No offense, you clearly said it is NOT an office. Then what is the bishopric to you? An open-end position?
An episcopal see/seat/throne. Again, the problem is in what the RCC claims comes with it, not with it existing (in that sense, Sees are not to be confused with “Offices”, since apparently to the RCC the “office” is some sort of metaphorical thing handed down from Pope to Pope from St. Peter that gives them the right to tell the rest of the Church what to do because Peter was prince of the apostles; no). Nobody denies that there are Sees. Everyone who isn’t Catholic denies that the Roman bishop, through the authority of St. Peter, XYZ.
Let me see if I can put this in another way.
The Coptic Orthodox Pope, who sits upon the throne of St. Mark and is the most senior bishop in the See of St. Mark, which is located in an actual physical place (Egypt), has prerogatives that are proper to him by virtue of the authority granted within his territory in the ancient canons of the Church, both conciliar (i.e., the canons adopted at Nicea) and particular (the Canons of St. Basil, consisting of 13 shared with the Melkites and 105-06 particular to the Copts). He is subject to the ruling of the Holy Synod which he chairs, should they find reason to discipline or depose him, as has happened historically and recently. While the territory considered proper to him has fluctuated throughout the 2000 years of the church’s life (e.g., it used to include places it does not now include, and it now includes places it did not once include, as the ebb and flow of history has brought autocephaly to the Tewahedo, and diasporas and missionary work to new parts of the world which are then considered “Coptic” territory by virtue of being home to Coptic communities, churches, dioceses, etc.), it has never included the canonical territory of another bishop, even in those cases when, for various reasons, Coptic people set up their own churches in territories that are traditionally those of other Patriarchs (e.g., the Copts in Lebanon, who have been there since the 1980s despite Lebanon falling under Antiochian jurisdiction). In those cases and in every other such case, the Coptic Pope cannot step in and tell Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas (or HH Abune Antonios or Matteous, or the Catholicoi of Armenia, or the Malankarans) “I am the Pope. I declare the following to be binding upon you. You do it because I am recognized as having the authority and judgment given to St. Mark.”
By contrast, in the RCC model, we have the Roman Pope, who essentially does have this power to overrule or direct any bishop, even another Patriarch, even well outside of traditional Roman/Latin territory, and whose decisions are, of themselves, considered irreformable and cannot be appealed to a council, as councils/synods do not have authority over the Roman Pope in this conception of ecclesiological governance. And when non-Catholic people ask “How can this be so when there are so many early and modern examples of people not recognizing any such right of the Pope?” and are told that such things are right and necessary for the continuation of the “Office of St. Peter”…well, you see how this in no way denies that Rome is a Petrine See, or that Rome has primacy, or that St. Peter is prince among the apostles, or that there are bishoprics (or any other thing that is not actually about the claimed powers of the Roman Pope), but at the same time it’s not exactly what being a Patriarch means to the rest of the world, as it comes with no effective limit on power, jurisdiction, or other matters, all of which have been handled quite differently in the history the Church during the first millennium, and (for the Orthodox) today.
So I have no problem with bishoprics. “The Office of St. Peter”, however, I have a very big problem with. It doesn’t exist. There is no office to be tied to a specific apostle, to be conceived of separately as being contained in the man
or the chair by virtue of some kind of mechanical definition of apostolicity whereby such a thing may be maintained simply by the fact that some guy exists somewhere and he sits on the throne of St. Peter in Antioch or Rome, etc. as some sort of conceptualization of authority which may then be branded so as to put the rest of the church under his rule because St. Peter was this or that. St. Peter is St. Peter, St. Mark is St. Mark, St. Andrew is St. Andrew, etc. These are the men who established the sees and entrusted them via centuries of successors to the current HH Mor Ignatius Zakka I Iwas, HH Pope Tawadros, HAH Patriarch Bartholomew, etc. They will be preserved so long as the faith given to them is preserved unchanged, but not through supposed guarantees of everlasting power and authority throughout the universe as conceived of as being passed down through a metaphorical “office”. Again, such a thing does not exist. You want to talk bishoprics, fine, but then we’re talking about canonical territory, which throws a spanner in the works for the argument of the universal jurisdiction of your Pope.
