Perhaps you’ve heard
the term Apostolic Succession. It’s a very important concept in our Catholic
tradition, but what does it mean? In a
way, we are asking how we are connected or linked to what Jesus did and taught
2000 years ago. Christ was sent to
reveal God’s identity as Trinity. He was sent to bring us the Good News that we
are called to share in the life of the Trinity. And He was sent to bring us
into that communion of life and love through his suffering, cross, and
resurrection. Christ entrusted all His words and deeds to His Apostles. He then sent them out to teach and preach
everything He had taught them: “He who
hears you, hears me and he who rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16). He gave them authority to teach in His name: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). Christ also promised that the Holy Spirit would
lead them into all truth (John 16:13).
But what happened as the apostles died? They entrusted
the message to others in their place.
They appointed successors
in each local community. They handed on
to their successors what they had seen and heard from Jesus. This is what Paul wrote to Timothy near the
end of his life: “What you have heard
from me before many witnesses entrust
to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.” (2 Tim
2:2) God sent His Son Jesus, Jesus sent
Paul, Paul sent Timothy, and Timothy was told to send successors of his own,
and so on.
These successors of the apostles came to be called Bishops. Here’s what Pope St. Clement of Rome wrote around the year 90AD:
"Through countryside and city [the apostles] preached, and they
appointed their earliest converts, testing them by the Spirit, to be the
bishops and deacons of future believers. Nor was this a novelty, for bishops
and deacons had been written about a long time earlier. . . . Our apostles knew
through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of
bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they
appointed those who have already been mentioned and afterwards added the
further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed
to their ministry" (Letter to the Corinthians 42:4–5, 44:1–3).
This unbroken chain of successors from the
apostles was of paramount importance to the early church. Rather quickly splinter groups and heresies
arose. Most prominent and problematic in
the early church were a group known as Gnostics who claimed to have “hidden
knowledge” or the real message of Jesus.
The Gnostics even used Christian scriptures to support their heretical
or false views. So which group had the
true teaching? How did the earliest Christians determine who taught the truth? Around the year 190, a Bishop named Irenaeus
wrote a book against the heresies of his time.
This is what he said:
“It is possible, then, for everyone in every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has
been made known throughout the whole world.
And we are in a position to
enumerate those who were instituted Bishops by the Apostles, and their
successors to our own times…For surely they wished all those and their
successors to be perfect and without reproach, to whom they handed on their authority.” (Against Heresies 3:3:1)
There’s the link
again: Jesus, the apostles, their successors the Bishops. This unbroken link was, as we have seen,
essential in the early Church for handing on the truth of the Gospel and knowing
with certainty what that truth was. This unbroken chain of successors from the
Apostles, known as bishops, is what we call Apostolic Succession.
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