It’s always interesting when a feast day comes along that outranks the Sunday and takes its place, and although the calendar date for the feast day of S. Peter and S. Paul was actually this last Saturday, the 29th, it has been moved by the bishops to the Sunday. This must be to save us from attending church on two consecutive days (what horror!), for this great feast day is also a holy day of obligation. Why is this feast day so very important for us, and why are both these great Saints bundled together on a single day?
Well, the answer must be that this great Church of ours very early on was centred in Rome. This was an accident of history, for in the time of our Lord and the Apostles, Rome was the centre of the civilised world, a beating heart with an arterial road network that ran around the Mediterranean, and reaching from the Levant to far in the north of Britain, and waterways that reached even further, across the Indian Ocean. If you and I were apostles and evangelists of the time, rejected by the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem and looking for a likely centre of operations for the growing number of Christians, we would naturally look towards Rome, where there was already a significant Jewish diaspora.
So, S. Peter first moved into north Syria, becoming the first bishop of Antioch, but then inevitably was drawn to Rome. S. Paul was more of a missionary priest than a sedentary bishop, but even he wrote at least one letter to the Roman Church and then, being a citizen of Rome, directed his steps towards his capital city. Both of them died there, and their relics were carefully preserved by the Roman Christians, whose spiritual descendants we are. Over the centuries, no matter how far we have been geographically from the Holy City of Rome, our eyes have wandered over to the tombs of the Apostles, our ears have strained for news of the Successor of Peter, the ground of our unity, whom we have called the Holy Father. It’s not too long ago that Rome ceased to be an economic and political centre of the world, but for the Catholic heart it is ever the religious centre of our existence in this world.
But let’s have a quick look at the personal characters of these two men that we honour today. I am myself partial to S. Paul, rather than S. Peter. Paul was an orthodox Jew and a Pharisee, which as he himself declares he never ceased to be after his life-changing encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus. Rather, Paul became an orthodox Jewish-Christian and a Christian Pharisee. A Pharisee was a Jew who was intent upon ritual purity before God, and the good Pharisee instead of being a hypocrite (as were the bad Pharisees of the gospel stories) practised what he or she preached. And so we see, in the Acts of the Apostles, how the immense intellect and extraordinary stamina of the good Pharisee Paul was turned in an instant from the pursuit and destruction of the Christians to becoming one of their greatest champions, a fatherly figure to them and a prodigious founder of local churches. If we had more such Pauls today, we would change the world very quickly.
S. Peter on the other hand, is more a figure of authority in the same Acts of the Apostles and in the gospels, clearly an authority over the other eleven original Apostles. There is that same air of fatherhood, but of the whole Christian Church, in those two general letters we have of his in the New Testament. From the gospel story, we know Peter to be faithful and pious, but also impulsive in his words and deeds, but in him Christ found reliability. The Lord would have known at once that this man, even if he fell, would rise up again in humility and become a strong foundation for the Church about him, clergy and laity, to become a rock of stability and love in a world of change and cruelty. And so He built the Church on the steadfastness of Peter, and with the energy of Paul. Thus do we have had unity alongside mission, peace together with growth, to communicate throughout the world an infectious love that will endure all things.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 