Greetings, Parish Orpins and Retroats and Ret retrogrades. Happy Sunday. For you Americans, it's Super Bowl Sunday.

And I had some good phone discussions with some of the people that I have disagreed with recently over the past half a week, and I wanted to kick a

shout out to one of those people. I was calling him Mexican Rocky. I think his name is Tamu. I'm,

I'm not exactly sure how he pronounces that, but we're calling a Mexican Rocky in the show. We're

disagreeing over

the extent of papal power, and it's a really, really straightforward, fundamental disagreement,

and it's very central to what it means to be a Catholic.

Well, how much do we believe the Pope is like Jesus?

He's in some sense an exemplar.

Everyone knows this.

The Pope is the vicar of Christ,

the vouchsafer of the teachings that Jesus gave to the apostles, namely the prince of the apostles,

Peter. The prince of the apostles Peter conferred something we call the Petraine office. This is the

pontificate. And so the first prince of the apostles communicates to his successor a princehood of the

apostlehood that is communicated to by all of the previous bishops to later bishops.

They're like the other 11 apostles.

And Peter is like all of the bishops of Rome.

So just as Peter was to the 11, the bishop of Rome is to all of the other bishops, and they're all like the apostles. It's pretty simple. And that means that they are usually,

ordinarily good models of Christianity for us, good models of exemplars of Christian fidelity and

behavior. There have been lots and lots of success. There have been lots of exceptions

to the rule among the various successors of Peter and among the various successors of other

of the apostles. So it's not except in one sense, one limited sense, it's not an exceptionless rule that the chief bishop

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