Saints Peter and Paul 2025
Acts 12: 1-11; 2Tim 4: 6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16: 13-19
On the evening of this day in 1961, I along with a gaggle of future classmates and a cluster of parents, was ushered for the first time through the portals of the establishment which was to be responsible for my secondary education. We were told some things, asked others, and then sent away to return on a September Thursday.
How, you may ask, am I so certain of the date? That’s easy: it was a Holy Day of Obligation, and the four of us who were attending Catholic Primary schools had enjoyed a day off, whilst our contemporaries in state or C of E schools hadn’t.
The principle of giving children a day off to celebrate a Holy Day was a sound one, though no doubt difficult or even impossible in today’s very different social conditions. After all, a Holy Day originally entailed a holiday as a matter of course—that is the origin of the word “holiday” which was a day free from work to celebrate, through attendance at Mass, but also through recreation, whatever Church festival (Holy Day) was occurring.
In sterner centuries, and as the nature of work changed, and the Church was no longer responsible for setting the agenda of countries, the concept of holiday for a Holy Day was lost, and the rule of obligation prevailed. No longer were Catholics free from work to celebrate the Holy Day to the full: instead, they were (and are) expected to fit Mass in before work, or during their dinner hour (if such a thing still exists) or after their return from work, and the priest, conscious of people’s needs, feels obliged to keep Mass as short as possible to facilitate the rush to work.
Many years after that original approach to secondary education, I found myself, as a priest, attempting to instil the delights of Latin, Greek, and Ancient History into a new generation of lads. On a Sunday morning, I would usually supply a Mass for Fr. Donald Gordon, the delightfully gentle and prayerful parish priest of Sacred Heart, Hindley Green, on the outskirts of Wigan. Fr. Gordon was far from being a radical, but he would maintain, quietly and logically, that if there was no holiday, there could be no obligation, a view which failed to find favour with the powers-that-be.
Today, we keep the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Had it not been a Sunday, priests would be hastening from church to church, seeking to make Mass as available as possible, while the faithful would be scratching their heads, attempting to work out where and when they could “fulfil the obligation”.
It is an important feast, though whether it really deserves to impose an obligation, or to displace Sunday’s liturgy, is another matter. Peter and Paul are universally recognised as foundation stones of the Church, the former even owing his name to that role. They are giants, on whose shoulders we stand, and whose very peculiarities remind us of the pre-eminence of grace: only the grace of God could have built the Church on two such different and such flawed characters.
There is an antiphon for today’s feast in the Roman breviary, which claims “They loved each other in life”. In your dreams, matey! There are indications in the scriptures that they could barely stand each other. Paul openly sneers to the Galatians about the authority of Peter and the other apostles, whilst demanding from the Corinthians respect for his own authority. Also to the Galatians, he brags about calling out Peter’s cowardice in a way which contradicts Jesus’ own instructions.
That same cowardice of Peter emerged even more dramatically in his threefold denial of Jesus. Add to that his tendency to promise more than he could deliver, and Paul’s ability to fall out with anybody and everybody, and we may feel justified in applying the term “flawed genius” to both.
This is where grace is seen at work. Would you or I have chosen either Peter or Paul to guide the Church in its infancy? I doubt it; yet Jesus did so, with results which will endure as long as time lasts. Today we honour Peter and Paul, warts and all, we reflect on our own flaws, and we thank God for using these two saints to enable us to belong to the Body of Christ almost two millennia later.
