Does St Peter’s Need Porters?

Not only St Peter's but many Churches need a reconstituted Order of Porters with the powers of the Porters during the times of persecution, which seem to have returned.

From Crisis

By John M. Grondelski, PhD

Recently an egregious display of sexual perversion was allowed to desecrate St. Peter's, which could not have been possible before Paul VI's abolished the minor orders.

Before 1972, preparation for the priesthood involved passing through various “minor orders.” They included porter, lector, acolyte, exorcist, and subdeacon, followed by the major orders of deacon and priest. That year, Pope Paul VI issued the apostolic letter Ministeria Quaedam, abolishing the minor orders. Lector and acolyte were reconstituted as “lay ministries.” Exorcist was recognized as a specialized ministry of certain priests. Porter was eliminated, deemed unnecessary in the modern Church.

After the September 6 “LGBTQ+ pilgrimage” in Rome and events in Minneapolis, maybe we might want to ask if Paul VI’s assumptions about porters might merit reconsideration. 

Porters arose in the ancient Church—the Ecclesia quinque saeculis, the period liturgists canonize as the Church’s golden age—in order to protect the Church. For much of that time, the Church was illegal. She had to function clandestinely, underground. She had to be protected from infiltration. Porters were key gatekeepers, protecting the Church against her enemies.  

The Church was not viewed as an enemy simply because of political differences with the empire but because of what she taught. Roman opposition to the Church was in odium fidei, a rejection of what the Church stood for. So, a porter’s job was to ensure that those opposed to what the Church taught were not “welcomed” into the Church…to destroy it.

Does the Church today have “porters?” In some sense, yes. Even when I was last in Rome, twelve years ago, there was security screening for people entering the basilica. There were always signs near the door designating proper and improper dress in the basilica. Since my time there, I also understand the Bergoglio pontificate introduced something akin to a fee for “reserved time” visitor entry to St. Peter’s. So, unlike my first walk into St. Peter’s Basilica in June 1989, there are more gatekeepers these days.

In other words, there are some kind of “porters” controlling entrance. Secular porters.  Porters who make sure weaponized wackos cannot smash the Pietà or lunge at the pope. Porters who enforce standards of propriety. Even porters who get you through the door faster at an appointed time for your contribution to the Vatican’s deficit. The only thing lacking are porters who deny admission to those who reject what the Church teaches, whose beliefs pretend to be different versions of the “Faith” but are in fact in odium fidei.  

Like “pilgrims” toting backpacks during unofficial “LGBTQ+ pilgrimages” that officially declare, “f— the rules!” Granted, some of the gentiluomini may still find English to be an esoteric language they need not read, but somebody should have noticed that. At the Holy Door.

Isn’t today’s Church supposed to be “welcoming?” Isn’t she supposed to “accompany” everyone? Didn’t Pope Francis declare at the start of the 2023 synod that the Church welcomes “everyone, everyone, everyone.”

Well, yes, Francis did. But his message left out half the Gospel message.

The Church’s doors are open to “everyone, everyone, everyone”—but on Christ’s terms, not theirs. And Christ’s core message, spoken at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel (1:15), is that “the Kingdom of God is at hand! Repent!”

The Church’s message—her “Good News”—is not to offer secular bromides that “I’m OK, you’re OK.” That kitsch pop psychology went out with Thomas Harris in the 1970s (though some clerics seem stuck in that decade). The Church’s Good News is that “I’m not OK, and you’re not OK—but we can be OK by changing our ways, by repentance.”

The Greek word for “repent” is μετανοεῖτε, “metanoeite.” It literally means “to change one’s mind,” i.e., to change one’s way of thinking about life, about right and wrong, about what God expects of us. The Church’s message of repentance is to welcome “everyone, everyone, everyone” to change their minds about life, to put off the old man and to put on Christ (Ephesians 4:22-24). And proclaiming what “putting on Christ” entails is exactly why Christ left behind a Church.  

Passing through the Holy Door involves taking off the old man and putting on Christ. The whole purpose of jubilee years is spiritual conversion. Writing in Incarnationis Mysterium, his bull announcing Holy Year 2000, Pope St. John Paul II specifically addressed the meaning of passing through the Holy Door: it “evokes the passage from sin to grace which every Christian is called to accomplish” (8). He went on to state that those steps evoke “the courage to leave something behind, in the knowledge that what is gained is divine life,” a passage by which “Christ will lead us more deeply into the Church” (emphasis added)—that is, into living contact with her who is “Mother and Teacher.” 

Great 20th-century porters—like André Bessette and Solanus Casey—knew that important as the bread and clothes they handed out at their monastery doors was, far more important was their door-keeping role in bringing people back to the Church on the Church’s terms.

All of that is part of “accompaniment” and “welcoming. “Accompanying” and “welcoming” that simply calls for entrance without “the rest of the story” fundamentally misrepresents the Christian Gospel.

That is why backpackers with scatological messages and processional crosses festooned in ideological colors is not a “welcome” but a scandal. It’s why the Church, starting with St. Peter’s, needs porters whose gatekeeping function extends beyond weapons interdiction to stopping odium fidei, even when it pretends to be a counterfeit version of the Faith proclaimed by clerical Pied Pipers.

It is that fundamental failure to proclaim “I’m not OK, you’re not OK” that has led to porters who fail their fundamental mission and thus find themselves relegated to secondary functions like security checks and dress codes. “Secondary” doesn’t mean unimportant, but experience suggests those other functions have become more necessary because the Church doesn’t proclaim her moral truths unalloyed. Once those truths are relativized, everyone becomes his own judge of his “truth”—and that’s when you find that instead of moral porters offering Christ and the Church’s Truth at the door, you are asking the state for bulletproof glass in the windows.