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Hello and Welcome to the Catholic Hack! With Joe McClane. I want to say thank you to all those who sent me feedback with prayers and condolences for my Grandma who passed recently. I truly appreciate the positive feedback.
In this weeks podcast I wanted to get back to the discussion on St. Peter and the Authority of the Church. Although, the likely progression should lead to infallibility, I didn’t want to have a full blown discussion on that just yet. I wanted to address a certain passage that I hear brought up all the time when it comes to talking about St. Peter as being our Pope. I wanted to dispel the Galatians 2 – Apostolic Butt Chewing myth! Did St. Paul put St. Peter in his place? Does this mean he can not be infallible? Does this mean he can not be the Prime Minister of Christ’s Church?
I think you will see that this passage does not mean, at all, that St. Peter is anything less that the earthly Sheppard of Christ’s Church (John 21). I even go so far as to say (my opinion of course) that it was St. Paul who learned something from this incident that he would go on to teach to the Christians in Rome only a few years later.
SHOW NOTE: When I read the verse, during the podcast, from Galatians Chapter 2:12, I kept saying “un-circumcised” however the verse actually says “circumcised” …. I can only imagine that my brain just didn’t want to function properly … but then again I’m just a hack….
Anyway… the bottom line here is that this verse does not do what critics would like it to do… to St. Peter anyway… and instead teaches us a valuable lesson. Our Freedom can become a stumbling block that can/will turn others away from Christ. We are called to draw people to Christ so we can not, according to Romans 14:15, allow our freedoms to get in the way of our mission to “Love”. St. Peter had to find a way to “Love” both the Gentile converts and the Jewish Christians who had not yet overcome the hurtle of the Jewish food (as well as other) laws. We are called to Charity and Love… read 1Cor. 13 and then apply that to this situation in Gal. 2. Should St. Peter just pull out the sledge hammer and pound the “Judizers”? That would have turned them away from Christ not towards him. St. Peter may not have done a good job about riding the line but… the bottom line is he, as the Pope, can not love one and not the other. He was stuck between a “Rock” and a hard place.
God Bless
Joe M
The Catholic Hack!
