St. Peter’s Chair at Rome

The Chair of Saint Peter, celebrated on February 22, is not the memorial of an individual saint but a liturgical feast honoring the teaching and pastoral authority that Christ entrusted to the Apostle Peter and, through him, to his successors. The chair, or cathedra, is the seat from which a bishop teaches; the cathedra of Peter has stood from ancient times as a symbol of the unity of the Church and of the apostolic faith handed down from the first shepherd of the Roman Church. The feast is among the oldest on the Roman calendar. The Roman chronograph of the year 354, drawing on earlier lists, records the celebration of Peter's chair on February 22, and the observance is generally traced to at least the mid-fourth century. For many centuries the Latin Church kept two related feasts, on January 18 and February 22, associated respectively with Peter's ministry at Rome and at Antioch; the calendar reform of 1960 combined them into the single celebration of February 22, which the present General Roman Calendar retains as the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, Apostle. A venerable wooden throne long honored as the chair of Peter is preserved in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome. Modern scholarship dates the surviving chair to the Carolingian era, identifying it as a gift associated with the Emperor Charles the Bald in the ninth century, though it has been venerated for centuries in connection with the Apostle. In 1666 Gian Lorenzo Bernini completed the monumental Altar of the Chair in the apse of the basilica, enclosing the relic in a soaring gilt-bronze reliquary upheld by four Doctors of the Church beneath the famous alabaster window of the Holy Spirit. For pilgrims to Rome, the Altar of the Chair remains one of the great destinations within Saint Peter's Basilica. The feast's Gospel recalls Peter's confession at Caesarea Philippi and Christ's reply that on this rock he would build his Church. In celebrating the Chair of Saint Peter, the Church gives thanks for the ministry of unity exercised by the Bishop of Rome and prays that the faith proclaimed by Peter may be preserved whole and entire.