Beyond Bridges and Times
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, James and John as “the pillars” (styloi) of the Church (Galatians 2:9). Pillars do not exist for themselves. They bear a weight entrusted to them.
The Gospel itself quietly prevents us from transforming Peter into an untouchable hero.
Jesus never called him Peter.
He called him Kaypha.
Saint John carefully preserves the original Aramaic: “You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas“—which is translated Peter (John 1:42). It would have been easy for the Evangelists simply to use the Greek Petros throughout. Instead, they deliberately allow the Semitic world of the Gospel to remain audible.
Within that same Semitic world another Kaypha unexpectedly appears.
The High Priest before whom Jesus is brought during His Passion bears exactly the same Aramaic name (Matthew 26:57).
For many years this detail accompanied conversations I was privileged to have with Fathers Michel van Esbroeck and Frans Van Cangh, while Hans Urs von Balthasar’s remarkable Einsame Zwiesprache mit Martin Buber remained one of those books to which I constantly returned. The more one listens to the Semitic texture of the Gospel, the more difficult it becomes to dismiss this shared name as a mere coincidence.
One Kaypha interrogates Jesus before the Sanhedrin.
The other confesses Him at Caesarea Philippi: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).
Yet the same disciple who utters this confession will soon deny his Master before the servant girl’s fire (Matthew 26:69–75). The Gospel therefore refuses to oppose a guilty High Priest to an innocent Apostle. Both Kayphas stand before Christ in their frailty. The Church is not built upon an impeccable man but upon one who has been forgiven.
The mystery deepens still further.
Jesus addresses him as Shimon bar Yonah—Simon, son of Jonah (Matthew 16:17). Christians generally hear only a patronymic, whereas Scripture itself suggests a wider horizon. Jonah is the reluctant prophet who flees his vocation, descends into the depths, passes through darkness and is finally returned to announce repentance to those whom he never wished to serve (Jonah 1–3). Peter’s own life strangely follows that same movement. His confession leads to fear, his fear to denial, his denial to tears, and his tears to restoration. His vocation is not abolished by failure; it is purified through it.
Nor does Israel remember only one Simon. Ben Sirach praises Simon the High Priest, who restored the worship of Israel and gathered the people once more before the Presence of God, pronouncing the priestly blessing over the assembly (Sirach 50:1–24). Scripture thus gathers it into Christ Himself, who entrusts the keys of the Kingdom to Peter (Matthew 16:19) not because he has proved himself incapable of failure, but because divine mercy always entrusts more than human judgement considers reasonable.
Perhaps that is where every reflection on the Church must begin—not with power or precedence, but with the astonishing freedom by which Christ continues to build His Body through those whom He has first restored.
If Peter’s vocation cannot be understood apart from mercy, neither can Paul’s. The Apostle never conceals his own past. On the contrary, he repeatedly recalls that he persecuted the Church of God (Galatians 1:13; Philippians 3:6), and he is confessing that his apostleship remains entirely the work of divine grace.
The Church therefore remembers Peter and Paul together not because they represent two complementary institutions or two competing traditions, but because both bear witness to the same mystery: God entrusts His Gospel to those whom He has first transformed.
This perspective also changes the way we understand the history that followed them.
Even while the Roman Empire still provided the principal framework of Christian life, communities had appeared beyond its effective frontiers. Persia developed a rich Syriac tradition whose theological and liturgical life unfolded independently of the Mediterranean world. Armenia and Ethiopia received Christianity according to their own histories and languages. India preserved the memory of Saint Thomas, while Arabia already knew Christian communities before Islam transformed the region.
The Gospel was never imprisoned within the geography that first sheltered it.
For this reason the Pentarchy should never be confused with the fullness of the Church. It represented the first great architecture of communion around the Mare Nostrum, but the apostolic horizon had always been larger. Peter and Paul belonged first to Jerusalem, yet neither remained enclosed within Jerusalem. Their ministry continually overflowed every frontier that history attempted to draw around it.
Perhaps this is one of the lasting lessons of the Council of Nicaea after seventeen centuries.
The Fathers gathered there did not attempt to define the geographical limits of Christianity. They confessed the identity of Christ. Ecclesiastical structures existed to preserve that confession, not to replace it.
Every generation of Christians has faced that temptation.
Sometimes the Church has identified herself too closely with empire. At other moments she has become identified with nation, language or culture. The temptation has appeared in East and West alike, for no Christian tradition is immune from confusing the providential circumstances of its own history with the catholicity (openness to all) of the Gospel itself.
The present moment is no exception.
The Orthodox Churches continue to seek the delicate balance between primacy and conciliarity, between the dignity of each local Church and the visible unity of the whole. At the same time, the tragic war in Ukraine has demonstrated how easily ecclesiastical language can become entangled with political and civilisational projects, while the ancient Patriarchates of the Middle East continue to remind the entire Christian world that fidelity is often measured not by influence but by perseverance.
Jerusalem survives not because history has been kind to her, but because the Resurrection cannot be confined within any political order.
This is perhaps why the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul remains so profoundly Jerusalemite.
Before either Apostle reached Rome, both belonged here.
Before Peter became associated with the See that bears his witness, he remained Shimon bar Yonah.
Before Paul became the Apostle of the nations, he remained Shaul, the Pharisee who discovered that the Messiah whom he opposed had already gone before him.
Their universality did not abolish their origins. It fulfilled them.
Hans Urs von Balthasar perceived something similar in his “monologued dialogue” with Martin Buber. Genuine encounter between Judaism and Christianity cannot arise from triumphalism on either side. It begins when both stand before the mystery of the God who always remains greater than the theological systems by which we seek to understand Him. Such humility is not a weakness of faith; it is one of its deepest expressions.
After seventeen centuries of councils, patriarchates, theological achievements and painful divisions, we continue to ask how Christian unity should become visible. The question remains legitimate. Yet the feast of Peter and Paul gently reminds us that visible unity begins not with institutions but with conversion. Peter’s tears and Paul’s blindness belong as much to the foundation of the Church as Peter’s confession or Paul’s missionary journeys.
The Milvian Bridge therefore remains one of the great moments of Christian history, but it cannot become its final destination.
Constantine crossed a bridge that changed the public history of Christianity.
Peter and Paul crossed the world.
They left Jerusalem, yet never ceased to belong to Jerusalem. They traversed the Mare Nostrum, yet never mistook it for the horizon of the Gospel. Their road continued beyond the frontiers of the Roman world, just as the Church herself continues to journey today far beyond the geography inherited from Late Antiquity, reaching equally towards the forests of Amazonia, the islands of the Pacific, the communities of the Arctic and every place where humanity still longs to hear that “Christ is risen”.
That is why the Church continues to celebrate Peter and Paul together.
Not because they solved every question that later generations would ask.
But because they continue to remind every generation that the Church does not begin with certainty, power or prestige.
She begins where Christ calls, forgives and entrusts.