II. The perspective of history:
apostolic succession and apostolic movements

Let us therefore pose the question: What does the origin of the Church look like? Anyone who has even a modest knowledge of the discussions about the nascent Church, from the form of which all Christian churches and communities seek to derive their justification, will also know what a seemingly hopeless enterprise it is to expect any such historical enquiry to yield tangible results. If, in spite of that, I risk trying to find a solution from this viewpoint, I do so with the presupposition of the Catholic view of the Church and her origin. This view, while offering a solid framework, also leaves open areas for further reflection which are far from having been exhausted.

There is no doubt that, from Pentecost on, the immediate bearers of Christ's mission were the Twelve, who would soon after appear under the name of «apostles». To them was entrusted the task of taking Christ's message «to the end of the earth» (Acts 1:8), to go out to all nations and to make disciples of all men (cf. Mt 28:19). The territory assigned to them for this mission was the whole world. Without being restricted to any one place, they served to build up the one body of Christ, the one people of God, the one Church of Christ.

The apostles were not bishops of particular local churches: they were, in the full sense of the term, «apostles» and as such assigned to the whole world and to the whole Church which was to be built up in it: the universal Church thus preceded the local Churches, which arose as its concrete realisations [5]. To put it even more clearly and unequivocally, Paul was never, nor did he ever wish to be, the bishop of a particular place. The only division of labour that existed at the beginning was the one described by Paul in the letter to the Galatians (cf. 2:9): «We —Barnabas and I— for the Gentiles, you —Cephas, James and John— for the Jews». And even this initial division of the mission field was soon superseded. Peter and John recognised that they too had been sent to the Gentiles, and lost little time in crossing the frontiers of Israel. James, the Lord's brother, who became a kind of primate of the Jewish church after the year 42, was not an apostle.

Without going into further detail, we can say that the apostolic ministry is an universal ministry, assigned to the whole of humanity and thus to the one Church as a whole. It was the missionary activity of the apostles that gave rise to the local Churches, which now needed leaders to assume responsibility for them. It was the duty of these leaders to guarantee unity of faith with the whole Church, to develop the life within the local Churches and to keep their communities open, so that they might continue to grow and be able to bestow the gift of the Gospel on those of their fellow citizens who did not yet believe. This ministry at the level of the local Church, which at the beginning appeared under a variety of different names, slowly acquired a fixed and homogeneous form.

Two orders thus quite clearly co-existed side by side in the nascent Church. There was of course a certain fluidity between them, but they can be quite clearly distinguished: on the one hand, the services of the local Church, which gradually assumed permanent forms; and on the other, the apostolic ministry, which very soon ceased to be restricted to the Twelve (cf. Eph 4,10).

Two concepts of «apostle» can be quite clearly distinguished in Paul. On the one hand, he stresses the uniqueness of his apostolate, which rested on his encounter with the risen Lord and so placed him on a level with the Twelve. On the other hand, he understood «apostle» as an office extending far beyond this elite, as in the first letter to the Corinthians (cf. 12:28). This broader concept is also presupposed by his description of Andronicus and Junias as apostles in the letter to the Romans (cf. 16:7).

A similar terminology is found in the letter to the Ephesians (cf. 2:20), where talk of the apostles and prophets as the foundations of the Church is clearly meant to include more than just the Twelve.

The prophets, of whom the Didache speaks in the early years of the second century, are clearly understood as fulfilling just such a missionary, supralocal ministry. It is all the more interesting that the Didache says of them: «They are your high-priests» [6].

We may therefore assume that the co-existence of the two types of ministry —the universal and the local— continued well into the second century, i.e. into a period when the question of the apostolic succession, and who was to represent it, was already being seriously posed. Various texts suggest that this co-existence of the two ministries was not entirely free of conflict. The third letter of John provides us with a very clear example of just such a situation of conflict. However, the more «earth's remotest end», or the part of it then accessible, was reached, the harder it became to continue to assign any meaningful role to the «itinerants»; it may be that abuses of their ministry concurred to their gradual disappearance.

Now it was up to the local communities and their leaders, who had in the meantime acquired a very clear profile in the tripartite division of bishop, priest and deacon, to spread the faith in the territories of their respective local Churches. That at the time of the emperor Constantine Christians made up around 8% of the population of the Empire, and that even at the end of the fourth century they remained a minority, shows what an immense task this was. In this situation those who presided over the local Churches, the bishops, had to recognise that they were now the successors of the apostles and that the apostolic mission lay entirely on their shoulders.

