PEOPLE POWWOW

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Disbelief in the Pope

REMEMBER when then Davao City mayor Rodrigo Duterte blamed Pope Francis for causing heavy traffic in Manila in January 2015?

“It took us five hours to get from the hotel to the airport,” the newspapers quoted Duterte recounting that experience. “I wanted to say, Pope, son of a whore, go home.”

Since he was running for the highest office, that “disrespect” might have cost Duterte some Catholic votes. It was a paradox that he bagged 16 million votes to become President of the Philippines.

How could a politician “blaspheme” the head of the Roman Catholic Church and get away with it? Had the Catholic voters momentarily junked the “sanctity” of the papacy?

If truth be told, the papacy is so enmeshed in a web of confusion that certain questions ache for better answers than those already taught. Let us focus on three of them.

First question: Did Christianity start with Peter as the first Pope?

The Bible describes Peter as the apostle who denied Jesus Christ thrice. After the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, nothing more is Bible-recorded of his “bonding” with ten other surviving apostles to establish the Church.

While the “Church History” by Eusebius depicted Peter and Paul as having moved to Rome to plant the seeds of Christianity, Jerome (another church historian) echoed the uncorroborated belief that “Peter became bishop of Rome for 25 years.”  Other historians described Peter’s death during the reign of pagan Emperor Nero as “martyrdom” but were inconclusive on whether he had been crucified upside down for being a Christian.

There was no evidence of a bishop presiding over Christian churches in Rome. The earliest Roman bishop presiding over the diocese of Rome was Pius I (142-155 AD).

Roman emperors wielded power over the early bishops.  Sylvester, the Bishop of Rome in 314-335 AD, drew authority from his benefactor, Emperor Constantine.

In fact, the earliest cleric addressed as “Pope” in Church history was Pope Gregory VII, who assumed his throne only in 1073.

Second question: Is the Pope the Vicar or representative of Christ?

No, since it was not Jesus Christ who organized Christianity; he was a Jew till death.

Disbelief in papacy prodded German Augustinian monk Martin Luther to launch the Protestant Reformation in 1517. He resented the Church’s selling of indulgences in exchange for forgiveness of sins and freedom from purgatory, of which the Bible says nothing. As a Bible student and teacher, he challenged his followers to stick to “what is written.”
Third question: Is the Pope infallible?

Infallibility or insusceptibility to error is another religious dogma attributed to the Pope and no one else. It makes no sense when tested on the anvil of syllogism: The Pope is a human being; all human beings are fallible; therefore the Pope is fallible.

History throbs with verifiable papal errors, the most infamous of which happened in the 16th century when the Church adopted the Aristotelian theory that the sun revolves around the earth. This was disputed by Italian physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who echoed the contrary theory of Copernicus: It’s the Earth that revolves around the sun.

Galileo’s evidence, an affront to “papal infallibility,” forced the Church to label him “heretic” and sentenced him to indefinite house arrest in 1632.

During his church trial, Galileo “reinforced” the Copernican theory with the Bible verse saying that God “moves the earth” (Job 9:6).

The papal error might have sprung from the writings of Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), who believed that the universe was “finite and spherical with a stationary earth at its center.”

Without disclaiming papal infallibility, Catholic theology eventually dropped the Aristotelian theory like a hot potato./PN
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