There is something wonderfully inconvenient about today’s Gospel.
Jesus Christ founded a Church.
Not a movement.
Not a discussion group.
Not a collection of spiritual opinions held together by good intentions.
A Church.
And He gave that Church authority.
The modern world is rather suspicious of authority, especially religious authority.
We like truth provided it remains a suggestion.
We like religion provided it does not tell us what to believe.
We like Christ provided He does not establish anything too definite.
But today Our Lord is very definite indeed.
To understand the Gospel we must begin with Isaiah.
Shebna is the steward of the royal household.
He has authority, but he has abused it.
So God removes him and appoints Eliakim.
Then comes the important detail:
“I will place on his shoulder the key of the house of David.”
The key belongs to the king. But the king entrusts it to his chief steward.
He governs for the king. He opens and shuts in the king’s name.
And centuries later, standing before Simon Peter, the Son of David uses precisely the same language.
“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.”
That cannot be accidental. Christ is the King. Peter is given the keys.
Then Jesus says: “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
This is not merely a compliment to Peter.
It is an office.
And offices continue when the man who holds them dies.
That is why Catholics believe in the papacy.
Not because Peter was brilliant.
He clearly was not always brilliant.
Within a few verses of today’s Gospel he will rebuke Christ and be sharply corrected.
Later he will deny Our Lord three times.
Peter is not the foundation because Peter is flawless.
Peter is the Rock because Christ appoints him.
That distinction matters enormously.
The strength of the Church does not rest upon the personal excellence of churchmen. Thank God for that.
If the survival of Catholicism depended upon every Pope, bishop and priest being heroic, the Church would have disappeared before the Acts of the Apostles was finished.
Judas was an Apostle. Peter denied Christ. The Apostles fled from Calvary.
Yet Christ built His Church upon men without making His promise depend upon their perfection.
“The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
This does not mean that members of the Church cannot sin.
History would make such a claim ridiculous.
It does not mean that churchmen cannot be cowardly, foolish or scandalous.
They can. It means something far greater.
Human sin cannot destroy what Christ has established.
The Church is holy because Christ is holy.
She possesses truth because Christ entrusted truth to her.
She gives grace because Christ gave her the Sacraments.
Her permanence rests not upon human cleverness but upon divine fidelity.
And that brings us back to the question Jesus asks: “Who do you say that I am?”
Peter answers: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Everything follows from that answer.
If Jesus is simply a religious teacher, then of course we may edit Him.
We may keep the parts we like.
We may quietly ignore the difficult commandments.
We may congratulate Him when He agrees with us and improve upon Him when He does not.
But if He is the Son of the living God, the arrangement is reversed.
We do not judge Him.
He judges us.
We do not correct His teaching.
His teaching corrects us.
We do not reinvent His Church.
We receive the Church He founded.
This is where Catholicism is profoundly unfashionable.
The modern world says that truth must somehow emerge from within us.
Christ says to Peter:
“Flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”
Truth is received.
Revelation comes from above.
The Faith is not something each generation manufactures.
It is something each generation inherits.
That is why tradition is not the dead weight of the past.
It is the memory of the Church.
A man who loses his memory does not become liberated.
He becomes lost.
So too a Church which forgot what she had received would not become modern.
She would cease to know who she was.
Saint Paul therefore ends today not with argument but with adoration:
“Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!”
Notice the humility.
Real Catholic certainty does not make a man arrogant.
It makes him grateful.
We are certain about revelation precisely because we did not invent it.
“For from him and through him and to him are all things.”
The truth comes from Him.
The Church comes from Him.
The authority comes from Him.
The keys come from Him.
Even Peter’s confession comes by grace.
My brothers and sisters, there is therefore something wonderfully reassuring in today’s Gospel.
The Church does not have to invent herself every morning.
She does not have to discover a new Gospel for every generation.
She does not have to ask the world for permission to remain Catholic.
Christ has already spoken.
Christ has already established His Church.
Christ has already given the keys.
And Christ has already made the promise.
Empires have risen and fallen.
Philosophies have appeared and vanished.
Cultures which once seemed permanent are now paragraphs in history books.
Yet the words spoken at Caesarea Philippi remain:
“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.”
The important word is my.
His Church. His truth.
His authority. His promise.
And therefore our confidence is not finally in Peter.
Nor in any Pope.
Nor in any age of the Church.
Our confidence is in Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God.
The key remains in the royal household.
The Rock remains where Christ placed it.
And the gates of hell shall not prevail.
St. Mary's, St. John Bosco and St. Edward's 