The Rights of Communion Flow to All from Peter

But as even the rudiments of Catholic faith declare, no one can be considered a bishop ... who does not adhere to the supreme Pastor to whom the sheep of Christ are committed to be pastured; and who is not bound to the confirmer of fraternity which is in the world.

And indeed “the Lord spoke to Peter; to one person therefore, so that He might found unity from one” to Peter, “the divine dignity granted a great and wonderful consortium of his power, and if He wished anything to be common with him and the rest of the princes [the Bihops], He never gave, except through him, what He did not deny to the others.”

Hence it is from this Apostolic See, where blessed Peter “lives and presides ...,” that the rights of venerable communion flow to all”; and this same See “for the Churches spread throughout the whole world is certainly the head, as it were, of their members, from which if one cuts himself off, he becomes an exile from the Christian Religion, as soon as he begins not to belong to its structure.”

Therefore the holy martyr Cyprian, writing about schism, denied to the pseudo-bishop Novatian even the title of Christian on the grounds that he was cut off and separated from the Church of Christ.

“Whoever he is,” he says, “and whatever sort he is, he is not a Christian who is not in the Church of Christ. Let him boast and preach his philosophy and eloquence with a proud voice; he who does not have fraternal charity and does not retain ecclesiastical unity, loses also what he previously had.

“By Christ one Church was founded and divided into many members throughout the world, so likewise one episcopate, diffused in the harmonious multiplicity of many bishops … but he [Novatian] attempts to build a human church. Therefore, he who does not retain unity of spirit nor communion of peace. and thus separates himself from the bond of the Church and the college of the priesthood. cannot have the power nor the honor of a bishop because he kept not the unity nor the peace of the episcopacy.”

Pius IX, Encyclical Etsi multa, November 21, 1873, §§ 24, 25.
Posted on July 18, 2026