The Chair of St. Peter

First published in the Bulletin of St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church, February 19, 2024

On Thursday, February22, we celebrate the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter.

When I sat down to write this, I imagined the response my fifth graders would have if I announced this feast. Casson would probably say “wait, we have a feast day for a chair?” Dylan would respond “for the chair or for St. Peter?” Blake might announce “St. Peter was the Pope.” Anthony would likely say “Are we celebrating the chair or because it was St. Peter’s chair?” And then at least one of them (and maybe all of them) would want to know if we still have the chair and if the Pope sits in it now. And, as usual, they would all be right in different ways.

As to whether we still have the actual, physical chair: probably not. There is a relic in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City: a wooden chair enclosed in a bronze casing by Bernini, but the chair may only date from the sixth century. But that chair also serves as symbol of the authority given to St. Peter by Christ. In his Angelus address on February 22, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI called the Chair “a symbol of the special mission of Peter and his Successors to tend Christ’s flock, keeping it united in faith and in charity.”

And it is as that symbol of the worldwide unity of the Church that we continue to celebrate the Chair. In Pope Benedict’s address at a general audience on February 22, 2006, he traced St. Peter’s own journey “from Jerusalem, the newly born Church, to Antioch, the first center of the Church formed from pagans and also still united with the Church that came from the Jews. Then Peter went to Rome, the center of the Empire, the symbol of the ‘Orbis’ - the ‘Urbs’, which expresses ‘Orbis’, the earth, where he ended his race at the service of the Gospel with martyrdom.”

The relic of the Chair, preserved in Rome, symbolizes not only St. Peter, but his authority as the “Rock,” so named by Christ to be the first head of the Church. That symbolism does not end with St. Peter, but continues through him to all of his successors, now numbering 266. Many of us may remember most of the eight Popes of the last hundred years. Those Popes are Pope Pius XI (1922-1939), Pope Pius XII (1939-1958), Pope John XXIII (1958-1963), Pope Paul VI (1963-1978), Pope John Paul I (1978), Pope (now Saint) John Paul II (1978-2005), Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013), and Pope Francis, who became Pope on March 13, 2013.