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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.
And I will
give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you shall bind on
earth shall be bound, even in heaven. And whatever you shall release on earth
shall be released, even in heaven.
(Matthew 16:19, CPDV)
What
Rome Says the Keys Mean
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.
What
Old Catholics Actually Believe
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.
What
the Keys Are Actually For
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.
A
Prayer for Saint Miriam, on Their Diocesan Patron's Feast
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
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