Von Balthasar and the Office of Peter in the Church

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„As shepherd who has to pasture the whole flock, he has a right to claim
authority (in doctrine and leadership) and to demand unity. This
prerogative is his alone. But it does not isolate him from the others who
have founding missions and who, in their own way, have no less a
continuing life and representation in the church‟ (158)
The office of Peter, he argues, „must take his bearings by the all-encompassing
totality of the Church, which expresses itself concretely in the dynamic
interplay of her major missions and in the laws inherent in her structure‟
(314-5). While he develops this, several alternative configurations are
rejected as inadequate: he rejects a neo-scholastic division of the Church into
a „teaching‟ (ecclesia discens) and a „listening‟ part (ecclesia docens),
preferring a „much more nuanced scale of ministries in the Church‟ (236): yet
even the New Testament triads of „apostles, prophets, teachers‟ (1 Cor 12.28
and „evangelists, pastors, teachers‟ (Eph 4.11) are insufficient in his view to
account for the scale of differentiation within the Catholica. Nor does he
accept the typological division of the universal Church into „Petrine‟
(Catholic), „Pauline‟ (Protestant) and „Johannine‟ (Orthodox) Churches (146).
Paul and John are not to be thought of as principles „tending in opposite
directions‟ from Peter: communio is not incompatible with collegiality and
primacy. But the office of Peter is not the defining feature of the Catholic
Church, as though a Pauline stamp were characteristic of Protestantism and
Johannine contemplation the feature of Orthodoxy:
...the communion of the Catholica cannot be characterized exclusively by
the Petrine principle and thereby placed in opposition to other Christian
communions and communities (145-6)
It is precisely the task of the Church to realize its Catholicity in ways which
bring together the Petrine, Pauline, Johannine and other dimensions within a
concrete unity. Petrine authority is at the service of the other dimensions of
the Church and it flourishes when it promotes the functioning of the other
missions and dimensions within the Church. When it marginalises itself from
them—for example, by acting as though they had no proper status within the
life of the Church—or when it is marginalised by them—a not uncommon
attitude in some parts of the Western Church—the Catholica becomes as
dysfunctional as a family in which the father has no role.
The authority linked with the Petrine office is one of those principles, but it is
not the centre of the Church‟s identity: faithful union with Christ, embodied in
Mary, not Peter, is the archetypal centre of the Church. He recognises that it
is „difficult to keep the office of Peter in balance within the integral unity of
the Church‟ because the Petrine office has frequently drawn energy to itself at
the expense of other principles. He aims to restore a better balance to the
Church‟s image of itself and speaks of the particularly Catholic concern of
„balancing Petrus with Maria-ecclesia‟, thereby enabling the Roman aspect to
stand in a right relationship to the more fundamental Marian dimension and
to the other principles in the Church. The more the Petrine office asserted
itself, from Gregory VII onward he says, the more difficult it has been to keep
sight of the Marian, and the other, equally valid, dimensions and missions in
the Church which counterbalance juridical authority within the mysterium
(184). He is aware of the difficulty of the task: