The Catholic Accent Podcast

17 - Breaking Barriers: Peter, Cornelius, and the Council of Jerusalem

• Diocese of Greensburg • Season 2 • Episode 7

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A rooftop vision, a generous centurion, and a room full of leaders wrestling with change—this is the turning point where identity meets inclusion and love reorders the rules. We open the door on the lived world of early Jewish Christians, where kosher meals, ritual purity, and Sabbath rhythms defined daily life. Then we sit with the hard question: how do you welcome Gentiles into a community formed by the Mosaic Law without creating a two-tier church?

Peter’s encounter with the descending sheet reframes everything. What God calls clean cannot be dismissed as common, and the Spirit uses Cornelius’ charity to show that grace is already at work beyond familiar borders. We unpack why this wasn’t merely a menu change but a shift in what marks the people of God: from external boundaries to the “circumcision of the heart,” from scorekeeping to the law of love. Along the way, we talk guardrails and growth—how rules can be good teachers, and how maturity in Christ lets the church keep the moral core while letting ritual barriers fall.

The Council of Jerusalem comes into focus as the church’s first model for discernment and authority. Apostles and elders gather to answer the question that would shape mission for centuries: must Gentiles keep the Mosaic Law to belong to Christ? The decision clarifies a path of freedom ordered by love, rooted in Jesus’ own outreach across Judea, Samaria, and Gentile cities. Expect practical insights, honest tension, and a few laughs as we trace how unity without uniformity became the church’s distinctive witness.

If this conversation helps you see law, love, and belonging with fresh eyes, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Your support helps more listeners find thoughtful, faith-filled conversations like this one.

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Jordan Whiteko, Father Andrew Hamilton, Father Christopher Pujol, Vincent Reilly, Cliff Gorski, John Zylka, Sarah Hartner

SPEAKER_01:

You're listening to the Catholic Act of Podcast. We discussed the act that Jesus performed that has done his disciples. Great to be back, Jordan.

SPEAKER_00:

You don't know us by now, you're never gonna know.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm Jordan Waco here with Father Hamilton and Father Fujil.

SPEAKER_02:

Alright, Jordan.

SPEAKER_01:

Bring us back. We're back again. New show.

SPEAKER_02:

New Jordan. Episode seven. New wine, new one.

SPEAKER_01:

We're breaking barriers. Peter, Cornelius, and the Council of Jerusalem. So, as we talked about in a previous episode, most early Christians still practice some aspects of Judaism. What would these practices have been? Father Chris.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, the early Christians being faithful Jews first, you know, they would have still continued ritual purity laws. So eating kosher, um, not mixing uh dairy and meat, they would still, you know, ceremonially wash their vessels and make sure everything's cleaned, avoid things that could make them ritually impure, such as blood.

SPEAKER_01:

Um what are some examples of kosher? Because like right now, all I'm thinking about is pickles.

SPEAKER_02:

They're kosher.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Give me some more.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, a certain way in which that you handle the foods that that come about, that they are like properly handled, that they don't mix and touch other things, and they're processed correctly.

SPEAKER_02:

So, like, it would be really even down to the humane killing of some of these animals. And so you would have animals that would in the Old Testament sacrificed at the temple, and then they would be either burned or consumed by the priests at the temple. And so, even in this period of growth for the early church, there would be certain customs of how the animal would be bled out. Because if there is any sign of blood maintained in the animal, that meat would not be kosher.

SPEAKER_00:

Life is in the blood. So it wasn't to be eaten in that way from the Mosaic Law. But you have to figure that the early Christians are coming out of, as we said, uh Judaism. And so what they're following is the Mosaic Law and in many ways different schools of thought. So, say, for example, like the Pharisees, what St. Paul was really trained in, they knew all of the laws around the original Ten Commandments that were built up as the Levitical laws. So the 613 other impositions really upon the Jewish people that helped you not to even come close to breaking the ten moral commandments of God in the Old Testament.

SPEAKER_01:

So, why would it have been difficult for non-Jewish people to embrace these customs?

