Martin Scicluna seems to have had a whale of a time with The Pope, The Butler And The Cardinal (August 28). Good on him.

To him the papacy may well be merely “an institution of great antiquity, history, riches and splendour... which appeals to the imagination and our collective sense of history” two millenniums after a carpenter wagged his forefinger at a few fishermen and got it going from scratch.

To us Catholics, the papacy is a trifle more than a glamorous story of alleged but rarely corroborated intrigue, romantic as that may appear to be.

Indeed, to us Catholics, the Pope is nothing less than Vicarius Christi, the Vicar of Christ – the Lord’s representative. He is the supreme head of the Church on earth, a position he holds in virtue of the commission given by Christ himself to a presumptuous, temperamental, treacherous fisherman from Bethsaida.

Although one of Jesus’ inner circle, he didn’t think twice about denying Him when confessing Him as the Messiah seemed a less than healthy proposition. The mischiefs of the Pope’s butler seem like mere child’s play by comparison!

To Catholics, the Pope is also Summus Pontifex, the supreme bridge-builder between God and mankind. But perhaps he is above all Servus Servorum Dei, the butler of the butlers of God, if I may be allowed a little licence in the translation.

Admittedly, all this is not nearly as glamorous as what the butler saw but over the centuries it has shown itself to be rather more durable and true to that remarble promise Jesus made (and kept) concerning His Church: “And the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it”.