Dr. John Bergsma

The room is a metaphor for the current age that we're living in, right?

So the council's done with, they've disbanded, they're no longer in the room.

Now that they're not in the room, we can talk about them and we can say whatever we want about what they decided.

And we can say, we don't think that they were right.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But the successor of Peter is always this guy in the room who's this living voice says, no, we do believe what they said.

No, that's not what they meant.

They meant what they said.

We believe what we said.

And so there has to be this constant reaffirmation that yes, we still believe these same things.

And that's the ordinary magisterium of the church.

And it's a very, very important function.

And every time that the Pope gets up and reaffirms the gospel and reaffirms the things that we have always believed down through this, it is keeping that living official voice of the church going and keeping us on an even keel, headed forward.

And the problem is without the ministry of Peter, there is doubt

without a living voice in the room about whether we still believe these things, about whether they got it wrong in the past, blah, blah, blah.

And we can't make theological progress because we keep rehashing the same old issues without being able to say that has been decided.

Done with that.

We're done with that.

We're moving on.

And that's what I experienced in Protestantism was that at any point, you know, we'd have these annual synods and potentially anything could come up because in principle we held that the church could err.