SPEAKER_00:

Like they're it's the way you live. I mean, everything that you do is based around those laws. If you lived a law every single day and habituated yourself to that, it's very hard to stop doing that.

SPEAKER_01:

So even like if you look So like they're getting a like they can get away with eating more now, but it's hard because it's breaking tradition.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, but even if you look at like some of the Orthodox Jewish communities we have here in the States, during you know, the celebration of the Sabbath, they have food prepared so that they don't actually have to cook. They have special light switches so that they don't break the law of working on the Sabbath. So if you're following the law to its uh really exact letter, yeah, letter of the law, then it's a very strict and burdensome uh way of living. And so now we have uh Peter, who is Jewish, embracing a Gentile community, and that Gentile community didn't grow up with these laws, they aren't concerned about being ritually impure, and so there has to be this conversation now how do we move forward to both welcome the Gentile community while maintaining our identity as Jewish people, and not setting up a tiered system where we were Jewish and we are circumcised, we follow all the laws of the Mosaic covenant, and Gentiles are a second-tier Christian.

SPEAKER_00:

But you can see this in certain communities in a bad way that this can break out in spirit, where the more that I do, the better I am than somebody else. Yeah. Quantitatively covering all these things rather than the qualitative, right? And what Jesus is really asking throughout his own teaching and then later through the apostles, is circumcision of the heart a sign of interior transformation, not just following the law for the sake of the law and getting a grade at the end of it, like a report card, but rather how are you actually living out the essence of the law? And so that becomes the early debate in the church, and this is where we see Peter as a Jew really needing to come to a greater understanding of where the law of Christ is not supplanting the law of Moses, but bringing it to its fulfillment.

SPEAKER_02:

We even see this in Jesus' own ministry if we think about that time when he's walking through a field full of grain with his disciples, and the Pharisees come after him and say, Your disciples aren't following the Sabbath because they're picking grain to eat as they walk. Now, in our minds, we wouldn't think of that as work. And when you're free from the law or freed by the law, then you have a different perspective. But really, the the leaders at the time were very imminent in in supplanting.

SPEAKER_00:

In the teaching of that is man is not made for the Sabbath, but Sabbath for the man. The whole point of the Old Testament laws were to try to help guide as guardrails towards living out freedom in Christ. So, for example, children, whenever they're young, you need more rules around children, what they're to do, how they're to live, what time they should go to bed, how they use their phones. If they do that with proper discipline in those early rules, then some of the rules can fall away, and then you're much better. Think of like an analogy of bowling. You need the bumpers because you're probably going to throw tons of gutter balls, Jordan. You used this analogy last season. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

Well, Jordan still has a bedtime, too. It's a good analogy. Yeah. It is a good analogy.

SPEAKER_00:

Let's use it again. And uh, and because of that, and if you can remember what episode that was from, you get a free t-shirt.

SPEAKER_01:

We have to make t-shirts, but sure.

SPEAKER_00:

But once once you master kind of those early skills and become an expert bowler, you don't need them anymore. The guardrails don't need to be there, and you're throwing strikes. And so that's the way of the growth of maturity in Christ. And you could see Israel in the Old Testament is like a father with an immature child that's not listening. And so there has to be more rules. And then as you come to maturity in Christ, now the church doesn't need the Levitical laws in the same manner, and so they fall away in the fulfillment of the law. Are you a bowler?

SPEAKER_02:

Because after using a lot, I mean, he used one of those slides that you line up and drift slide through. You remember wee bowling whenever you'd throw it. So you're a big wee bowler.

SPEAKER_00:

I was like one of those guys that like at least three times, like you remember the remote, and then the ball would just fall down, and then everybody would be real sad. Spin around in the back. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And maybe you were gonna say you hit the TV with the remote.

