Upon This Ice I Will Build My Church, Says Leo XIV

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.

The old church was built on a rock who was a man: a flawed man, Peter. He betrayed Jesus, three times, but was penitent, and is always treated in the Gospels as the most important of the disciples. By tradition he was the first Pope: he went to Rome, founded the church there, perhaps, and then died a martyr’s death. Whatever Peter was, he was a rock. He was not a pseudo-rock of frozen water.

The Pope has been an important figure, as a bishop, ever since then, and has been important as the bishop-of-bishops and emperor-overseas ever since Constantine shifted the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantion. The Pope guided the barbarian remnants of Western empire into civilisation and Christianity.

For centuries, Popes crowned Emperors. Eventually, in a twist that resembles Leo XIV’s, Napoleon summoned the Pope to Paris in 1804 and, in the present of Pius VII, crowned himself emperor. Symbols, you see. So now, in a wonderfully 21st century twist, instead of building his church on the old rock of Peter, this man, this vicarius Petri, Leo XIV, has instead blessed a bit of ice. Perhaps he would like to build his church on it.

The irony of the symbol. For ice melts. Try building a church on ice.

But isn’t this a wonderful image, or symbol, for what the Catholic Church is trying to do? It is beating the drum for care-of-the-world, interpreted to meaning worrying-about-climate-change. We are told (in Laudate Deum) that Pope Francis emphasised that “the most effective solutions will not come from individual efforts alone, but above all from major political decisions on the national and international levels”. Lord above, even he was using the wholly inappropriate language of ‘solutions’, as if he were a chemistry teacher. Anyhow, it’s about as biblical as the Beatles.

I checked, and ‘ice’ is not in the New Testament, though ‘snow’ does appear. My biblical concordance informed me that ‘snow’ is usually associated with purity in the Bible. Angels, ‘white as snow’, all that. But there are three references to ice in the Old Testament:

“Out of whose womb came the ice? And the …. frost” (Job 38:29); “By the breath of God ice is given” (Job 37:10); “He casteth forth his ice like morsels” (Psalms 147:17).

Oddly, ice is not a symbol of purity, like snow. It is a symbol of God’s power. Well, nowadays, unlike in biblical times, man can create ice, and so, perhaps, we have lost any sense that ice reflects God’s power. Nay, ice, even when it is not made in a refrigerator, only represents our human-all-too-human capacity to melt it: sometimes by placing a benedicting hand on it, and sometimes by coughing carbon omissions into the atmosphere.

And, aye, the church is more interested in power than purity. Ice, ice, baby.

I discover by chance that the church did have ‘ice saints‘, including St Pancras, but, as far as I can see, none of them was ever pictured with ice. No, not until Leo XIV did we have a picture of a holy man staring at an ice cube with his hand on it, respectfully gazing as if imagining the whisky that could go with such a rock.

Will Leo XIV be remembered as the Ice Pope? I hope so.

If he builds his church on such a rock it has not long for this world.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.