In May of last year, Wikipedia set a new record for visitors to its site. At one point, the online encyclopedia was handling 800,000 hits per second, more than six times the normal amount. What was driving this mad scramble for information?
The election of Pope Leo XIV. The website “Streamcharts.com” reported that nearly six million people watched the announcement of his election online. Internet viewers logged over sixteen million hours watching the conclave as a whole, making it one of the biggest news items of the year. Anyone who thinks that the Catholic Church and the papacy are irrelevant in the modern world are clearly out of step.
Yet we also know that the modern world harbors a distinct hostility toward the Catholic Church and the pope. When I say “the modern world”, I mean something like the conglomeration of persons whose financial interests and ideologies coincide with a near-monopoly on communications, the banking industry and much of the political scene worldwide. It doesn’t matter, for the purposes of this homily, whether these person form a coordinated Deep State conspiracy or if the actions and ideologies of this overlordship was destined to arise when we crossed a certain threshold of technology. What matters is that one of the most important institutions, if not the most important institutions standing athwart their ambitions, is the Catholic Church.
Since, as I mentioned, they tend to control many communications outlets and write many of the algorithms that drive the internet, we know of their hostility toward the Church by the ways in which they try to induce Catholics toward suspicion of the papacy and the bishops, toward polarization and a general sense of doom. Anyone who has studied social media can tell you that few things drive mouse clicks more than anxiety and outrage. We even have a name for this compulsive behavior: “Doom scrolling.” But what it means is that every time we follow one more suggested article or video, we are not only potential undermining our faith in Christ’s Mystical Body, but we are also funneling money to the very people who benefit from the weakness in the Catholic Church.
What is it about the Church that the overlord class hates? There are many things. The Church opposes the pet ideologies of the modern world, for starters. But so does Islam. In some ways, Islam is even more medieval than the Catholic Church. So what separates us? I think the answer is obvious. The Catholic Church speaks in a unified way with authority, and she does so because she has one top vicar on earth, representing the authority of Christ, the One mediator between humanity and the One God. The Catholic Church has a pope.
One of the ways that the modern world tries to undermine the pope’s authority is through the language of political ideology. Every one of the pope’s actions is read through the materialistic lens of left versus right. So it behooves us this morning to revisit the nature of the papacy and the gift of authority in the Church, as exercised through the pope and the ordinary Magisterium, and to do so from a deep, theological point of view.
In today’s gospel, Jesus recognizes a special gift to Simon Peter from the Father. This gift is insight into the identity of Jesus. Not only is He the Messiah, the Christ. This is Peter’s confession in the gospels of Mark and Luke. But, peculiar to Matthew’s gospel, Peter adds that the Son of Man, Jesus, is also the Son of the Living God. Jesus tells us that Peter did not deduce this from any human reasoning. The insight is a gift from God the Father, the very Person Who sent the Son on His mission of reconciliation. And so Jesus confirms this gift and deepens its meaning by bestowing on Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Like the other Apostles, he is given genuine authority on earth—the authority of a steward, but still real authority. Since at least the time of Saints Clement and Ignatius of Antioch—in other words, since the generation after the Apostles—the Church has understood that Peter, the Rock upon which the Church is founded, has a special ministry of unity. This ministry has passed down through 2000 years to Pope Leo XIV, the 264th successor of Peter.
The Church built upon the rock of Peter’s confession is a type of a sacrament of salvation for the whole world. By nature, the Church is both human and divine. When people speak of the Church today, we often mean either the men and women who happen to be living upon earth and who belong to the Catholic Church, or, in some cases, and even more incorrectly, the bishops and priests. In other words, we reduce it to something merely human, forgetting the divine nature of the Church. This is what modernists would like us to do. They might not be fully conscious of this desire; since they don’t acknowledge a divine nature to the Church, they may simply understand the Church as just any other human institution. But we should be very wary not to make this mistake.
Traditionally, the Church’s membership has been divided into three parts: the Church militant, expectant, and triumphant. The Church militant is the part that we can see on earth at the moment, the part that we often confuse with being the Church as a whole. But it is not nearly the entire Church. There is also the Church expectant, the souls that have passed on to the next world, but are not yet fully purified, and are working their way through Purgatory, with the great help of our prayers. Finally, we have the Church triumphant, those souls that already enjoy something of the vision of God. But they are ontologically connected to each of us in the Body of Christ. By virtue of our baptisms, we share the same divine life with them. They are close to us. They are our bulwark against every temptation against fidelity. For they know the Truth and are living in it. The pope is not simply a man, from this perspective. In some way, he speaks in communion with all of the popes who went before, who all exercise the keys as Saint Peter in the current context. We can have confidence that the Holy Spirit will protect us from the banes of apostasy and heresy precisely because we are in union with the entire Church, the communion of saints.
I end with a quick note on the gates of hell. Literally, these are the gates of Hades. We hear about these very gates in the works of Homer. Whereas Peter has the keys of God’s kingdom, and determines who goes in and out, the gates of Hades have been definitely breached by Jesus when He descended there after His crucifixion. No one is manning those gates anymore.
We often misconstrue this imagery, seeing the Church as under attack by these gates, and hearing our Lord’s assurance that Hades or hell cannot invade the Church. There is truth to this, but I fear that this interpretation puts us on the defensive, which is not the import of the image. Rather, with the power of the grace flowing through the Church’s sacraments, we have the mission of rescuing all who have been taken captive by the power of death and setting them free. This begins with each of us descending, with Christ, into those areas within ourselves where hell’s power still lurks: those places where we have been hurt, where we harbor resentment or hopelessness, loneliness, fear and anxiety. The power of the keys unlocks everything within us that is captive and sets it free by the power of Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God. To Him be power and glory forever. Amen.
