Now, to be clear, the early Roman church did enjoy a kind of primacy. Rome was the capital of the Empire, it was the place of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, and the early Roman church was a flagship church and bastion of orthodoxy for several centuries. So it’s not hard to go back and find positive statements about the primacy, stature, and significance of Rome and her bishops. The problem is that primacy doesn’t necessarily entail supremacy and infallibility, the specific qualities Vatican I asserted were characteristic of church history. Yet people stretch the data to make it seem like it
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