Was St. Peter in Rome?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIX, Issue 20, 18 May 1922, Page 11

Was St. Peter in Rome?

(By John 0. Reville, in America.)

The death of Pope Benedict XV, the meeting of the Conclave to elect his successor, the accession of Pius XI to the throne, have again turned all eyes to the Vatican. With rare exceptions the Press paid a generous tribute to the late Pontiff. To Pius XI it gave a cordial welcome. Hero and there a discordant note was struck and unfair estimates of Benedict and his work were written. At this Catholics were not surprised, nor did they marvel that often answered objections against the Papacy and the Popes were brought forward. Among those objections one was urged anew in connection with the statement that Pope Benedict XV was the successor, of St. Peter and that as Roman Pontiff he traced back his line to the Fisherman of Galilee. He could not be Peter’s successor, so the objection ran, for Peter was never at Rome. Peter therefore never founded his Chair in that city, and the claims of the Roman Pontiffs that they occupy his seat of authority are not supported by history. In answer, it can be proved that Peter visited Rome, that ho suffered martyrdom there, that Peter was truly Bishop of Rome, “or, what is the same thing, that the early Bishops of Rome were universally regarded as his true successors in the episcopate.” (0, J. B. Allnat, Was St. Peter Bishop of Pome? London, v Catholic Truth Society Pamphlets. Vol. 50, p. 1 sq.) Except perhaps among the Wandenses, St. Peter’s residence in Rome, his episcopate and martyrdom there were the common belief of Christendom for 12 unbroken centuries. In 1326, during the controversy between Pope John XXII and Emperor Louis of Bavaria, Marsilius of Padua, a champion of the Emperor, wrote in connection with Jean de Jandun, his famous Defensor Pads, or “The Champion of Peace.” The book was filled with false theories of the State, anticipating to some extent the social errors of Rousseau’s Gontrat Social. Marsilius was a man of undoubted learning. In the Defensor Pads, he did not absolutely deny Peter’s residence and episcopate in Rome; he cast a doubt over them. Certain Lutherans and Calvinists absolutely denied them, among others, the learned but bitterly partisan, Spanheim. Rationalists like Baur, Adalbert Lipsius, his pupil, who devoted his whole '* life practically to attacks on the Petrine claims, Winer, Zeller, Volkmar, called’ the residence and martyrdom of Peter in Rome “a myth.” Gregorovius writes in his History of the City of Home in the Middle Ages (Vol. I, p. 172); “History knows nothing of the presence in Romo of the Apostle Peter,” and calls Peter “the legendary founder of the Roman Church.” He is confronted on the other hand by a host of Protestant scholars —Cave, Pearson, the great Hugo Grotius, the erudite Usher, Blondel, Lardner, Hilgenfeld, Hase, Hundhausen, Guerike, Neander; and as many otherss, who entirely favor the Catholic claims. Adolph Harnack cannot be open to suspicion in . this matter. In speaking of the Baur-Tubingen school, ho writes:

“The martyrdom of St. Peter in Rome was contested, first, through .Protestant prejudice and. later through a similar critical prejudice. In both cases the mistake led to the recognition of important historical truths, and has consequently been productive of good. But that it was a mistake is now perfectly clear to every sincere investigator. The whole critical armory with which Baur attacked the ancient tradition is now rightly regarded as worthless.” (Grisar: History of Borne and the Popes During the Middle Ages. Vol. I, p. 298.) Calvin himself was finally convinced of St. Peter’s martyrdom in Rome, and wrote in his Institutes (Bk. IV, ch, VI, par. V); “I no longer question the fact of the martyrdom of St. Peter in Rome which is unanimously attested by all historians.” But what are the principal grounds of our Catholic belief? Strange as it may appear, St. Peter himself stands ' sponsor, for at least the one fact, that he was at Rome, and there in a position of authority, that of his episcopal and pontifical dignity. Writing to the Christians of Asia Minor, he closes his First Epistle with the words: “The Church which is in Babylon . . . saluteth you and so doth my son Mark” (C, V, 13). The Babylon here mentioned cannot be the old capital of the Assyrian Empire. It was at that time a deserted city. It cannot be any one of the insignificant towns which bore that name in the East. Peter never visited them. Babylon here means imperial Rome, the centre of heathen wickedness in Peter’s day, just as the older Babylon was in the day of Balthasar. The well-known Protestant Speaker's Commentary, finds “an absolute consensus of ancient interpreters that here Babylon must be understood as equivalent to Rome.” It adopts “without the least misgiving this explanation of the word as alone according with the mind of the Apostle and the testimony of the early Church.” It adds that non-Catholic scholars, Ewald, Thiersch, and Hilgenfeld support this view. The same Commentary declares that the presence and martyrdom of St. Peter in Rome are maintained by “nearly all unbiased critics.” The “Commentary” of the Protestant Bishop, Ellicott, says; “It may be called the established interpretation that the place here meant is Rome. We never hear of Peter being in the East, and the thing itself is improbable, whereas nothing but Protestant 'prejudice can stand against the historical evidence that St. Peter sojourned and died in Rome. . . Whatever theological evidences may follow from it, it is as certain that St. Peter was at Rome as that St. John was at Ephesus.” Ellicott admits that the evidence for St. Peter’s stay in Rome is “as strong, early, and wide as that on which we believe that Hannibal invaded Italy.” ' In the striking words in St. John’s Gospel (XXI, 18, •19), Our Lord had foretold the manner of death whereby St. Peter was to “glorify God.” As 0. F. B. Allnatt. argues {op. cit. if Peter glorified God through his martyrdom, the place where he did so must have been well known to the early Christians. If it had not been known, God could not have been glorified in the sense foretold. For that implied notoriety, the dam notitia cum laude, or wide-extended knowledge of the fact with due attendant praise. Now Rome alone is mentioned by early Christian writers as the scene of St. Peter’s martyrdom. Neither Jerusalem, nor Antioch, nor any other apostolic see ever claimed that honor. So forcibly do the facts militate for Rome' as the scene of the Apostle’s death that the Protestant Lardner, in speaking’ of St. Paul’s martyrdom at Rome (a-fact never doubted) says that it rests on no better evidence than does the martyrdom of St. Peter in the same city. Moreover, when St. Paul came to Rome, he found the Faith founded there. (Rom. I, 8; XVI, 9 ; XV, 14). Who founded that Church? “The Roman Church,” answers Bollinger in his First Age of Christianity and the Church (pp. 94-96) “must have been founded by an Apostle, and that Apostle can only have been Peter.” Insisting upon the peculiar tone of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans, the tone of''one addressing an organised Christian body, well grounded in the Gospel, Bollinger concludes that “we are brought back to Peter as the only founder who can be imagined. The notion of a gradual origin of the community without any particular founder, or of Aquila or Priscilla being its founders, or St. Paul himself, is self-evidently untenable.”