The insight that the bishops, the responsible leaders of the local Churches, were the successors of the apostles, was very clearly articulated by Irenaeus of Lyon in the second half of the second century. His definition of what it is that forms the essence of the episcopal ministry includes two fundamental elements:

1. «Apostolic succession» entails, first of all, an idea familiar to us: guaranteeing the continuity and the unity of the faith, in a continuity we call «sacramental».
2. But apostolic succession also implies an even more concrete task, which goes beyond the administration of the local Churches: the bishops must now ensure the continuation of Jesus' mission to make all nations his disciples and to bring the Gospel to the earth's remotest end. They are, as Irenaeus forcefully underlines, responsible for ensuring that the Church does not become a kind of federation of competing local Churches, but retains her universality and unity. They must continue the universal dynamism of apostolicity [7].

At the beginning of our reflections we pointed out the danger of the priestly ministry ending up by being understood in purely institutional and bureaucratic terms, and of its charismatic dimension being forgotten. But now a second danger appears: there is a danger that the ministry of the apostolic succession may wither away into a purely local ecclesial ministry, that the universality of Christ's mission may be lost from view or fade from the heart. The restlessness that impels us to bring the gift of Christ to others, may be extinguished in the stagnation of a firmly established Church. I would like to express the point in even more forcible terms: the concept of apostolic succession transcends the purely local ecclesial ministry. Apostolic succession can never be exhausted in the local Church. The universal element, the element that transcends the services to the local Churches, remains indispensable.

This thesis, which anticipates my final conclusions, must now be examined in a little more depth and clothed in concrete historical flesh. It leads us directly to the place occupied by the movements in the Church. I said that for various reasons the ministries of the universal Church gradually disappeared in the course of the second century and were absorbed by the episcopal ministry. In many respects this was a development not only historically inevitable, but also theologically necessary; it brought to light the unity of the sacrament and the intrinsic unity of the apostolic service. But it was also —as already pointed out— a development that was not without its dangers.

For this reason it was perfectly understandable that a new element should appear in the life of the Church as early as the third century. And we have no hesitation in calling this element a «movement»: monasticism. Now it might be objected that early monasticism had no apostolic and missionary character, that it was, on the contrary, a flight from the world, an escape into islands of holiness. The absence of a missionary tendency, directly aimed at the propagation of the faith throughout the world, can doubtless be ascertained in the initial stage of monasticism.

The predominant impulse in Anthony, who in our eyes stands out as a clearly defined historical figure at the beginning of monasticism, was indeed the desire to live the vita evangelica, the desire to live the Gospel radically and in its totality [8]. The story of his conversion bears an astonishing resemblance to that of St. Francis of Assisi. We find in both the same impulse to take the Gospel quite literally, to follow Christ in total poverty, and to model one's whole life on him. Anthony's retreat into the desert was a deliberate abandonment of the firmly established structure of the local Church, a flight from a Christianity that was progressively adapting itself to the needs of secular life, in order to follow uncompromisingly in the footsteps of Christ. But this gave rise to a new spiritual fatherhood; and this spiritual fatherhood, while it had no directly missionary character, did nonetheless supplement the fatherhood of bishops and priests by the power of a wholly pneumatic life [9].

In the works of Basil, who gave Eastern monasticism its permanent form, we see very clearly the same problems that many movements are having to face today. He had utterly no intention of creating a separate institution alongside that of the normal Church. The first and, in the strict sense, only rule he ever wrote was not conceived —as Balthasar puts it— as the rule of a religious order, but as an ecclesial rule: his manual or «Enchiridion of the committed Christian» [10].

Yet the same is true of the origin of almost all movements, not least those in our century: what they seek is not a community apart, but an integral form of Christianity, a Church that is obedient to the Gospel and that lives by it.

Basil, who had first been a monk, accepted the episcopal office and thus powerfully underlined in his own life the charismatic character of the episcopal ministry, the inner unity of the Church lived by the bishop in his personal life. Basil, like today's movements, was obliged to admit that the movement to follow Christ in an uncompromising fashion cannot be totally merged with the local Church.

