Thirteen years ago, when Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would leave the See of Rome, I wrote an article occasioned by another anniversary that, at the time, received surprisingly little attention: the seventeen hundred years of the Edict of Milan. The Christian world was understandably absorbed by the resignation of the Bishop of Rome, yet another question quietly remained in the background. What had Christianity become after seventeen centuries of freedom? Had we gradually identified the Church with the historical forms that had sustained her, or were we still capable of recognising the apostolic movement that had first brought the Gospel into the world?

Time has not diminished that question. Benedict XVI has since entered into the communion of those who have gone before us. Pope Francis has completed a pontificate that repeatedly invited the Church to rediscover herself from her geographical and human peripheries. Pope Leo XIV now begins his ministry while Christians throughout the world commemorate the seventeen hundredth anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Meanwhile, the Orthodox Churches continue to face difficult questions concerning communion, primacy and national identity. The ancient Patriarchates of the Middle East live under the daily pressure of war, migration and survival.

Today the Mare Nostrum has returned to public discourse under very different circumstances. It evokes migration routes, naval rivalries, energy corridors and strategic interests. Yet Christianity first knew this sea as a place of encounter. Even then, however, it was never the final horizon. Peter and Paul themselves did not remain within the Mediterranean basin. Their missionary vocation already pointed beyond it, towards worlds that neither the Roman Empire nor the Pentarchy could ultimately contain. Before long, Christians were praying in Syriac beyond the Euphrates, in Ge’ez south of Egypt, on the Malabar coast of India and, centuries later, in lands that no bishop gathered at Nicaea could ever have imagined. Today the same apostolic movement reaches equally towards the Arctic, Tasmania and Amazonia. The geography has changed; the Gospel has not.

Shimon bar Yonah was a Galilean fisherman whose mother tongue was Aramaic and whose life had been shaped by the villages surrounding the Lake of Galilee. Shaul of Tarsus belonged to another intellectual and cultural world. Formed within the traditions of Israel and educated in the wider Hellenistic environment, he would later describe himself as one “born out of due time” (hōsperei tō ektrōmati; 1 Corinthians 15:8), recalling that he had first persecuted the very Church he would eventually serve. Peter would confess Christ before denying Him; Paul would persecute Christ before proclaiming Him. Neither begins his apostolic ministry from strength. Both begin with mercy.

Perhaps this is why Paul simply speaks of Peter,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)