And so St. Paul’s attitude towards the apostles in general and towards St. Peter in particular confirms that picture of the Church which we derived from the original community in Jerusalem. It is clear that the governance of the Church appertained to the apostles, and that St. Peter was the most influential and esteemed of the apostles. The twelve governed the Church under the leadership of St. Peter. Jerusalem, as the seat of the apostolic college with St. Peter at its head, was the metropolis of the Christian churches. As Karl Holl has lately demonstrated against Sohm, Jerusalem had a special competence to decide questions that arose and a formal right to supervise the whole Christian mission and to accredit the missionaries.[3] St. Paul himself tells us with obvious satisfaction that the authorities in Jerusalem recognized his mission to the Gentiles and gave him “the right-hand of fellowship” (Gal. ii, 9), without laying more upon him (ii, 6). So the Pauline communities also were subject to the supreme control of Jerusalem. St. Paul adds: “Only that we should be mindful of the poor, which same thing also I was careful to do” (Gal. ii, 10). Not a few modern investigators see in these regular alms sent to Jerusalem a species of tax—Heiler even speaks of Peter’s-pence— which the Christian communities of the diaspora had to pay in acknowledgment of their intimate dependence on Jerusalem, just as the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora were bound to contribute to the temple.

So if we consider the fundamental character of the original Christian Church we can understand how Heiler can call those early years the “formative period of Catholicism,”[4] and in what respect he can say of the primitive community in Jerusalem that it displayed the “unmistakable germs and fundamental elements of the coming Catholicism.”[5] The most outstanding of these is St. Peter’s preeminence in the apostolic college.