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The Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul

And Jesus came into the quarters of Cæsarea Philippi: and he asked his disciples, saying: Whom do men say that the Son of man is? But they said: Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. Jesus saith to them: But whom do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answering said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is 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 to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven. - Matthew 16:13-19

We Catholics interpret our Lord's words to mean that Simon Peter was the rock upon which He would build His Church. Protestants and Orthodox read those same words and come to completely different conclusions (I was actually rather charmed by Cal Thomas's rather innocent take on it, as if Jesus was unaware of how very much like pre-Ressurection Peter all of us can be.) The evidence for papal supremacy is not indisputable. That mythical creature called the neutral scholar could not look at the evidence and be as irresistibly drawn to the Catholic conclusion as he is to four being the solution to two plus two. The doctrine of papal supremacy is a reasonable conclusion derived from the historical evidence and Tradition; there is certainly nothing in early Church history to contradict it.

Critics of Catholicism often point to the clear evolution of the Church's understanding of the papal office and the powers of the bishop of Rome as discrediting the claim the papacy was established by Jesus Christ Himself when He gave the keys to Peter. Does this prove that the doctrine of papal supremacy is not part of the Apostolic deposit of faith? I don't think it's possible for that to be right. Consider, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity:

"Let us allow that the whole circle of doctrines, of which our Lord is the subject, was consistently and uniformly confessed by the Primitive Church, though not ratified formally in Council. But it surely is otherwise with the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. I do not see in what sense it can be said that there is a consensus of primitive divines in its favour, which will not avail also for certain doctrines of the Roman Church which will presently come into mention. … Now it should be clearly understood what it is which must be shown by those who would prove it. Of course the doctrine of our Lord’s divinity itself partly implies and partly recommends the doctrine of the Trinity; but implication and suggestion belong to another class of arguments which has not yet come into consideration. Moreover the statements of a particular father or doctor may certainly be of a most important character; but one divine is not equal to a Catena. We must have a whole doctrine stated by a whole Church. The Catholic Truth in question is made up of a number of separate propositions, each of which, if maintained to the exclusion of the rest, is a heresy. In order then to prove that all the Ante-nicene writers taught the dogma of the Holy Trinity, it is not enough to prove that each still has gone far enough to be only a heretic—not enough to prove that one has held that the Son is God, (for so did the Sabellian, so did the Macedonian), and another that the Father is not the Son, (for so did the Arian), and another that the Son is equal to the Father, (for so did the Tritheist), and another that there is but One God, (for so did the Unitarian),—not enough that many attached in some sense a Threefold Power to the idea of the Almighty, (for so did almost all the heresies that ever existed, and could not but do so, if they accepted the New Testament at all); but we must show that all these statements at once, and others too, are laid down by as many separate testimonies as may fairly be taken to constitute a “consensus of doctors.” It is true indeed that the subsequent profession of the doctrine in the Universal Church creates a presumption that it was held even before it was professed; and it is fair to interpret the early Fathers by the later. This is true, and admits of application to certain other doctrines besides that of the Blessed Trinity in Unity; but there is as little room for such antecedent probabilities as for the argument from suggestions and intimations in the precise and imperative Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, as it is commonly understood by English divines, and is by them used against the later Church and the see of Rome. What we have a right to ask, if we are bound to act upon Vincent’s rule in regard to the Trinitarian dogma, is a sufficient number of Ante-nicene statements, each distinctly anticipating the Athanasian Creed."

For that matter, how many of the Ante-Nicene Fathers explicitly believed in the full divinity and personhood of the Holy Spirit? The Ante-Nicene Father who most consistently taught the full Nicene-Constantinapolitan doctrine was the Montanist Tertullian! Appeals to the consensus of the Church Fathers are unsatisfactory because they assume there was a time when the Church infallibly, explicitly, and uncontroversially taught everything that it teaches today; but such a time has never existed. The Church as Church knows the totality of the deposit of the faith, but at any given point in history, not all of that knowledge is discursive. The belief that there can be no such thing as doctrinal development might look as if it follows from the Christian conviction of the totality and finality of God's revelation to us in Christ. But that itself is not a revealed truth, nor taught by the Catholic Church. People who reject doctrinal development have a lot more historical problems to deal with than we papal supremacists.

We Catholics do not rest our faith on the ever shifting attitudes and passions of historians and scholars though. Otherwise, we should all simply lay down our crosses until the Jesus Seminar is finally retired. The Catholic believes that the papacy is divinely instituted because the Catholic Church authoritatively and infallibly proclaims it to be such; and so the Catholic, legitimately and rationally, interprets the evidence of history in light of this revealed truth.