A Personalist Approach to the Pope
Gerhard Cardinal Müller’s The Pope: His Mission and His Task is based on the principle of emphasizing “the precedence of the person before the institution.” The “papacy is not,” he writes, “an objective and impersonal institution” but rather a relational reality pertaining between believers and Christ’s vicar on earth. It is primarily founded on the relationship between Christ and St. Peter and only then maintained by each successor who appears “before us in his specific individuality.” Therefore, the “person is antecedent to the institution and makes the abiding task and mission of Peter visible and alive.”