SPEAKER_01:

That's what I thought. I thought you were gonna lose grip and it was gonna smash a TV. Like we basically. And then you're like, this is why children need rules and adults. This is why there's just punishments. Um, so you both mentioned uh Peter. Uh, according to the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Peter had a vision which shaped the welcoming of non-Jewish people into the church. Could you tell us about that vision?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so Peter's vision is really coming on the back end of what's important for Cornelius, who's a Gentile. So he's a centurion. He has a vision of three men coming to him and talking about because of his charity that he has already shown, right? Charity is the highest of the virtues. Even though he's not baptized, he's showing good charity, and that's a prayer to God. And from there, he's told to send out these, uh, or to send a messenger to find Peter, who's staying with at the time Simon the Tanner around Caesarea, and to find him so that therefore uh they could have a conversation eventually. But Peter has a vision as he's going along and he goes up on top of a roof during uh the noontime for prayers that Jewish people would say throughout the day.

SPEAKER_02:

The hottest time of the day.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. And uh in that, then he sees a vision as he's praying of a sheet, and the four corners come down and they touch the earth, and on the sheet are all these different reptiles and birds and animals of four legs, and the message that's given to him is slaughter and eat. Rise, slaughter and eat. And he actually rejects that originally, which you could see from his training in the the Jewish law.

SPEAKER_02:

Because it would be a complete reversal of everything that he learned and studied and understood to be able to eat these things, especially those animals with split hooves that are on kosher, so like pork, you you know, and and now they're being told go for it.

SPEAKER_00:

Slaughter and eat. Yeah. Because ultimately everything that comes from God is good. And it does say that he's also hungry there, so it's not just hungry visions and so forth, but it's real from God. Like going to the grocery store. Yeah, you're going to the grocery store and you're hungry and you want to buy everything.

SPEAKER_01:

I that I have that problem. I get yelled at all the time. By your mom? No. I was gonna I didn't I was gonna say yeah, I get when I go to the grocery store with my girlfriend, she hates when I'm there hungry because I will buy like three bags of tortilla chips and salsa. That's my favorite go-to, is chips and salsa. That's a good throwback. But then everything else. Okay, well, I didn't say I didn't buy cheese, but chips and salsa is Minecraft singles. No, you gotta get the shredded like.

SPEAKER_02:

That's like that government cheese.

SPEAKER_00:

So you mentioned the sheet, the sheet coming down from the sky with all the animals on it, slaughtering. What were the animals you said? These four-legged animals, especially with um, but you mentioned birds as well.

SPEAKER_01:

So what did I say? But you said birds. Yeah, there was there's four-legged, what four-legged bird is there?

SPEAKER_00:

Four four-legged creatures, birds, and reptiles. Gotcha. Okay. I thought it was all the four-legged creatures. Yeah, it's a newfound. It's a newfound bird. We don't have it. But nonetheless, so that really is a change from what Peter's used to. And he comes out of that after being kind of rebuked multiple times to do so, even though he rejects. And then after that, whenever he meets those messengers from Cornelius, he starts to recognize that the church going forward is not just Judaism, but is bringing in the Gentiles as well who have not followed the Mosaic Law. And the question becomes in the early life of the church: are Gentiles supposed to follow the Mosaic Law coming into the law of Christ, or is being brought into the church through baptism automatically enroll one into the life of Christ without all of the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law?

SPEAKER_01:

So, what was the reaction of others uh in the church to St. Peter's actions?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I think you would have had a clear group that was disappointed, if not angry, and disenfranchised, because what he's saying is that he has a better way than than what the Jewish people are and are doing. And you know, that ultimately is one of the reasons that God Christ killed. And so you have that that part of it, but you also have those who start to see this liberation from the law. And if if we think about the greatest law, which Christ teaches us is to love God and to love your neighbor, then everything else we do should enhance that. And so if we're able to enhance that by easing up on some of this dietary restrictions and some of these purification laws, then what it's showing is that God is not contained by a law, but rather God frees us by his law, which is love.

SPEAKER_01:

So why couldn't they bring everyone together to make a decision about how to welcome non-Jewish people into the church? I mean, I know like it took the a council to do this.

