The Confession of St Peter. On Chairs Too.

I had so much fun writing this as a comment on Pastor Weedon's excellent blog that I am reposting it here, slightly revised as a post on my own blog.

Crap, I'm two days late, too busy earning a living.

Anyway, isn't this a hoot. In the traditional calendar, this isn't the feast of the confession of St Peter at all, and now that's true twice over.

Before Vatican II, it was known as St Peter's Chair at Rome. The Roman emphasis was on the Petrine leadership of the church, Peter personally and conserved in his successors, not at all on his confession.

That it is known in the current LCMS list of Feasts and Festivals as the Confession of St Peter rightly re-establishes that the Rock is the Confession, not Peter and not an office.

But the "twice over" comes in this: Vatican II did away with the feast, and combined it with the feast of St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February.

A Ninth Century text of the Martyrologium Hieryoranimianum gives the two dates as existing celebrations. And so they stood in my youth as an RC altar boy over a thousand years later.

But John the Destroyer, aka John XXIII, removed the Chair of Peter at Rome feast on 18 January altogether in 1960, and also demoted the 22 February Antioch one. These changes survive in the hunk of dung 1962 Roman Missal, which is now the "extraordinary form" of the Roman liturgy, as bogus a sham of the Roman liturgy up to the 1960s as the "ordinary form" the novus ordo is.

So Rome, having missed the point about the confession altogether, eliminates the feast in one of its calendars and combines it with a similar feast in which it similarly misses the point in its other calendar!

How typically RCC. Good to celebrate the feast in its Biblically correct context on its historically correct date, even though the Antioch one is left out in our current "Feasts and Festivals".

But even better what Loehe did, St Peter's Chair at Rome on 18 January and St Peter's Chair at Antioch on 22 February, unapologetic -- the text stands on its own, and as so often, the "Lutheran" difference with Rome being not so much in what we do but in how and why we do it -- and unrevised from what it had been for a millennium, without attempting a correction but yet within a two-calendar calendar like Rome as we have done.

Or even better, like THE Lutheran Hymnal, which lists neither.

But in any of these three ways, better than Rome pre or post Vatican II which never ever celebrated the Confession because they don't get it. If you need a man rather than a confession of Christ for a Rock, go with Dwayne Johnson!