One hundred and fifty years after the death, of St. Peter, his martyrdom in Rome was spoken of in the whole Church as a well authenticated and undoubted fact. To quote the merest fraction of the testimony would require a treatise. The Protestant historian, Cave, in his Scriptorum Ecclesiaisticorum Eistoria Literaria (p. 5), writes: "That Peter was at Rome ... we intrepidly affirm with the whole multitude of the ancients And he proceeds to quote, chapter and book, “witnesses altogether unexceptionable,” St. Ignatius, Peter’s successor at Antioch; Papias of Hierapolis, probably a disciple of St. John; St. Irenaeus of Lyons, disciple of that Polycarp who was a disciple of St. John. Most of these witnesses were of the apostolic or immediate post-apostolic age. Others like Origen, Caius, Tertullian could be added. These witnesses are Latins, Syrians, Greeks, testifying either to Peter’s sojourn in Rome or his death there. Similar testimony is found in every succeeding age, from St. Clement of Alexandria in the second century; from St. Cyprian of Carthage, Tertullian, and Origen in the third. In the fourth century St. Jerome explicitly affirms St. Peter’s journey to Rome, his episcopate there, his martyrdom there under Nero, his burial "at Rome on the Vatican Hill, near the Triumphal Way” (De Fin's Illustribus., G. I). Peter’s episcopate in Rome is solemnly affirmed by a multitude of early authorities. For the first five centuries, writes Allnatt (Loc. Cit.), and indeed until many centuries later,' not a single writer can be cited as having entertained the faintest doubt that Peter had established his Chair in Rome. Constantinople and Rome, East and West, Gaul and Africa, heretics and schismatics looked upon the succession of the Bishops of Rome from St. Peter as an unimpeachable historical fact. In 451 the Council of Chalcedon, an Eastern Council, hence not naturally inclined to the recognition of Roman claims, addresses Pope Leo I as “the interpreter to all men of the voice of Peter.” Another Eastern Geneva! Council, that of Ephesus' in 431, calls Pope Celestine "the successor in order, and placeholder of the Blessed Peter . . . who even until now, and always, lives and exercises judgment in his successors.” The Council of Arles (314) speaks a similar language. The Fathers of the Church re-echo the same sentiments. St. Optatus of Milevis, about the year 375, reminds the Donatist Parmenian that the “Episcopal Chair was first established by Peter in the City of Rome.” Writing about 315, Eusebius, the Father of Church history, affirms that Peter, after founding the Church of Antioch, “proceeded to Rome, where ... he continues for 25 years Bishop of that city.” Going back from Eusebius to the earliest times, we find similar testimony from St. Cyprian, St. ' Hippolytus, St. Hegesippus, Tertullian, St. Ignatius, and men almost contemporary with the Prince of the Apostles. But if the early Fathers and Councils, the catalogues of the Popes headed by Peter’s name were silent, "the stones will cry out.” Peter’s tomb in Rome under the wondrous dome, the Mamertine prison where he suffered for Christ; cemeteries which from the earliest times bore his name; monuments in brass and stone, memorials of his sufferings and death; the chair from which he taught; churches built centuries ago on the site of houses that sheltered him; the records of him discovered by De Rossi and Lanciani; the Feasts of Peter’s Chair and Peter’s Chains, are facts, not myths. They, too, have an apologetic and historical value of the first importance. “For the archaeologist,” says Father Grisar (Op. cit., p. 225) “the presence and execution of St. Peter (and Paul) in Rome are facts established beyond the shadow of a doubt by purely monumental evidence.” Were every other historical record lost, the very stones of Rome would cry out that Peter, hallowed them with his presence and encrimsoned them with his blood.