The Keys That Bind and the Keys That Free

Today the Church remembers Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot the tradition calls the Mellifluous Doctor, honey-tongued, for the sweetness and force of his preaching. Bernard founded the Abbey of Clairvaux, reformed the Cistercian order, and left behind sermons that shaped Western spirituality for centuries. He is remembered every August 20.

I want to mark this day for a specific reason. Our sister parish, Saint Miriam Parish and School in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, is part of the Diocese of Saint Bernard Clairvaux, an Old Catholic diocese named in his honor. Saint Miriam has been a companion in this work for years: reformed, inclusive, unapologetically welcoming, and rooted in the same conviction that shapes this parish, that the table of the Lord is not ours to restrict. Today, on their diocesan patron's feast, I want to hold them in prayer and gratitude, and use the occasion to talk about something at the center of both our communities: what it actually means, in Old Catholic theology, to hold the keys of the kingdom.

This Sunday's Gospel is Matthew 16:13-20, the passage where Jesus gives Peter the keys of the kingdom and the authority to bind and loose. It is one of the most consequential verses in Christian history, and it is worth being honest about why.

The Roman Catholic Church has, since the Lateran Council of 1215 and especially since the First Vatican Council in 1870, read this verse as establishing a single, unbroken chain of authority running through the Bishop of Rome alone, with every other bishop's authority understood as contingent on remaining in communion with him. That reading is precisely what our own tradition parted ways with. When the Archdiocese of Utrecht, and later the wider Old Catholic movement, rejected the dogma of papal infallibility declared at Vatican I, it was rejecting the idea that the keys belong to one bishop and flow outward from him to everyone else.

Old Catholic ecclesiology holds something different, and I want to state it plainly rather than hedge around it, because it is central to who we are: every validly consecrated bishop, standing in apostolic succession, holds the keys. Not by permission from Rome. Not as a delegated fragment of someone else's authority. Fully, by virtue of the office itself, in the same apostolic line that runs back to the apostles Jesus first commissioned.

This is not a modern innovation invented to justify our independence. It draws on the same patristic well the whole Church draws from. The fifth-century monk Vincent of Lerins, whom Old Catholic theologians have long cited as a touchstone, taught that we hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all the faithful. Long before Vatican I concentrated the keys in a single office, the early Church understood the apostolic ministry of binding and loosing as belonging to the whole college of bishops, exercised locally, in communion with one another rather than in submission to one see.

That is not an abstract point of church history. It is the reason a parish in Augusta, Georgia, and a parish in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, five hundred miles apart, in different Old Catholic Dioceses, can both hold the keys fully and validly, without asking Rome's leave, and can both use those keys for the same purpose.

Here is what I want you to understand about binding and loosing, because I think it gets misused constantly, in every direction, and I want to be direct about how this parish understands it.

The keys can bind. That is real, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are people who claim the name of Christ loudly, publicly, and use it as a shield for cruelty they have no intention of repenting of: the pastor who preaches love on Sunday and abuses his family the rest of the week, the leader who wraps bigotry in scripture and calls it conviction, the institution that protects its own reputation over the child it failed to protect. The keys can and should bind that. Naming it plainly, refusing to bless what has not repented, holding accountable what claims authority it has forfeited: that is a legitimate and necessary use of the authority Christ gave the Church.

But the same keys that bind are the keys that free. And I want to be just as direct about this half of the authority, because it is the half too many churches have forgotten they were given. The keys that can hold someone accountable for claiming a faith they do not live are the very same keys that can release someone from the false guilt other churches have loaded onto them for simply existing: the queer person told they are an abomination, the divorced person told they are unwelcome at the table, the abuse survivor told to forgive and stay silent, the immigrant told God only loves people with the right paperwork. If the keys have the power to bind, they have the power to release, and this parish, and our sister parish in Flourtown, exist in large part to exercise that second half of the authority as forcefully and as freely as any church has ever exercised the first.

That is not a lesser use of apostolic authority. It is the same authority, aimed at the actual purpose the Gospel gives it: not protecting institutions, but setting people free.

On this feast of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, I want to close by holding up our sister parish. Saint Miriam Parish and School, and the whole Diocese of Saint Bernard Clairvaux, have been doing exactly this work in Pennsylvania for years: binding what deserves to be bound, and freeing everyone the rest of the Church has told to stay in chains.

May Bernard's intercession be with them today, and may the keys entrusted to every bishop in valid apostolic succession, ours included, keep being used the way the Gospel intends: for freedom, first and always.

This Sunday we sit with the same Gospel that gives us those keys. Come and hear more.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer