In the Roman Church’s Back Yard: Challenges for the Evangelical Church in Italy (pt. 1)

Written by Beaux Hargrove

By Gianluca Pollutri

How did the papacy develop from an alleged succession of apostolic authority into a claim of infallible spiritual and political power? Tracing the historical growth of the papal office from its misinterpretation of Matthew 16:18, this article examines how Rome departed from the biblical foundation of Christ as the head and cornerstone of his church.

*This article is the first in a two-part series.

12 min read

PDF

Introduction

“From the very beginning a humongous giant elevated himself up to cover the whole world with his shadow and to obscure the science of the gospel. . . . This giant is called Romanism.”1 These were the sobering words of nineteenth-century Italian reformer Teodorico Pietrocola Rossetti. All that the Roman Catholic Church asserts as its prerogative, all that the papacy proclaims and does ex cathedra—is the “norm of life” for the Catholic world, both in religious and political matters. In fact, its impact reaches far beyond the walls of the Vatican City, and the worldwide evangelical church must be constantly on guard against this deceptive stronghold of authority and power. Nowhere, however, is its impact felt more acutely than the home of the Roman Catholic Church itself: Italy.

Rome has long distorted the biblical vision of church leadership. This distortion has led to many challenges to a sound ecclesiology today among former Catholics, particularly for Italian believers who have left the Roman Church. Believing congregations face two major problems: (1) a dominant spectator mentality and (2) a tainted view of giving and of support for church leadership. This article will demonstrate the roots of this wrong understanding of leadership via the history of the papacy in the Roman Catholic Church. Then, in the next article, we will examine the resulting challenges that evangelical believers face and what a biblical understanding of leadership and involvement should be within the true Italian church.

The Original Exegetical Misstep

The office of the papacy has a long and, sadly, dark history. The Christianity that began with simple fishermen-turned-apostles morphed over centuries. An organization emerged with an office at the heart of the political world, producing a long line of popes who claimed to possess the infallibility of God Himself. At its root, however, the Roman Catholic Church, the oldest institution of the Western world, claims to derive its mandate from Jesus’s famous words in Matthew 16:18: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (LSB).

The Roman Church maintains that Peter (in Greek Petros, meaning “stone”) is “the rock” (petra, meaning “large rock” or “bedrock”)2 upon which the church would forever be built. It claims that Peter was appointed the head (“prince”) of all of the apostles and that he was granted the keys to the kingdom of heaven, cementing his authoritative role and establishing a lineage of succeeding, infallible leaders for the Church. Furthermore, this interpretation is alleged to have been validated by the universal teaching of church fathers, and that all those who would claim otherwise should be anathema (“accursed”).3

Evidence for Rome’s interpretation dates back to the third-century debate between Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, and Stephen, the bishop of Rome (AD 254–256).4 Both appealed to Matthew 16 to argue whether the bishop of Rome had authority over other churches to establish doctrine and practice. Yet, while both somehow understood Peter to be the “rock” upon which Christ built the Church, Cyprian demanded evidence from Scripture—not merely tradition—that Peter ever claimed primacy over the other apostles.5 Cyprian, alongside other southern and eastern bishops whom Stephen attempted to excommunicate, rejected the claim that the Roman “episcopate” held the so-called “chair of Peter” by succession.6 Stephen doubled down, and the Roman church has followed him ever since.

The impact of this serious misinterpretation of Scripture has been far reaching. Yet Peter’s confession that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (v. 16) (the context of Jesus’s promise to build His church, v. 18) is often lost in the discussion of this passage. Matthew clearly did not have in mind the papal office when he recorded this episode in Jesus’s life. Instead, he wanted believers to know that Jesus was and is the promised Messiah, the “anointed” of the Lord.7 The biblical author’s intention for this passage was to proclaim Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God—and we would do well to keep his intention our main focus.8

The rest of Jesus’s statement offers further insight. First of all, Jesus recognized Peter as blessed in response to his confession. R. T. France notes: “Jesus congratulates Peter on his exceptional insight, not in the sense that Peter has himself puzzled out the truth but that, like all knowledge about God and his Son (11:27), it has been revealed to him by God himself (cf. 11:25).”9 Jesus’s response was, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah” (from the Aramaic, bar meaning “son”). A simple and mortal man, the son of a human father, Peter was blessed to be the recipient of such revelation. It was a result of neither his human abilities nor his genealogical lineage that Peter uttered those words; it was only because of a gracious God.10

John MacArthur comments on this important passage:

Therefore, whether one interprets Matthew 16:18 as referring to Peter as a small stone placed on the mountainous stone of his confession of Christ or as referring to his being one with the rest of the Twelve in his confession, the basic truth is the same: The foundation of the church is the revelation of God given through His apostles, and the Lord of the church is the cornerstone of that foundation.11

Jesus, not Peter, builds His church. Jesus, not the pope, protects His church from the gates of Hades. Jesus simply made Peter a pebble in the church’s foundation, built upon Himself as the chief cornerstone (Eph 2:20; cf. Acts 4:8–12; 1 Pet 2:4–7). Thus, the problem with the Roman misinterpretation of this passage is not in seeing the petra (“rock”) as somehow connected to Peter’s historical role per se but in how they define that role. The Roman Catholic Church uses God’s Word in vain, building a false ecclesiology on a passage that does not speak in the least on apostolic succession, much less papal authority.

There is no hint of papal primacy over local churches in this passage, nor of papal preeminence over God’s universal church, nor of the pope’s infallible voice as the “vicar of Christ.” Christ Himself is the true apostolic foundation of the church; He is the cornerstone on which His church is built (Eph 2:20). For this reason, the apostle Paul affirmed, “What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed” (1 Cor 3:5). Paul metaphorically calls the church “God’s building” (v. 9). By God’s grace, an apostle was merely a servant who had the privilege of carefully building on the foundation already laid. Woe to the man, whether pope or any church leader, who lays a different foundation (Gal 1:6–10). Christ alone is the rock, the head, the builder, and sustainer of His church.

The Growth of the Papal Office

Tragically, history documents a turn away from the biblical foundation of Christ in Matthew 16:18. The origins of the papacy, as Leonardo De Chirico notes, lie in that most basic and innocent of facts that Peter was present in Rome and martyred in that city.12 According to a tradition circulated by Irenaeus around AD 180, Peter and Paul, in their church-planting efforts, eventually founded the church in Rome.13 Church tradition further holds that Peter was martyred in Rome as well.14 All this caused the congregation and its leaders to be held in high regard by many others from early on.15 Accordingly, Emperor Constantine (AD 274–337) built a church upon the supposed gravesite of Peter—the place that was then referred to as Vatican Hill. Thus, the Roman Church, it is supposed, was theologically and geographically built upon the shoulders of Peter. But these are claims grounded in uncertainty.

The church at Rome especially grew in its reputation after Constantine died on Whitsunday, AD 337. The Western Empire experienced an inexorable eighty-year decline. As a result, the bishop of Rome became a quasi-monarchical figure in the West. A succession of “popes” (as they were later designated)16—including Damasus (AD 366–384),17 Siricius (AD 384–399),18 and Innocent I (AD 401–417)19—paved the way for Leo I (AD 440–461) to secure his primacy and give himself the title pontiff.20 This confirmed what was noted above, as De Chirico writes, “The thinking in the papist sense on the Petrine texts begins from the third century when the theological biblical reading is interwoven with implications of a political-ecclesiastical nature.”21 Thus, the cement of the earlier misinterpretation of Matthew 16 began to solidify as a whole Church, a global hierarchy, was built around this Petrine “line of succession.”

Karl Baus comments on Leo I: “This Pope was profoundly convinced that only Christ is the true and eternal bishop of his church. . . . But since Christ, as the eternal bishop, had granted Peter an imperishable participation in his episcopal power, Peter always presides over his (Roman) seat, and it is Peter who in turn works and acts in his heirs.”22 During the Nestorianism debate, Leo I wrote the famous document called The Tome of St. Leo, defending the true humanity of Christ. The letter was read enthusiastically at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451), where Leo’s monophysite (from Greek monos [“one”] + physis [“nature”]) defense of Christ’s nature was well accepted. But the prelates responded in this manner: “This is the faith of the fathers, this is the faith of the Apostles. So we all believe, thus the orthodox believe. Anathema to him who does not thus believe. Peter has spoken thus through Leo. So taught the Apostles.”23 Thus, Leo was considered no longer only a successor to Peter; he had now also officially become his mouthpiece.

The scope of the papal office expanded further with Pope Gregory I (AD 590–604),24 his many interventions on the European scene,25 and his prolific writing.26 Gregory’s papacy was characterized by new episcopal responsibilities, including civil and military duties. According to George Jenal, the pope’s authority “considerably expanded to the competence for what concerned the social assistance, . . . the surveillance of offices and municipal orders, [and] . . . the collaboration in the choice of city administrators.”27

“Fullness of power” (plenitudo potestatis) was added to the already staggeringly powerful papal office during the term of Pope Nicholas I (AD 858–867) in order to tip the balance in the struggle for power between the East and West.28 Jovino De Guzman Miroy explains, “What best encapsulates medieval papalism is the idea of plenitudo potestatis . . . defined as the Roman Pontiff’s possession of absolute power, a privilege accorded to him by Christ for the preservation and promotion of the Church.”29 In this way, a tragic cumulation of departures from the apostolic, biblical, Christological foundation was leading to an irreversible conclusion.

