Red-Letter Day
The Confession of St. Peter
January 18
also known as Confession of St. Peter, St. Peter's Confession, Peter's Confession at Caesarea Philippi
On this day the Church remembers Simon Peter's answer at Caesarea Philippi: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." The feast keeps the confession itself, not the office Peter held. Its date is older than its content. January 18 carried a Roman commemoration of Peter's episcopal chair from at least the eighth century until Rome struck it in 1960; the Episcopal Church supplied the vacant day with new propers under a new name in 1973, and the Prayer Book has kept it since. It opens the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
Jesus took his disciples north, out of Galilee, into the district of Caesarea Philippi, and there he asked them what people were saying about him. They gave him the rumours: John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, one of the prophets. Then he narrowed the question to the men in front of him. "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered for them all: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Jesus told him that flesh and blood had not revealed this, but the Father in heaven, and gave him a new name and the keys of the kingdom. That is the whole of it. The Gospels give no date for the day it happened, and no one since has been able to supply one.
The feast, then, is not an anniversary. It is a day the Church chose, and the choosing took a long time and went a strange way round.
January 18 was already occupied. As early as the eighth century a martyrology copied at Weissenburg entered at that date the dedication of the chair "in which Peter the Apostle first sat at Rome": not the confession, but the seat, the bishop's office at the city where he died. In 1558 Pope Paul IV made that observance a distinct feast, and the reason he did so was polemical. Prosper Guéranger, writing in the nineteenth century in Laurence Shepherd's English, states it without embarrassment: it was "in order to nullify, by the authority of the Liturgy, this strange pretension of Protestants" that Paul IV "restored the ancient Feast of St. Peter's Chair at Rome, and fixed it on the 18th of January." The reformed English prayer books never kept it. The 1662 kalendar has Prisca at January 18 and nothing else.
In 1908 an Episcopal friar named Paul Wattson, with Mother Lurana White, took hold of the same date for a different purpose. He set an octave of prayer for Christian unity to run from January 18, then the Chair of Peter, to January 25, the Conversion of Paul, bracketing the eight days between the two apostles. What the octave asked for in those first decades was the return of the separated to Rome, and it said so plainly; a generation later Abbé Paul Couturier of Lyon released it from any required agreement about the terms of unity, and asked instead for the unity of the Church as Christ wants her. The octave outlived its own first intention, and it outlived the feast that gave it its opening date: in July 1960 the Sacred Congregation of Rites published the direction that January 18 be struck from the calendar, and the martyrology at that day was made to begin again with St Prisca at Rome.
So the numeral stood empty. In 1973 the Episcopal Church put into its trial-use calendar a Holy Day that had never existed anywhere before, the Confession of St Peter, and in 1979 the Prayer Book made it permanent; the Lutheran Book of Worship had taken the same date in 1978, and the Anglican Church in North America carries it still. The day had been kept for four hundred years as an assertion about where Peter sat. It is kept now for what Peter said. The collect asks that the Church be kept steadfast "upon the rock of this faith", and the fathers had read the verse that way long before there was a feast to argue about: Chrysostom, in the translation of Prevost and Riddle, glosses "upon this rock will I build my Church" simply as "that is, on the faith of his confession", and Hilary of Poitiers, writing in exile and rendered into English by Watson and Pullan, says of the same faith that "through this faith the gates of hell cannot prevail against her." The day belongs to anyone who can give Peter's answer.
You may find that the question in this Gospel is easier to admire than to answer. Jesus asks first what people are saying, and that is a comfortable question; it can be answered with reading, with history, with other people's opinions honestly reported. Then he asks the second question, and it has no cover in it: "But who do you say that I am?" Peter answers, and is told at once that the answer was not his own achievement but a gift from the Father. That is worth holding onto, because the confession this day keeps is not a test of your cleverness or your nerve. It is a thing given, and it can be given again. The Church prays today to be kept steadfast on the rock of this faith, not on the steadiness of the man who first said it, which was never much to build on. Where in your own life have you been answering the first question when you were being asked the second?
The documentary situation for this day divides cleanly in two, and the two halves are of very different quality. For the modern feast the sources are primary and current: the Book of Common Prayer 2019 propers, read directly; the 1979 Prayer Book's calendar; and, for the day's Roman ancestor, the official Latin acts published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis for 1960. For everything before the sixteenth century the situation is thinner than it looks. Nearly the whole fourth-to-ninth-century account below descends from a single reference article, the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the Chair of Peter, which quotes the calendars at second hand. No critical edition of either the Chronograph of 354 or the Martyrologium Hieronymianum has been consulted for this page. One encyclopedist, however often repeated, is one witness.
On that witness, the earliest dated commemoration of Peter's chair at Rome is not January at all: the Chronograph compiled in 354, reflecting a list going back to 311, enters at February 22 "natale Petri de cathedra." January 18 appears later, in the eighth-century Weissenburg manuscript of the Hieronymianum: "Dedicatio cathedrae sci petri apostoli qua primo Rome petrus apostolus sedit." That manuscript is a copy of a Gallic redaction of about the year 600, itself a recension of a fifth-century Italian compilation, and the same encyclopedia flags the clause attaching Antioch to the February date as a ninth-century addition. The two dates ran together, Rome in January and Antioch in February, from the Tridentine Breviary of 1568 until 1960.
