "we all have a responsibility to bring God's love and salvation to the poor, the sad and the lonely." That was how we started, so let's do what he urges us to do in the wake of that great witness that has been handed down to us from our ancestors in the faith.
Have a lovely feast of SS Peter and Paul!
Photos by B.Lally (c)2013