The Declaration of Infallibility

The spiritual and secular authority of the papal office reached its low point during the medieval age with endless scandals, intrigues, and distractions that marred the Holy See’s reputation. A confused and disjointed medieval Church was then a major catalyst for Luther’s search for salvation outside of it. That very same Reformation, however, then also led to a slow decline in papal power, culminating with the birth of the modern secular state of Italy in 1870. Ironically, during the first Vatican Council (1869–1870), it was Pope Pius IX—the same pope who had witnessed the dissolution of the papal states—who declared the infallibility of the pope when speaking ex cathedra (“from the throne”), that is, in his official capacity and concerning faith and morals. From that point on, the pope would become the sole authority for continuing divine revelation, Scriptural interpretation, and the norms of tradition.

Today, the Roman Catholic catechism still affirms, “The Roman Pontiff, as the successor of Peter, is the perpetual and visible principle and foundation of unity of both the bishops and of the faithful.”30 According to their teaching, “the pope’s power of primacy over all, both pastors and faithful, remains whole and intact. In virtue of his office, that is, as Vicar of Christ and pastor of the whole Church, the Roman Pontiff has full, supreme and universal power over the Church. And he is always free to exercise this power.”31

Thus, for more than fifteen centuries the pope has increasingly exercised and represented a monumental effigy of power, culminating in the Roman Catholic dogma that this human figure cannot err when pronouncing in his official capacity as the heir of Peter and the representative of Christ. His power is exerted through political and spiritual leadership, presence, and influence globally, but most especially in the Vatican’s backyard. This is the context in which the evangelical church in Italy finds itself today. It is in the Vatican’s shadow, the pope’s backyard. This environment raises unique challenges that threaten the church and merit a biblical response.

Gianluca Pollutri (MDiv, ThM, The Master’s Seminary) serves in Florence, Italy, with his wife, Sonia. He is actively involved in church planting, disciple making, and leadership training. Gianluca also teaches at the Istituto Teologico Evangelico Verbum, a TMAI training center.

  1. 1.  Teodorico Pietrocola Rossetti, “Lo Stabilimento Del Papato,” in Pagine di Fede e Libertà, ed. Egidio Marinaro (Verdone Editore, 2014), 305. Original translation.

  2. 2.  See footnotes in the LSB. Whereas petra (πέτρα) was the standard term in Greek literature for “rock,” mainly for boulders, cliffs, and rocky hills, the derived noun petros (πέτρος) usually referred in distinction to stones that could be hand-held, only occasionally meaning anything larger. It was the latter that Jesus designated Simon Peter (Πέτρος). See also Moisés Silva, ed., “πέτρα,” New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (Zondervan, 2014), 3:735.

  3. 3.  First Vatican Council, “First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, Pastor Aeternus, 18 July 1870,” sec. 4, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/ecum20.htm.

  4. 4.  Gregg A. Allison, Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Zondervan Academic, 2011), 596–98.

  5. 5.  Cyprian, Epistles of Cyprian 70.3, 73.2 (ANF 5:377, 386); “Bishop (II. Bishop of Rome),” A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs, ed. David W. Bercot (Hendrickson, 1998), 75–76.

  6. 6.  Firmilian, Epistles of Cyprian 74.6, 74.17 (ANF 5:391, 394); “Bishop,” DECB, 76–77.

  7. 7.  “Christ” is a transliteration of the Greek term christos (χριστός), which translated the Hebrew term mashiah (מָשִׁיחַ), meaning the “anointed one” promised in the Old Testament (cf. John 1:41).

  8. 8.  Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 14–28, Word Biblical Commentary 33B (Word, 1998), 468.

  9. 9.  R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Eerdmans, 2007), 619.

  10. 10.  Leon Morris, The Gospel According to Matthew, Pillar New Testament Commentary (IVP Academic, 1992), 421.

  11. 11.  John F. MacArthur Jr., Matthew 16–23, MacArthur New Testament Commentary (Moody, 1988), 29.

  12. 12.  Leonardo De Chirico, Il Papato: Una Guida Evangelica (BE Edizioni, 2013), 38.

  13. 13.  Irenaeus, Haer. 3.3.2 (ANF 1:415); “Bishop,” DECB, 74.