SPEAKER_00:

It's people that are proud, you know, in a way. Like we wouldn't want to give up like all our own. I always say that it's like if you've ever seen the movie Happy Gilmore. Of course. And uh so Happy is facing off with Shooter McGavin, right? Shooter McGavin hits the ball and then it lands on this big guy's foot that has a shirt on that says guns don't kill people. I do, right? Play it where it lies. And the rule from the judge is play it as it lies. You have to hit it off of his foot. So he does, right? Later, Happy's on the green and an entire media tower falls down in front of the hole and he asks for a ruling on it. And Shooter McGavin says, I had to play it off of Frankenstein's fat foot, play it as it lies. You have people in society in life like that, right? Where it's like, if I had to follow all of these Jewish laws about food and all these other customs and so on and so forth. Like, if I had to do it, you got to play it off of Frankenstein's fat foot, too. So that was maybe a group there in the early church that really said, like, if I had to do it, you have to do it. And it's like, you're not gonna have it easier than we had it.

SPEAKER_01:

That was the perfect analogy.

SPEAKER_00:

I think you're welcome. See, bowling.

SPEAKER_01:

I wish I would have worn my happy Gilmore shirt now.

SPEAKER_02:

Um and groups always have their clear identities. I mean, what's funny is even look at some of our parishes, right? On the same street, we'll have an Italian, a Polish, and a German church, because even they couldn't get along when they were building their parishes. And so it's it's an age-old reality that to be able to come together is always a difficulty.

SPEAKER_00:

So who is the council of Jerusalem? It's those early apostles and the others that were the leaders of communities coming together to then figure out, okay, what is the teaching, right? We call the apostles together and the bishops of the world that are the continuation of the apostles, the magisterium, meaning from like the Latin a teaching office or to be a teacher. And so just like you had the Sanhedrin in the Jewish uh Old Testament, right? The Sanhedrin, the same ones that condemn Jesus as well as Stephen and so forth, they were a council of different individual leaders in Judaism that helped to teach the people and enforce laws. And so what you see with the apostles is in a real way, they're the new Sanhedrin, right? They're the the new magisterium that sits in the seat of Moses and teaches and binds the people properly for their salvation. So they have to come together and they have to hash these things out, which becomes a long tradition as we look in the history of the church, that this is the way in which councils come together to clarify and settle questions and and clarify. So that's the effect that the council of Jerusalem had on the growth of the church. It starts basically setting up what is the interplay between Jew and Gentile. Did Jesus come for only the Jewish people as the fulfillment of the Messiah, or did he come for Jew and Gentile alike? And if we trace that back in Jesus' own teachings, that the apostles would have been there learning from Jesus for years. Jesus went to Gentile lands and Jewish lands. He went to Samaria, he went to Judea, he went to the decopolis of the Greek cities. He was speaking not just for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but to all people. But to all people. Thanks for listening to the Catholic Accent Podcast.

SPEAKER_01:

Don't forget to follow, like, and subscribe to our show. So we have the Council of Jerusalem to thank for bacon cheeseburgers, essentially. Is what it boils down to.

SPEAKER_00:

Maybe, but I'm not I'm not a uh big bacon cheeseburger guy. I actually think bacon's way better off of a cheeseburger.

SPEAKER_01:

That's true. You did make that uh But do you like a cheeseburger?

SPEAKER_00:

I like the cheeseburger, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

But you want bacon on it?

SPEAKER_00:

No, not really. So you'll only take it. It doesn't, one, you pay more for it. It doesn't really add that much to the flavor. It's overshadowed by the other things on it. So the bacon's better to just and he is good at making bacon. I've had his bacon.

SPEAKER_01:

I've had his bacon as well. When you made those uh homemade croutons. I did, yeah. You fried the you fried the bread up in the in the grease from the bacon.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, that's a blast from the past. That can be found on our diocesan YouTube page.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it can be. So make sure you subscribe.

SPEAKER_02:

We need a hundred thousand subscribers at least.