In these words Jesus discards for His disciples that absolute power, that domination, which was exercised by contemporary rulers, especially by the Hellenistic princes. The mark of the disciple of Jesus is to be service, and not brutal domination. In God’s Kingdom there is to be no “lording it over them” and no “letting them feel one’s power,” but loving ministry and ministering love. The words themselves make it plain enough that the Master is not excluding all authority and all power from His society, but only that power which is essentially brutal and domineering. This meaning of our Lord’s words is brought out still more clearly by the evangelist Luke (xxii, 24 ff.) who gives Mark’s logion in the form: “He that is the greater among you, let him become as the younger: and he that is the leader as he that serveth.” By those words Jesus makes it perfectly clear that there shall be a “greater” among his disciples, and that there shall be those who are “leaders.” So that his recommendation of brotherly humility and love is not directed against the principle of authority in itself, but against the egotistical misuse of this principle. How else could Jesus have set Himself up as a pattern of service and brotherly love, and yet in the same breath call Himself the “Son of Man,” that is the Lord of the future and of the judgment, the holder of authority? Just as His brotherly service does not exclude His supreme dignity as Son of Man, so his recommendation of humility and love cannot be intended in an anti-hierarchical sense. Therefore it is a misinterpretation of the plain intention of Jesus to argue that the idea of a primacy is irreconcilably opposed to His teaching concerning humility and brotherly love. The contrary is true. The teaching of Jesus obtains its luminous fulfillment exactly in-papacy and episcopacy, if they be correctly conceived. For the papacy, regarded in the light of the supernatural essence of the Church, is nought else but a personification of love, the manifestation of the unity of the Body of Christ on earth. It is therefore in its essential nature the exact opposite of domination; it is born not of brutality, but of love. Papacy and episcopacy are divine power, but power put to the service of love. Certainly the pope has sometimes to speak out in sharp and peremptory admonition. It is as when Paul cried: “Shall I come to you with a rod?” (1 Cor. iv, 21). And sometimes his anathema rings through the world “in the same tones and with the same language” (Heiler) as St. Paul used when he excluded the incestuous Corinthian from the Christian community. Nevertheless, even this angry and corrective love remains love, love for the community of brethren. The pope has in so far the primacy of love. Nor is there any hierarchy in the Church that may express itself otherwise than in ministering love. Woe to the pontiff who misuses his primacy of love for personal ends, to gratify his lust of power, his avarice, or other passion[4] He sins against the Body of Christ, he offers violence to Jesus. He has to render an account beyond that required of any other member of the Body of Christ. How terribly at the Judgment may the words sound in his ears, when the risen Lord shall ask him: “Peter, lovest thou me, lovest thou me more than these?” That is the great and sacred privilege of his office, to love Christ and His Body more than all other men, to realize that honorable title which Gregory the Great assumed: “Servant of the servants of God” (Servus servorum Dei). Pope Pius XI, in his first Encyclical, laid it down that those who preside are nothing but “servants of the general weal, servants of the servants of God, especially of the weak and needy, after the pattern of the Lord.”[4]