  14. 14.  Tertullian, Praescr. 36 (ANF 3:260).

  15. 15.  Allison, Historical Theology, 597–98.

  16. 16.  Pope comes through Latin from Greek pappas, meaning “papa,” the child’s word for “father.” While referring to church leaders as a father was common in Eastern Greek-speaking churches, in the Latin West it was uncommon outside of Rome. From the sixth century it became increasingly reserved for that bishop, until it was made officially exclusive to him by Pope Gregory VII (1100–1187). J. VanEngen, “Papacy,” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Daniel J. Treier and Walter A. Elwell (Baker Academic, 2017), 640.

  17. 17.  Much controversy surrounds the life of Damasus (e.g., sexual scandals and charges of murder). He claimed the seat of Peter using Matthew 16:18 as support. He built a stronger reputation when he commissioned Jerome to produce the Vulgate, a better Latin translation than was available at the time. See John Julius Norwich, The Popes: A History (Vintage Digital, 2011), 417.

  18. 18.  Siricius followed in Damasus’s steps and claimed to be the direct successor of Peter with authority as pope. See Jakob Speigl, “I Papi nella Chiesa Imperiale del Secolo IV e dell’Inizio del V. Da Silvestro a Sisto III,” in Storia dei Papi (Edizioni San Paolo, 1994), 60–62.

  19. 19.  “It was Innocent I who reinforced the idea of the papacy as a juridically defined office starting from the idea of the bishop of Rome as the successor of Peter.” De Chirico, Il Papato, 41.

  20. 20.  The origin of pontiff was in Roman state religion. The Latin word pontifex, literally meaning “bridge maker,” was used in a figurative sense for a class of Roman cult priests. The pontifex maximus was their high priest, but the title became associated with the emperor from Augustus onward (ca. 12 BC). Burkhard Gladigow, “Roman Religion,” ABD, 5:810.

  21. 21.  Leonardo De Chirico, “Papato,” in Dizionario di Teologica Evangelica, ed. Pietro Bolognesi, Leonardo De Chirico, and Andrea Ferrari (Edizione Uomini Nuovi, 2007), 533.

  22. 22.  “This concept of the Roman bishop as heir of Peter, already affirmed by Siricius, is further deepened by Leo I who saw the effective foundation of this primacy: as the heir succeeds in all the right and duty to the one who nominated him as such, so the one who time after time is bishop of Rome, as the heir of Peter, assumes his function in all his power and privileges.” Karl Baus and Eugen Ewig, Storia della Chiesa: L’Epoca dei Concili: La Formazione del Dogma il Monachesimo Diffusione Missionaria e Cristianizzazione Dell’impero (Jaca Book, 1992), 288. For a more detailed study on Leo I the Great, see Peter Stockmeier, “Leone Magno,” in Storia dei Papi (Edizioni San Paolo, 1994), 70–88.

  23. 23.  “The Council of Chalcedon: Extracts from the Acts, Session II,” in The Seven Ecumenical Councils, NPNF 2 14:259. Emphasis added.

  24. 24.  He introduced the papal title Servus Servorum Dei (“Servant of the Servants of God”). See De Chirico, Il Papato, 44. For more discussion on Gregory the Great, see Gregor Jenal, “Gregorio Magno,” in Storia dei Papi (Edizioni San Paolo, 1994), 105–26.

  25. 25.  “In the VI century the Byzantine revival in Italy could only slow down for some time but could not stop an evolution destined to be intensified at the end of the century with Gregorio Magnus [i.e., Pope Gregory I], the great protector of the Italians who were abandoned by the eastern empire and exposed to the reprisals of the Lombards, the supporter of the monks who did not fail to open the granaries of Sicily to feed the hungry population.” Guerriero, “Il Ministero del Papa Tra Teologia e Storia,” 13.

  26. 26.  John W. O’Malley, A History of the Popes from Peter to the Present (Sheed & Ward, 2010), 49–50.

  27. 27.  Jenal, “Gregorio Magno,” 108.

  28. 28.  De Chirico, Il Papato, 45.

  29. 29.  Jovino De Guzman Miroy, Tracing Nicholas of Cusa’s Early Development (Editions Peeters, 2009), 52–53.

  30. 30.  Second Vatican Council, “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium, 21 November, 1964,” sec. 23, accessed July 25, 2025, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

  31. 31.  Second Vatican Council, “Dogmatic Constitution on the Church: Lumen Gentium,” sec. 22.

Beaux Hargrove
Next

The Autobiography of John G. Paton (pt. 5): Becoming A Foreign Missionary