In a second draft of a rule, which Gribomont calls «the small Asketikon», Basil conceives of movement as a «transitional form between a group of committed Christians open to the Church as a whole and a self-organising and self-institutionalising monastic order» [11]. The monastic community that Basil founded is likened by Gribomont to a kind of leaven: a «small group for the vitalisation of the whole»; he does not hesitate to call Basil «the founding father not only of the teaching and hospital orders, but also of the new communities without vows» [12].

It is clear, therefore, that the monastic movement created a new centre of life that did not abolish the local ecclesial structure of the postapostolic Church, but that did not simply coincide with it either. It was active in it as a life-giving force, a kind of reservoir from which the local Church could draw truly spiritual clergy in whom the fusion of institution and charism was constantly renewed. That the Eastern Church should select bishops from the ranks of the monks, thus defining the episcopal ministry in a charismatic way and perpetually renewing it from its apostolic source, is significant in this regard.

If we now look at the history of the Church as a whole, it seems clear that the local Church, necessarily determined by the episcopal ministry, is the supporting structure that permanently upholds the edifice of the Church through the ages. But the history of the Church is also traversed by the successive waves of movements that renew the universalistic aspect of her apostolic mission and thus serve to foster the spiritual vitality and truth of the local Churches. After the monasticism of the Early Church I would like briefly to mention five such waves, in which the spiritual essence of what we might call «movements» emerges ever more clearly and their ecclesiological place is progressively defined.

1. The first wave was the missionary monasticism that flourished especially in the period from the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604) to that of Gregory II (715-731) and Gregory III (731-741). Pope Gregory the Great recognised the missionary potential in monasticism and exploited it by sending Augustine —later to become Archbishop of Canterbury— and his companions to evangelise the pagan Angles in the British Isles. The Irish mission of St. Patrick had already taken place; it too was spiritually rooted in monasticism. So monasticism now became a great missionary movement. It led to the Germanic peoples being converted to the Catholic Church, and thus laid the foundations of the new Christian Europe. Linking together East and West in the ninth century, Cyril and Methodius, brothers in the flesh and in monastic life, brought the Christian faith to the Slav world. Two of the formative elements of what it means to be a «movement» clearly emerged from all this:

1. The papacy did not create the movements, but it did become their most important backer in the structure of the Church, their main source of ecclesial support. Perhaps the deepest meaning and true nature of the petrine office as a whole was in this way brought into view: namely, that the Bishop of Rome is not merely the bishop of a local Church; his ministry is always referred to the universal Church. It thus has, in a specific sense, an apostolic character. It must keep alive the dynamism of the Church's mission ad extra and ad intra. In the Eastern Church, the Emperor had at first claimed for himself a kind of office as guarantor of unity and universality; it was no accident that Constantine was called «bishop» ad extra and «equal to the apostles«. But that could at best be a temporary, supplementary role, the danger of which is all too clear. From the mid-second century on, with the end of the old universal ministries, the claim of the popes to assume particular responsibility for this aspect of apostolic mission thus made itself ever more clearly felt. Movements that transcended the scope and structure of the local Church, not by chance, went increasingly hand in hand with the papacy.
2. The motivation of the vita evangelica, which we encounter already at the beginning of the monastic movement with St. Anthony of Egypt, remains decisive. But it now becomes clear that the evangelic life also includes evangelization: its poverty and freedom are conditions for a service to the Gospel that goes beyond one's own homeland and its community. At the same time this service is the goal and sense for the evangelic life, as we shall soon see in greater detail.

2. If only briefly I would like to mention the reform movement of Cluny, which was of such decisive importance in the tenth century. Once again backed by the papacy, it accomplished the emancipation of the religious life from the feudal system and from domination by episcopal feudatories. By a process of associating the individual monasteries into a single congregation, it became the great movement of the renewal of Christian life and devotion, in which the idea of Europe took shape [13].

Later, in the eleventh century, the impulse of the Cluniac reform gave rise to the Gregorian Reform [14], which rescued the papacy from the perils of worldliness and the quagmire of strife among the Roman nobility. More generally, the Gregorian Reform took up the battle for the freedom of the Church, and for the safeguard of its distinctive spiritual nature, though later this often degenerated into a power struggle between pope and emperor.

