You are in fact wriggling! Jesus named Simon/Cephas Petros [masculine] a small stone. And upon this rock Petra [feminine] bed rock I will my church. Petra, feminine cannot refer to Peter a male.
That said, I think it could well have been an allusion? SInce I don’t see what else it could have referred to.
Note that most Eastern Orthodox do not think it was referring to St. Peter, however, the Syriac Orthodox do (presumably based on the Peshitta).
But in either case its not a threat to our ecclesiology. The main centers of the early church were Rome, Alexandria and Antioch, after the destruction and before the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
At the council of Nicaea in 325 AD, Canon 6 declares that Alexandria and Antioch have the same authorities as Rome in their canonical territory, and Canon 7 grants that authority to the newly rebuilt city of Jerusalem. This obviously would not have happened had the Pope of Rome had the power that he has now.
Indeed the Bishop of Rome was not even styled as Pope until the 6th century. Since the fourth century however the Bishop of Alexandria was known as Pope.
Later in the fourth century, Constantinople also became a major autocephalous center of the Church, leading to the period of time, which lasted for many centuries, until the Great Schism in 1054, known as the Pentarchy, in which ecclesiastical power was jointly wielded by the bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, who also operated in that order of ceremonial precedence.
After the Great Schism, the judicial powers of appeal exercised by Rome under Canon 28 of Chalcedon were transferred to the Church of Constantinople, or New Rome. Later, after the conquest of the Ottoman Empire and the marriage of one of the surviving daughters of the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XIII, by one of the Dukes of Muscovy, Moscow became the Third Rome, and as such, among many Slavonic churches, it is regarded as the appelate church under Canon 28. This is part of the reason for the rivalry between the MP and the EP in Constantinople which has in recent years turned into a full-blown schism, and which has led to the Ukrainian Government attempting to suppress the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in violation of the ECHR, despite the UOC having severed ties with the MP in March of 2022.
Interestingly, the Church of Cyprus has always been autocephalous, and thus historically was the sixth in order of precedence after the Pentarchy. However, it was never a particularly powerful or influential church.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church, only the Patriarch of Romania wears a white cassock and exorason, (robe) because the Romanian Orthodox Church is the only ancient church in the Eastern Orthodox communion which never had experienced a period of time when its bishops embraced one of the ancient heresies such as Nestorianism, Arianism, Iconoclasm, etc. Whereas there were periods of time when Arians were installed by the Roman Empire after the Arian takeover following the death of Emperor Constantine on the sees of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem (it is believed at one point even St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writer of the Mystagogical Catecheses, may have been a semi-Arian, but it is believed he repented of this heresy, which is part of the reason why he is venerated, and this point is also controversial), and later Nestorius, the founder of the heresy which bears his name, ruled the Church of Constantinople with a violence, persecuting anyone who disagreed with his heresy.
This is why I am unsympathetic to his claims of having been wrongfully persecuted by the Council of Ephesus - his deposition was not an overnight affair, but the result of years of advocacy for the Orthodox faith by St. Cyril of Alexandria, with the help of St. Celestine of Rome, as he had for some time been protected by Patriarch John of Antioch, but eventually John saw the light, and agreed that he should be deposed, and thus the Council of Ephesus happened.
