Primacy of The Bishop of Rome - Development of The Doctrine

Development of The Doctrine

The Roman Catholic Church accepts that "the New Testament texts offer no sufficient basis for papal primacy" and that they contain "no explicit record of a transmission of Peter's leadership". It considers that its doctrine has a developmental history and that its teaching about matters such as the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the union of his two natures in a single person developed as the result of drawing out from the original revealed truth consequences that were not obvious at first: "Thanks to the assistance of the Holy Spirit, the understanding of both the realities and the words of the heritage of faith is able to grow in the life of the Church 'through the contemplation and study of believers who ponder these things in their hearts'; it is in particular 'theological research deepens knowledge of revealed truth'". Accordingly, it would be a mistake to expect to find the modern fully developed doctrine of papal primacy in the first centuries, thereby failing to recognize the Church's historical reality. The figure of the pope as leader of the worldwide church developed over time, as the figure of the bishop as leader of the local church seems to have appeared later than in the time of the apostles.

That the Christian scriptures, which contain no cut-and-dried answers to questions such as whether there is forgiveness for post-baptismal sins or whether infants should be baptized, gradually become clearer in the light of events is a view expressed, when considering the doctrine of papal primacy, by Cardinal John Henry Newman, who summed up his thought by saying: "Developments of Christianity are proved to have been in the contemplation of its Divine Author, by an argument parallel to that by which we infer intelligence in the system of the physical world. In whatever sense the need and its supply are a proof of design in the physical creation, in the same do gaps, if the word may be used, which occur in the structure of the original creed of the Church, make it probable that those developments, which grow out of the truths which lie around them, were intended to complete it."

Writers such as Nicholas Afanassieff and Alexander Schmemann have declared that the phrase "presiding in agape", used of the Church of Rome in the letter that Ignatius of Antioch addressed to it in the first years of the 2nd century, contains a definition of that Church's universal primacy; but the Roman Catholic writer Klaus Schatz warns that it would be wrong to read as statements of the developed Roman Catholic teaching on papal primacy this letter and the even earlier First Epistle of Clement (the name of Clement was added only later), in which the Church of Rome intervenes in matters of the Church of Corinth, admonishing it in authoritative tones, even speaking in the name of God. It was only later that the expression of Saint Ignatius could be interpreted as meaning, as agreed by representatives of both the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, that "Rome, as the Church that 'presides in love' according to the phrase of St Ignatius of Antioch (To the Romans, Prologue), occupied the first place in the taxis, and that the bishop of Rome was therefore the protos among the patriarchs". The same agreement stated:

In the history of the East and of the West, at least until the ninth century, a series of prerogatives was recognised, always in the context of conciliarity, according to the conditions of the times, for the protos or kephale at each of the established ecclesiastical levels: locally, for the bishop as protos of his diocese with regard to his presbyters and people; regionally, for the protos of each metropolis with regard to the bishops of his province, and for the protos of each of the five patriarchates, with regard to the metropolitans of each circumscription; and universally, for the bishop of Rome as protos among the patriarchs. This distinction of levels does not diminish the sacramental equality of every bishop or the catholicity of each local Church.