By JOHN YOUNG
St. Peter is seen as an impetuous man who acted without thinking. He at first refused to let Jesus wash his feet, then went to the other extreme and wanted to be washed all over. He declared he would follow Jesus even to death, and then betrayed Him three times.
In the early Church there was intense debate about whether Gentile converts were obliged to follow Jewish laws, and it is sometimes asserted that St. Peter went wrong here and had to be corrected by St. Paul, who said, “I resisted him to the face.”
It is this matter of Gentile converts and Peter’s attitude that I want to look at here because his position is often completely misrepresented. St. Paul is seen as correcting the first Pope on a crucial doctrinal point debated in the early Church. But that is not what happened.
Peter was the first to welcome Gentiles into the Church, which he did after a special revelation from God, when he had a vision of animals that were unclean according to Jewish law coming down from the sky, and God told him to eat them. Then when the centurion Cornelius and his family wanted to be received into the Church, Peter realized the meaning of the vision: Jews and Gentiles were equally to be members of the Church.
When Peter returned to Jerusalem he was criticized for his reception of Cornelius and his family, and he defended himself by relating the revelation that had been made to him.
Later, at the crucial Council of Jerusalem, he spoke up in defense of the right of Gentiles to be free from the dietary laws of the Jews. St. Paul is seen as the great defender of the Gentiles in this matter, but it is often forgotten that Peter took the same stand.
But what of the famous rebuke given by Paul to Peter? Modernist Catholics sometimes appeal to this to justify disobedience to the Pope. But if they are questioned they often show that they are muddled about the nature of this rebuke. I read where one said it was about circumcision.
The question related to Jews and Gentiles eating together, a practice condemned by some converts from Judaism. St. Peter had been eating with Gentile converts when certain converts from Judaism arrived, and Peter then stopped eating with the Gentiles.
St. Paul tells us Peter feared the circumcision party and that other Christians followed his example. “Even Barnabas was carried away by their insincerity” (Gal. 2:13). “I said to Cephas before them all, ‘If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?’” (2:14).
The meaning is quite clear. Peter, like Paul, had no problem eating with Gentiles, but he stopped doing so on this occasion because he “feared the circumcision party.” There was no difference of doctrine between Peter and Paul. It was a question of how to act in a delicate situation.
Yet attempts are made, with no foundation, to accuse Peter, the first Pope, of doctrinal error. Or more often, to belittle his authority by implication, and thus attempt to weaken papal authority.
The idea is: If Peter could go wrong and deserve to be criticized by Paul, any Pope can go wrong and we are entitled to criticize them when they do; we are following St. Paul’s example. It is true, of course, that in some circumstances we are entitled to criticize the Pope: that applies regarding various statements and decisions of Pope Francis. But a distorted view of the Peter and Paul incident is no help.
In Jewish tradition, there were strong opinions about dietary laws and other matters, such as circumcision, which are nonessential and can be changed, but when the Church began, and the earliest converts were Jews, it was inevitable that there would be strong differences of opinion.
That fact shows the absolute necessity for an infallible authority which can decide disputed questions. We see this authority at work in the Council of Jerusalem, about the year AD 50, which clarified this question of Jewish laws which were no longer applicable.
The same procedure continued through the centuries to our own time, with ecumenical councils settling disputed questions.
However, the difference between Peter and Paul was not about doctrine, but about how to act in a practical situation. A group of conservative converts from Judaism would be upset, maybe scandalized, if they found Peter eating a meal with Gentiles. But if he stopped eating with them this would encourage the view that the Jewish dietary laws were still in force. It was not a black and white situation.
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