22 February 2014

Changed Feast

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Today is the Feast of the Chair of St Peter in the modern calendar, but until Bugnini, it was the Feast of the Chair of St Peter at Antioch.  As it used exactly the same Mass as the Chair of St Peter at Rome, celebrated on 18 January, it was clear to the ordering mind of the Archbishop that these were feasts ripe to be merged, like the separate feasts of the three Archangels.

The problem is that they used to commemorate two separate things: the Chair at Antioch celebrates Episcopacy, the role of the Bishop in relation to his local Church; the Chair of St Peter celebrates Papacy, the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, and the possibility of the translation of Bishops from other local Churches to assume this role.

It must have seemed so mediaeval!
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