On this “Good Shepherd Sunday,” anticipating the arrival of Pope Benedict XVI to our nation and city, we are reminded that Christ the Good Shepherd has entrusted his flock to the Apostles of whom Peter is the chief, and center of unity. The primacy of the Bishop of Rome, Successor of Peter, is clear from the start: The angelic instruction from the Easter Tomb was that the women were to tell the “disciples and Peter” (Mark 16:7), and on that same day the other Apostles and those who were with them said, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” (Luke 21:34). St. Augustine says

To Peter alone was it given to play the part of the whole Church. … Now it was not one man but the unity of the Church that received those keys. By this fact the preeminence of Peter was proclaimed, in that he bore the figure of the very universality and unity of the Church.

A journalist recently asked me to contribute to a symposium on what we would like to tell the Pope. I replied that it is more important that we listen to the Pope. As St. Ambrose wrote in the fourth century,

At length Peter is set over the Church, after being tempted by the devil. And so the Lord signified beforehand what came to pass afterwards, in that He chose him to be the shepherd of the Lord’s flock. For He said to him, ‘When thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren’ (Luke 22:31-32).

We receive the Gospel in four ways, “according to” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Greek kata means that they record what they have received, for there is one Gospel, that of Christ himself. The Pope and the bishops in communion with him have the job of proclaiming and explaining that Gospel. Times and the vicissitudes of the times change, but the Church remains the means by which the sanity of the saints guides civilization through the unbalanced perceptions of mistaken theories of man. When John Henry Newman confronted social disorders in the 1850s, no less striking than that which challenges the Church today, he said in The Idea of a University:

If ever there was a power on earth who had an eye for the times … such is he in the history of ages, who sits from generation to generation in the Chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ, and the Doctor of His Church. These are not the words of rhetoric, Gentlemen, but of history. All who take part with the Apostle are on the winning side. … The past never returns; the course of events, old in its texture, is ever new in its coloring and fashion. England and Ireland are not what they once were, but Rome is where it was, and St. Peter is the same.