St. Peter the Apostle

Simon, called Peter by Christ, is presented in the Gospels with all their complexity. The great arc runs from the fisherman called from his nets at the Sea of Galilee, to the confession at Caesarea Philippi — the first explicit human acknowledgment that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God — the transfiguration, the footwashing he resisted and then accepted, and finally the denial in the high priest's courtyard, three times before the cock crowed. The denial deserves full weight, not as a failure to be smoothed over but as the center around which the restoration is shaped. The threefold profession of love on the shore of Tiberias — the question asked three times, the answer given three times, and the pastoral commission spoken three times — is one of the most carefully constructed scenes in all the Gospels.

In the earliest days of the Church, Peter is everywhere: the sermon at Pentecost, the healing of the lame man at the Temple gate, the appearance before the Sanhedrin, the vision at Jaffa that opened the Gentile mission, the account of his miraculous deliverance from prison under Herod Agrippa. The primacy is settled: Christ gave to Peter a unique and irreducible pastoral charge, and the see of Rome as the place of his episcopate and martyrdom carries that charge forward. The tradition that Peter died by crucifixion head downward under Nero, not counting himself worthy to die as his Lord had died, is old and strong. That martyrdom is remembered in the physical monument above it: the great basilica on the Vatican hill, the confessio below the high altar, the long unbroken chain of Roman devotion to the place where Peter is buried.