“Who do you say that I Am?”
Matthew 16:15-20
Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?”
John 21:15-18
Peter said to Him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love You.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed My lambs.”
Jesus said to him a second time, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?”
Peter said to Him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love You.”
Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.”
Jesus said to him the third time, “Simon, son of John, do you love Me?” Peter was grieved because Jesus said to him the third time, “Do you love Me?” and he said to him, “Lord, You know everything; you know that I love You.”
Jesus said to him, “Feed My sheep. Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go.”
The Chair of Saint Peter, for Peter’s successor bishops of Rome, are to be “the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful”
(Catechism of the Catholic Church # 882).
The Catholic Church has commemorated the Chair of Saint Peter for his episcopacy (his seat, or his chair) in Antioch (once commemorated on January 18th, before the commemoration of the Conversion of Saint Paul), and in Rome (commemorated on February 22).
These commemorations were unified to one Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter on February 22, but the time between the two dates have important memorials of witnesses testifying to the mission of the Catholic Christian Church:
To sum up… Peter is accompanied by a Roman martyr, Paul by a martyr of one of the oldest Greek churches, that of Ephesus, where both he and Saint John the Evangelist had lived and preached. Between their two feasts are celebrated martyrs from the two extremes of the Christian world in antiquity, Persia and Spain; native Romans, one the highest authority in the Catholic Church, and one the least and last of its members; a Roman soldier from the venerable see of Milan, representing the might of the Empire, subjected to Christ; and a young woman who in the pagan world was a person of no standing at all, but in the Church is honored as one of its greatest and most heroic figures. The eight day period from January 18-25, then, becomes a celebration not just of the two Apostles who founded the church in the Eternal City, but of the universality of that church’s mission to “preside in charity” over the whole Church, as Saint Ignatius of Antioch says, and bring every person of whatever condition to salvation in Christ.
Gregory DiPippo, “The Two Feasts of St Peter’s Chair”