[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

Concerning the power handed over to the apostles by Christ, designated as the key to the kingdom of heaven

So, good Jesus, you have disposed your most beloved spouse, the holy Church, with the end of your own purity. Since, indeed, you were disposing for its edification, through the apostles who were your own good men, and their successors, the ministers of the evangelical priesthood, and the dispensers of your sacraments and divine mysteries, you conferred upon them an admirable power with your gracious bounty, by which they might relax the sins of men and open the door of the heavenly kingdom to those who believe, which for that cause has been named by metaphorical locution the "key to the kingdom of heaven." And so that the unity of the Church might always remain unconcussed, your wisdom, Jesus, distributed the aforementioned power to the apostles in such an order that in one of them you might place the sublimity of that principle, namely in Peter, who was the chief and the first in that school of heavenly disciples. Whence, Matthew 16, when Christ was questioning the disciples as to who they said he was, and Peter, as if he were the mouth and head of them all, answered: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God," he earned from Christ the hearing: "You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not"

"prevail against it. And to you I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatever you shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven; and whatever you shall loose upon earth shall be loosed also in heaven." O inestimable and immense power! Augustine says: "To hold heaven for a man placed on earth." Behold, now at the nod of Peter, the gates of the divine kingdom are opened; for he received the keys of the kingdom of heaven from Christ, that he might open heaven to believers by loosening the bonds of sins. O what nearby and close remedies! The kingdom of God is close at hand if one runs to Peter. No machines are sought here for the clouds, because faith alone prepares the ascent; the way is not long for those who seek the Lord, because Christ himself has become the way for believers. He placed in the world, in his stead, Peter, the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom, lest anyone might think the ascent to heaven difficult. And Bernard says: "Peter, the key-bearer of the kingdom of heaven, the tongue of the faith, the foundation, a finished honor and a glorious dignity, to have a man placed on earth acting in heaven and exercising judicial power within the choir of angels. Peter is present, and at his arbitration the universality of the world is bound and loosed; and Peter's sentence precedes the sentence of the Redeemer, because not what Christ binds, this"