Upon This Ice I Will Build My Church, Says Leo XIV
by James Alexander 8 October 2025 1:00 PM
Well, we have had the news, we have had the picture, and we have had Roger Watson’s judgement – a sound one – but I fear that, since this story concerns his Holiness the Pope, we also need a bit of history and theology. Or untheology, as the case may be.
For a thousand years Jesus spoke Latin and though I have little Latin and less Greek, I always remember the phrase “super hanc Petram”: which means: on, or I suppose, literally, above this rock. “Super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam,” said Jesus in the Vulgate. “On this rock I shall build my church.” It is the only known instance of Jesus joking, since he was playing on the name of Peter. This is from Matthew 16:18. In (archaic) English it is: “And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” The play on words is there in the original Greek (and it is likely that Jesus spoke Greek, as a cosmopolitan Galilean): “Su ei Petros, kai epi taute te petra oikodomeso mou ten ekklesian.”
Well, the 267th Pope, perhaps provoked by the 45th and 47th President of the United States, has suggested that his church shall be built on a new rock, namely, that chunk of ice that some activist transported down from Greenland to drip all over the stage in a palace in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.
Ironies abound.
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/10/08/upon-this-ice-i-will-build-my-church-says-leo-xiv/
