Confession, chair, primacy

That today, the beginning of the week of prayer for Christian unity, should also be the feast of the Confession of St Peter is not, of course, mere coincidence.  The Anglicans of the English Church Union who initiated the week of prayer in 1908 quite deliberately chose to commence it on what was then in the Western calendar the feast of the Chair of St Peter.  Anglican calendars now (e.g. Scotland, Wales, TEC) tend to commemorate today as the Confession rather than the Chair of Peter.  The point is, however, the same - the Petrine confession leads to the distinctive Petrine ministry.  Today we celebrate that distinctive Petrine ministry and vocation, recognising its service to the Church's unity and communion.

For Anglicans that distinctive Petrine ministry is dispersed.  It is exercised by bishops, individually and collectively.  That is the point to the 1662 BCP employing a form of the collect for the feast of St Peter and John 21:15-17 in the order for episcopal consecration.  It is exercised also by Primates in the various provinces and in their meeting together to "strength[en] the mutual life" of the Communion (Windsor, Appendix 1.5).  And the See of Canterbury has fulfilled a Petrine mission by being "the pivotal instrument and focus of unity" within Anglicanism (ibid., para. 99). 

That bishops, primates and Canterbury share in the Petrine mission has, however, not prevented Anglicanism from recognising that the ancient see of Peter - Peter's Chair - is a particular expression of that mission and ministry.  When the Bishop of London recently referred to the Pope Benedict XVI as "undeniably the Patriarch of the West", he was following a well-established Anglican practice of acknowledging the primacy of honour due to the See of Rome precisely because it is Peter's Chair. 

This, of course, falls very far short of Vatican I's "universal immediate jurisdiction" - but it does demonstrate that Anglicanism's reflections on Peter's Chair are not exhausted by simply repeating  Article 37.  Reconciliation with the ancient patriarchal see of the West - the Chair of Peter - does not have to undermine or deprive Anglicanism of its dispersed Petrine ministry.  The ARCIC process has given us a vision of the vocation of bishops and primates in serving the Church's unity and communion itself being served by the See of Peter:

The Commission's work has resulted in sufficient agreement on universal primacy as a gift to be shared, for us to propose that such a primacy could be offered and received even before our churches are in full communion. Both Roman Catholics and Anglicans look to this ministry being exercised in collegiality and synodality – a ministry of servus servorum Dei (Gregory the Great, cited in Ut Unum Sint, 88). We envisage a primacy that will even now help to uphold the legitimate diversity of traditions, strengthening and safeguarding them in fidelity to the Gospel. It will encourage the churches in their mission. This sort of primacy will already assist the Church on earth to be the authentic catholic koinonia in which unity does not curtail diversity, and diversity does not endanger but enhances unity. It will be an effective sign for all Christians as to how this gift of God builds up that unity for which Christ prayed (ARCIC II The Gift of Authority: Authority in the Church III, 60).

In celebrating the Confession of St Peter, therefore, we give thanks for the various expressions of the Petrine ministry granted to the Church - and pray that the confession and chair of Peter may bring us a fuller experience of unity and communion.