3. The spiritual force of the evangelical movement that exploded with Francis of Assisi and Dominic in the thirteenth century continues to be felt to this day. In the case of Francis, it is quite clear that he had no intention of founding a new religious order, a separate community. He simply wanted to recall the Church to the whole Gospel, to gather together the «new people», and to renew the Church on the basis of the Gospel. The two meanings of the term «evangelical life» are inextricably intertwined: whoever lives the Gospel in poverty, celibacy, and renunciation of worldly possessions, must at the same time preach the Gospel. There was then a need for the Gospel, and Francis saw it as his essential task to proclaim, with his brothers, the simple core of the Gospel of Christ. He and his followers wanted to be evangelists. And it followed from this that the frontiers of Christendom had to be crossed and the Gospel taken to the ends of the earth [15]. When conflict later broke out at the University of Paris between the mendicant orders and the secular clergy, Thomas Aquinas summed up the novelty of these two movements (the Franciscans and Dominicans) and, at the same time, their fidelity to their origins and to the form of the religious life expressed in them. The secular clergy, as the representatives of a narrowly closed local Church structure, opposed the evangelising movement. They only wanted to accept the Cluniac type of monasticism in its later, rigidified form: monasteries separated from the local Church, dedicated to an ascetic cloistered life, and serving contemplation alone. Such monasteries, they held, could not disturb the order of the local Church, whereas conflicts inevitably broke out wherever the new preachers appeared.

Thomas Aquinas opposed this view. He emphasised that Christ himself is the model, and hence defended the superiority of the apostolic life over a purely contemplative form of life. «The active life that brings to others the truths attained through preaching and contemplation is more perfect than the exclusively contemplative life» [16]. Thomas understood himself as the heir of the successive revivals of the monastic life, that had all appealed to the apostolic life [17]. But in his interpretation of the apostolic life —drawn from his experience of the mendicant orders— he took an important new step. He proposed something that had indeed been actively present in the previous monastic tradition, but that has as yet been little reflected on. Everyone had appealed to the primitive Church to justify the apostolic life; Augustine, for example, had based his whole monastic rule ultimately on Acts 4:32: «The company of those who believed were of one heart and soul» [18].

But to this essential blueprint for the religious life Thomas Aquinas now added another component: Jesus' missionary instruction to the apostles in Matthew 10:5-15. The genuine apostolic life, Thomas taught, is the life that observes the teachings both of Acts 4 and Matthew 10: «The apostolic life consisted in the fact that the Apostles, after they had abandoned everything, went through the world, proclaiming and preaching the Gospel, as shown by Matthew 10, where they are given a rule» [19]. Matthew 10 now appeared as nothing less than a religious rule, or better: the rule of life and mission that the Lord gave to the apostles is itself the permanent rule of the apostolic life, of which the Church has a perpetual need. It was on the basis of this rule that the new movement of evangelization was justified.

The Parisian controversy between the secular clergy and the representatives of the new movements, in which these texts were written, is of permanent significance. The exponents of a restricted and impoverished idea of the Church, that absolutises the structure of the local Church, could not tolerate the intrusive new class of preachers. The latter, for their part, necessarily found their support in the holder of an universal ecclesial ministry, in the Pope as guarantor of the mission and the up-building of the one Church. It is no surprise, therefore, that all this gave a great boost to the development of the doctrine of primacy. Beyond any colouring lent by a certain historical period, primacy was now understood anew in the light of its apostolic roots [20].

4. Since the question that concerns us here has to do not with Church history, but with an insight into the forms of life in the Church, I will have to limit myself to only a brief mention of the new movements of evangelization that arose in the sixteenth century.

Prominent among them were the Jesuits, who now embarked on a world-wide mission in the newly discovered lands of America, Africa and Asia, though the Dominicans and Franciscans, thanks to their enduring missionary impulse, did not lag far behind.

5. Finally, we are all familiar with the new spate of movements that began in the nineteenth century. Strictly missionary congregations now emerged. From the very outset they were aimed less at the internal renewal of the Church than at evangelization in those continents that had hardly been touched by Christianity. Conflict with the local ecclesial structures was as a result largely avoided. Indeed, a fruitful collaboration was established between them. The historical local Churches derived new strength from it, animated as they were from within by the impulse to propagate the Gospel and serve charity. An element now came powerfully to the fore, an element that had in no way been lacking in the previous movements, but that can easily be overlooked: the apostolic movement of the nineteenth century was pre-eminently a women's movement. It was characterised by a strong emphasis on caritas, on care for the suffering and for the poor.