Paul IV's restoration of the January feast in 1558 is well attested in the secondary literature and reported verbatim by Guéranger, but no primary act of Paul IV has been located, and the claim should be read as a nineteenth-century report of a sixteenth-century decision. What can be checked directly is the negative on the English side, and it is decisive: no reformed English prayer book carried either Chair feast. The 1662 kalendar reads "Prisca, V. & M." at January 18 and leaves February 22 blank.
The 1960 suppression is the best-documented act in the day's history. The Variationes issued after the motu proprio Rubricarum instructum direct that the feast of the Chair of Peter at Rome on January 18 be expunged from the calendar; that the February feast lose its Antioch qualifier and stand simply as the Chair of St Peter; and that the martyrology's first entry at January 18 be deleted so that the day begins again with Prisca. It is worth being exact about this, because it is commonly misdated to 1969. The 1969 general calendar only re-ranked the surviving February day.
The name the Anglican and Lutheran books use is not attested before the twentieth century. "Confession of St Peter" appears first in the Episcopal Church's Lesser Feasts and Fasts of 1973, then in the Lutheran Book of Worship of 1978 and the Prayer Book of 1979. Two things about that account remain unsettled. The 1973 volume itself has not been examined for this page; the claim rests on secondary reporting. And the Episcopal Church's own glossary describes the inherited date as an ancient Gallican feast, where the Catholic Encyclopedia treats January 18 as Roman and only the surviving martyrology recension as Gallic. That disagreement is not resolved here.
The keeping of this day has always been shaped by what stands beside it. Since 1908 January 18 has opened the eight days that close on the Conversion of Paul, now the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, prepared jointly since 1968 by Roman and World Council of Churches commissions and observed more widely than the feast itself. The octave's early character was penitential as well as intercessory: its own leaflet of prayers directed participants "To offer a penance, a fast, the Stations of the Cross, or some devotion as an act of Reparation for the sins of heresy and schism," and its first-day intention was the return of the separated, which not everyone welcomed. When the octave's council canvassed Episcopal clergy in the winter of 1935, Bishop Fiske of Central New York replied, "No Octave of Unity for me."
The feast itself has kept almost nothing else. No fast, vigil, or food custom attaches to the day in any tradition examined; no folk practice or weather lore grew up around it, as it did around Candlemas. Its one proper hymn belongs to the older observance: the Roman Breviary sang "Quodcumque in orbe nexibus revinxeris" at the Chair feasts, stanzas lifted from Paulinus of Aquileia's longer hymn for Peter and Paul. No English hymnody has been written for the Anglican and Lutheran feast. The Church of England does not keep the day; the Eastern churches never had it, keeping Peter with Paul in June and marking January 18 for Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria.
The Book of Common Prayer 2019, Anglican Church in North America: the propers for the Confession of St Peter (January 18), source of the collect quoted here ("steadfast upon the rock of this faith") and of the appointed Gospel, Matthew 16:13-19 in the English Standard Version, from which "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" and "But who do you say that I am?" are taken. Official propers leaflet: https://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/110-Confession-of-St.-Peter.pdf
John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of St Matthew, Homily 54, section 3: "upon this rock will I build my Church; that is, on the faith of his confession." Translated by George Prevost and revised by M. B. Riddle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, vol. 10. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200154.htm
Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, book VI, section 37: "This faith it is which is the foundation of the Church; through this faith the gates of hell cannot prevail against her." Translated by E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 9. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/330206.htm
Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year, vol. 3 (Christmas, book II), page 331: the 1558 restoration and its stated purpose, "in order to nullify, by the authority of the Liturgy, this strange pretension of Protestants." Translated by Laurence Shepherd, third edition, 1904. https://archive.org/details/V03TheLiturgicalYear
Sacred Congregation of Rites, Variationes in Breviario et Missali Romano, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 52 (1960), pages 707 and 723-724: the suppression of the January 18 feast (chapter I, n. 8a), the dropping of the Antioch qualifier (n. 12b), and the deletion of the martyrology entry in favour of St Prisca (n. 17). https://www.vatican.va/archive/aas/documents/AAS-52-1960-ocr.pdf
Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), "Chair of Peter": source of the two calendar entries quoted in the History section, "natale Petri de cathedra" from the Chronograph of 354 and the Weissenburg martyrology line "Dedicatio cathedrae sci petri apostoli qua primo Rome petrus apostolus sedit." These are the Encyclopedia's quotations of critical editions, not a reading of the manuscripts. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03551e.htm
The Church Unity Octave: Prayers for Public and Private Use, published for the Council of the Church Unity Octave, undated: source of the recommendation "To offer a penance, a fast, the Stations of the Cross, or some devotion as an act of Reparation for the sins of heresy and schism," and of the printed first-day intention naming January 18 as St Peter's Chair at Rome. https://archive.org/details/the-church-unity-octave
The Chronicle, February 1936, reprinted as a pamphlet on the Church Unity Octave controversy: source of Bishop Fiske's reply, "No Octave of Unity for me." A hostile party's publication, primary for the controversy it reports. https://archive.org/details/churchunityoctave
Geoffrey Curtis, The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity (Pax House, 1940): contemporary account of Abbé Couturier's reframing of the octave. https://archive.org/details/curtis_week_prayer_christian_unity1940
Almighty Father, who inspired Simon Peter, first among the apostles, to confess Jesus as Messiah and Son of the living God: Keep your Church steadfast upon the rock of this faith, that in unity and peace we may proclaim the one truth and follow the one Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Acts 4:8–13Psalm 231 Peter 5:1–11Matthew 16:13–19