Who Do You Say That I Am? - Catholic Herald

The question begs for an answer, not only from St. Peter but from all of us.

I loved the parish in which I grew up. St. Aloysius was the home for many families and blue-collar workers in West Allis, mine among them. It was in that humble community that I received my First Communion, was confirmed and yes, married. Msgr. Winninghoff built the block-long edifice sometime in the late 1950s with images of the Twelve Apostles on the stained-glass windows hovering over the balconies on both sides of the church. Below the windows were the words: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Mt. 28: 19-20)

As a child, I had a sense of their importance and wondered how that command could be accomplished in anyone’s lifetime. In time, it would
be made clearer and, like St. Peter in the Gospel today, I had a nascent glimpse of the essence of the mission of the Church.

For St. Peter, like us, the awareness
of our role in the Church unfolds slowly. The repartee between St. Peter and Jesus in the pagan land of Caesarea Phillipi was filled with a kind of shocking innocence and vulnerability stripping away any sense of mystery, cutting straight to the mission Jesus desired to accomplish — to build his Church.

The back story to Jesus’ aching question is revealing. Jesus brought his apostles on a field trip to a Gentile country called Caesarea Phillipi where altars to pagan deities abounded. The place is historical geographically, and it is here that Jesus takes to task the apostles asking them to identify him, which they do not really seem to be ready to do. Except for one, St. Peter, who responds to the question Jesus asks by saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” The sky did not open, angels did not appear singing Alleluia, but Jesus recognized that St. Peter’s response was from God, his Father. Jesus’ heart quickened and he said to St. Peter, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” What struck me in Jesus’ response to St. Peter was the word “Church.” I pondered the word for days. Why did Jesus use this word when it doesn’t occur in any other Gospel?

The word “Church” catapulted me back to my childhood church-home, sitting in the pews reading the great commission. It was in those very pews that I learned what Church was, the sacramental presence of God in Baptism, Eucharist, in Reconciliation, in Matrimony, and Holy Orders and Anointing of the Sick, in the proclamation of the Word of God, in its rich Tradition, and the community of the faithful. The word “Church” begs the essence of the mission of God, to bring all peoples to know the living God, to announce the Good News that Jesus has come, suffered, died and rose from the dead to bring all people to himself.

The word “Church” has an evangelical ring to it. Pope Paul VI, in the wake of the Synod of Bishops that met in 1974, and on the 10th anniversary of the close of Vatican II (1975), wrote “Evangelii Nuntiandi,” a renewal of the call of the Church to evangelize the world, once again bringing to the people of God the Good News of Jesus Christ. Pope Paul asks the question: “In our day, what has happened to that hidden energy of Good News, which is able to have a powerful effect on man’s conscience?” He wonders, to what extent and in what way is that evangelical force capable of really transforming the people of this century?

Pope Francis rides the tide of Paul’s call to evangelization in his “Joy of the Gospel.” When the Church summons Christians to take up the task of evangelization, she is pointing to the source of authentic personal fulfillment, for life is attained and matures in the measure that it is offered up in order to give life to others. (10) The “hidden energy” is the proclamation of the word of God spoken with passion and with lives that reflect love for the living God in Jesus, the Lord.

The call for evangelization by Popes Paul and Francis was timely indeed, for it focused the Church on its core mission, which caused me to wonder: If Jesus asked each of us the Petrine question today, what would we say? If he took us to the places of pagan worship where greed and hate, where lust and human exploitation, where infidelity and violence rested upon new altars, then imagine Jesus asking you and me: “Who do you say the Son of Man is?”

What would we say? Maybe we would say, “I don’t know.” Or maybe we would say, “I am not a Church person.” Or maybe we would shout out the last words of the Gloria: “You alone are the holy one, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ.”

And if we identified him in this way, the call to us is the same as it was for St. Peter: Go, make disciples of all nations! For it is then we will be living stones built into the edifice of the Church and built upon the cornerstone of Jesus Christ and upon the rock, who is St. Peter.

(Note: St. Aloysius Parish and School closed and was sold to the city of West Allis in 2021. In 2026, the buildings were leveled to make way for 147 living units.)