We know what the new women's communities have meant, and continue to mean, for the hospital apostolate and for the care of the needy. But they also assumed a very important role in the fields of schooling and education. In this way, the whole range of service to the Gospel was made present in the combination of teaching, education and charity.

If we look backwards from the nineteenth century we will see that women have always played an important role in the apostolic movements. It is enough to think of the courageous women of the sixteenth century such as Mary Ward or Teresa of Avila, or, yet earlier, of the women religious of the Middle Ages such as Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena, of the women in the circle of St. Boniface, of the sisters of the Church Fathers and, finally, of the women in the letters of Paul and in the circle around Jesus himself. Though women were never bishops and priests, they did assume co-responsibility for the apostolic life and for its universal mission.

After this survey of the great apostolic movements in the history of the Church, we return to the thesis I already anticipated after our brief analysis of the biblical data: namely, that the concept of apostolic succession must be broadened and deepened if we wish to do justice to everything it claims to be. What does that mean? First, it means that the sacramental structure of the Church must be retained as the core of this concept. It is in this structure that the Church receives, perpetually renewed, the legacy of the apostles, the legacy of Christ. It is through the sacrament, in which Christ acts through the Holy Spirit, that the Church is distinguished from all other institutions. The sacrament means that the Church lives and is continually recreated by the Lord as «creature of the Holy Spirit».

The two inseparable components of the sacrament we mentioned above must here be kept in mind: first, the incarnational-christological component, that is, the Church's being bound to the unique and unrepeatable event of the Incarnation and of the Easter events, the link with God's action in history; second, and simultaneously, the making present of this event in the power of the Holy Spirit, hence the christological-pneumatological component, which guarantees at once the newness and the continuity of the living Church.

What has always been taught in the Church about the essence of apostolic succession, the real core of the sacramental concept of the Church, is summed up in this way. But this core risks being impoverished, indeed withering away, if the concept is applied only to the structure of the local Church. The ministry of the succession of Peter breaks asunder the purely local ecclesial structure. The successor of Peter is not just the local bishop of Rome: he is bishop for the whole Church and in the whole Church. He thus embodies an essential dimension of the apostolic mission, which must never be absent from the Church.

But the petrine ministry itself would in turn be misunderstood, and distorted into a monstrous exception to the rule, if we burdened its bearer alone with the realisation of the universal dimension of the apostolic succession [21].

Ministries and missions that are not tied to the local Church alone, but serve universal mission and the spreading of the Gospel, must always exist in the Church. The pope has to rely on these ministries, they on him; and in the harmonious interaction between the two kinds of mission the symphony of ecclesial life is realised.

The apostolic age, which has normative value for the Church, clearly emphasised these two components as indispensable for the Church's life. The sacrament of the Ordo, the sacrament of succession, necessarily forms an intrinsic part of this structural form, but it is —even more than in the local Churches— surrounded by a multiplicity of services, and here the contribution made by women to the Church's apostolate cannot be ignored. In sum, we could even say that the primacy of the successor of Peter exists precisely to guarantee these essential components of the Church's life and to connect them harmoniously with the structures of the local Churches.

At this point, to avoid misunderstandings, it should be said quite clearly that the apostolic movements appear in ever new forms in history, necessarily so, because they are the Holy Spirit's answer to the ever changing situations in which the Church lives. And just as vocations to the priesthood cannot be artificially produced, cannot be established administratively, still less can movements be established and systematically promoted by ecclesiastical authority. They need to be given as a gift, and they are given as a gift. We must only be attentive to them. Using the gift of discernment, we must only learn to accept what is good in them, and discard what is bad.

A retrospective glance at the history of the Church will help us to acknowledge with gratitude that, through all her trials and tribulations, the Church has always succeeded in finding room for all the great new awakenings of the spirit that emerge in her midst. Nor can we overlook the succession of movements that failed or that led to painful schisms: Montanists, Cathars, Waldensians, Hussites, the Reform movement of the sixteenth century. And no doubt blame must be apportioned to both sides for the fact that in the end schism has remained.