Traditional Catholic Teaching

Appendix to Supplement A: Lesson 5

Appendix 1:
The Role of the Pope in Christ’s Church

By Fr John Bettridge, S.M. 1961

The Church continues in the world of each era the presence and the action of our Lord Jesus Christ.

She offers anew each day His sacrifice in the Mass. She adores Him personally present in the Eucharist. She communicates to men His sanctifying vitality in the Sacraments. She makes known to them His sacred teaching.

For she was founded by Him to do precisely that.

Like Christ, she must live in the world of space and time and history. Just as the divine Master adapted Himself to life in a human family of Nazareth and was reared according to the Jewish social patterns of Augustus’ reign, so too the Church must continually adapt herself to the changing contexts of space and time and history.

Her love and her action must embrace not only individuals but whole peoples. She must concern herself not only with winning souls to Christ, but also with consecrating the institutions and the structures of the world to God. Thus living vibrantly in the minds and hearts of her members, she must, through them, take the Good News of Salvation to “all nations” and bring them to accept Christ for all that He is; similarly she must work also to have the charity and the justice of Christ penetrate all social life.

For “all things are Christ’s” in their providential destination, and it is the mission of the Church to make them so in fact also.

In order that she may fulfil her mission fruitfully, there is required in her members a familiarity with the spirit and content of Christ’s teaching on the one hand, and with the peoples and customs which the church has to win and sanctify, on the other.

This calls for a vital distinction by the Church between all that is God-given and essential and immutable in her teaching and constitution on the one hand and all that is unessential and mutable on the other. For, while she faithfully preserves unchanged and entire all that is essential she must also continually adapt herself to contemporary conditions and techniques in what is changing and unessential.

To provide for this preservation on the one hand, and adaptation on the other, Christ left to the Church a living principle of unity and authority, the Pope, who as Head of the Church on earth would be His Vicar. A single unique principle of authority, endowed with infallibility in matters of faith, the Pope is not only a visible symbol of the inner unity of the Catholic body, but also is the effective guarantor whereby the integrity of Revelation can be determined and preserved. As a living principle, the Pope can adapt and apply the essentials of Revelation to changing situations and new problems.

The Pope is thus a divinely given guarantee of the unity and integrity, the flexibility and actuality of the Church.

This living flexibility and actuality in applying the teaching of Christ could never be had merely by rigid literal adherence to the written word of the Bible or to the formulations of any number of Ecumenical Councils, any more than the preservation of the unity and integrity of Christ’s doctrine could be expected by allowing each individual to interpret for himself the Revelation of Christ as contained in the Bible.

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