Vatican City, Oct 20, 2022 / 09:05 am (CNA).
The Vatican will host a discussion inside St. Peter’s Basilica next month between a Catholic, a Protestant, and an Orthodox theologian on the primacy of Peter.
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president emeritus of the Pontifical Council for Culture, announced Oct. 20 that the Petrine primacy dialogue will take place in the basilica on Nov. 22 with the theme “On this rock, I will build my Church.”
The theological discussion is part of a new lecture series on the apostle Peter in history, art, and culture that will take place in the basilica starting Oct. 25 and running through March 2023.
The Catholic Church holds that Jesus gave St. Peter a special place or primacy among the apostles, citing the Gospel of Matthew 16:18–19.
The primacy of the bishop of Rome, as a successor of Peter, is one of the major issues of disagreement that has kept Orthodox Christians apart from the Catholic Church. Last year, Pope Francis told Orthodox theologians that it is his “conviction that in a synodal Church, greater light can be shed on the exercise of the Petrine primacy.”
At a Vatican press conference, Ravasi underlined that the new lecture series is not only for believers who want to find the reason for the hope that is in them but also aims to reach non-Catholics as well.
The cardinal said that Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the chief architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, envisioned the basilica’s colonnade as “two arms that could embrace not only Catholics from all over the world but also those who were heretics or of other faiths.”
Ravasi founded the Courtyard of the Gentiles foundation within the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education to promote dialogue between believers and nonbelievers through events, debates, and research.
Courtyard of the Gentiles is co-hosting the new lecture series along with the Fratelli Tutti Foundation, founded by Pope Francis in December 2021.
Ravasi will be the featured speaker at the first lecture in the basilica on Oct. 25 on the topic of St. Peter’s life and martyrdom, which will feature a string quartet performance of Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and Handel’s Cantate Domino.
The Vatican has not released the names of the theologians who will be speaking at the Petrine primacy discussion in November in the basilica, whose foundation is built on the tomb of St. Peter.
The two lectures scheduled for 2023 will focus on a more “cultural dimension” of the apostle Peter, Ravasi said. A lecture on Jan. 17 will analyze the figure of St. Peter in history and culture and a March 7 event titled “Quo vadis” will look at how Peter has been portrayed in art, literature, music, and film.
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An intricate step, the now combined “Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education.” When the names of the speaking theologians are released, it will be easier to discern whether the Church is equipped to maintain the irreducible distinction between education and culture.
Yours truly recalls a three-party panel in 2007, between an Evangelical, a Muslim (Mount St. Mary in Los Angeles), and a Dominican priest. The providential synthesis of the Christian revelation with Greek thought (faith and reason) was the topic, yet the Muslim continued deflecting the dialogue into the competing idiom of Islamic assimilative culture (even by playing a recording of Muslim musicians assimilating Western music). He postured as not understanding the Greek thing (such that the meaning of “the Word” incorporates both divine Revelation [and here, the Petrine Ministry?] and human Reason supplied by the Greeks). He finally stuck to the topic when challenged, but by someone in the audience and not the flaccid moderator. The Evangelical, of course, offered his ecumenical and assimilationist enthusiasm toward Islam. Kumbaya!
Just as the “human ecology” and the “overlapping natural ecology” have been conflated with mixed effect into an “integral ecology” in Laudato si (such that abortion advocates etc. now are added to a Pontifical Academy for Life–https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/10/19/catholic-doctor-criticizes-pontifical-academy-for-lifes-appointing-of-abortion-advocates/), now do we see the conflation of “culture” and “education” into some kind of lowest-common-denominator fraternity? Perhaps setting the table for the new (generic and mongrelized?) Dicastery on Evangelization, eclipsing an effective dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith? Already, what dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (?), signals Cardinal Grech, ringmaster for ongoing synodism.
Hoping, here, for precision and clarity from the Orthodox theologian. Lots of room for legitimate surprises, assuming that national and continental bishops’ conferences and “synods” will not be propped up as equivalent to patriarchates in some mutant way.
Of possibly more than archeological interest, from the Second Vatican Council, itself, are a few footprints on the path…In one of the many Council speeches, Elias Zoghby, Greek-Melchite Patriarchal Vicar of Egypt, regarded the worldwide and optimistic trend under decolonization and then alluded to the national “episcopal synods or conferences in the Catholic Church.”
Said he: “Now we have arrived at a moment in history when nationalism, at least if it is not a narrowly centralized nationalism is no longer a danger to the universal good, but instead a way of enriching the whole of human society.”
For balance, one wishes that the collected speeches were more inclusive (compiled by Kung, Congar and O’Hanlon, “Council Speeches of Vatican II,” Deus Books, 1964). Inaugurating today’s now fashionable narrowness (called diversity!), the editors write in the Preface:
“Only those talks have been included which were given in the spirit [vs the voted Council Documents] of this opening discourse [Paul VI: self-awareness of the Church, renewal, reunion of Christians, dialogue with the world]. Those which were expressions of doctrinaire narrowness [continuity?], petty criticism [bigots?] and unproductive defense of the status quo [Benedict’s “reform within Tradition”?] were by that very fact disqualified.”
But, today, and about narrowness, nationalism, and the fluid “spirit” of the Council: totalitarian Sinicization, the narcissist “synodal path” in Germania, lapdog Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, and Vatican ambivalence or worse toward moral absolutes?
Where, the “universal good,” let alone the universality of the apostolic and Catholic Church?