APOSTOLICITY. — It is the last of the four notes of the Church proclaimed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (v. CHIESA).
In saying that the Church is apostolic, one means to assert that it goes back to the apostles in what constitutes its essential constitution, and that it has remained identical from its origins to the present day. The apostolicity of the Church therefore entails its stability throughout the centuries: what the Church was in the time of the apostles, it has remained, without any “substantial” change, since there may be, and in fact have been, accidental changes and developments. The Church, indeed, the kingdom of God on earth, is like a mustard seed that develops into a great tree (Mt. 13:31–33) and, while remaining identical to itself in its essential features, grows in the manner of a living being. It adapts itself to times and places in the particulars of its legislation and social organization, thereby manifesting the fecundity of the revealed deposit. The general and complete notion of apostolicity therefore means continuity with the Church founded by the Apostles through the uninterrupted succession of legitimate Pastors (material apostolicity), and essential identity of ministry and hierarchical-monarchical government (formal apostolicity).
The Fathers and theologians were led to emphasize certain points of particular importance in the controversy against heretics and schismatics, and from the earliest times efforts were made to make apostolicity a distinctive note of the true Church against the innovative sects. Emphasis was therefore placed: 1) on the historical bond linking the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the apostles through the ordination and uninterrupted succession of bishops (apostolicity of origin); 2) on the legitimacy of this succession, which would not be legitimate if it had not been approved directly, indirectly, or tacitly by the central authority established from the time of the apostles, demonstrating that the Church had a primate in the person of Peter, as may be inferred from the texts of the New Testament, and that Peter had a successor in the bishop of Rome, as is attested by immediately subapostolic tradition. St. Irenaeus, for example, in the second century, declares that “every particular Church must be in agreement with the Roman Church because of its superior authority.” Here the regulating center of the unity of ecclesiastical communion and of the legitimacy of the mission is clearly indicated, whence arises what is called apostolicity of mission; 3) on the identity of the doctrines of the present Church with the doctrine of the apostles, as this emerges from the writings of the New Testament, from the tradition of the Apostolic Fathers, and in general from the first centuries of Christianity, whence apostolicity of doctrine; 4) on the identity of the constitution and social structure of the present Church with those of the Church of apostolic times, whence apostolicity of society, which may include apostolicity of mission and of doctrine as parts of the whole.
As is easy to see, apostolicity, considered as a property of the Church, goes beyond apostolicity considered as a note or distinctive sign of the true Church. Only elements sufficiently visible and apparent to be verified by the average person can serve as a note or distinctive sign, so that those who are confronted with the Churches currently in existence may ascertain which of them most faithfully reproduces the features of the primitive apostolic Church. These elements do not have the same probative value for all sects; effective against some, they are without value against others. For example, it was enough for the early Fathers, such as St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, and St. Augustine, to appeal to apostolicity of origin in order to refute the heretics or schismatics of their time, whereas the same arguments would be opposed with much less success to the dissident Eastern Churches of our own day. The validity of the priesthood of these Churches, deriving from an uninterrupted succession of episcopal ordinations, cannot be denied, while they themselves claim to preserve the doctrine of the apostles handed down in the books of the New Testament. Likewise, from the sixteenth century onward, Catholic apologists were able to demonstrate that Protestants possessed none of the elements of apostolicity mentioned above. But as soon as they sought to use the same demonstration against the Greek-Russian Church, they realized that their arguments were losing their force, and that it was therefore necessary to reorder both the proofs and the definition of the notes. The fact remains that many theologians no longer present apostolicity except as a negative note, that is, as an element whose absence in a Church is sufficient to prove that it is false, but whose presence, at least in certain respects, is insufficient to prove that it is the true Church.
It should nevertheless be held that at least one element of apostolicity may be given as a positive note, that is, as belonging exclusively to the true Church: apostolicity of mission, as we define it, namely insofar as it includes the primacy of Peter and of his successor, the bishop of Rome, is a note belonging exclusively to the Roman Catholic Church. But if this primacy is excluded, as certain theologians do, it is no longer clear how apostolicity of mission can constitute a property fulfilling the conditions of the positive note, as it is defined by most authors, since one of those conditions is precisely that the note can easily be known and verified. If one does not admit the existence, from the beginning, of a mother Church to which the particular Churches necessarily had to refer, it will be very difficult to maintain that certain dissident Churches of the East lack apostolicity of mission. There is still another method for identifying the true Church by means of the note of apostolicity, and it consists in seeking, among the various Churches currently in existence, the one that most closely approaches the Church of apostolic times and of the first Fathers. Since Jesus Christ founded only one Church, the true Church is the one that has preserved the essential features of the primitive Church. It was by this path, which may be called that of comparison and transcendence, that Cardinal J. H. Newman (d. 1890) passed from Anglicanism to Catholicism. “All parties,” he writes, “agree that, among all existing systems, the present communion of Rome is in fact the image that most closely approaches the Church of the Fathers, though they may feel free to believe that it could be brought still closer on paper” (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Difficulties of Anglicans). This method does not deny that certain dissident groups possess elements of apostolicity, holiness, and so forth; it merely means that the Roman Catholic Church possesses these notes to a degree superior and transcendent above all others.
APOSTOLICITY of the CHURCHES. “It is a tendency that appears as early as the end of Christian antiquity and subsequently grows ever more widespread among illustrious Churches of the East and, in particular, of the West, to derive their origin directly from the Apostles or from their immediate disciples.
That in the apostolic age Churches were founded only through the direct intervention of the Apostles or through the initiative of disciples appointed by them and under their supervision cannot be doubted; but it is equally evident that Christian propagation (and the ancient writers were already aware of this) did not come to an end in the apostolic age, and was extended both in breadth and in depth by the work of successive Christian generations, continued throughout the centuries and not yet exhausted.
It is almost always easy, from the Carolingian age onward, to follow, particularly in the West, the course of this propagation; it is not equally easy for the preceding period, owing to the lack of reliable monumental or historical sources. An attempt was nevertheless made to clarify the matter, and this lack was partly remedied in the East by the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and by those curious catalogues that circulated under the false names of Epiphanius, Hippolytus, and Dorotheus and purported to compile a list of all the 70 or 72 disciples of the Savior (Lk. 11:1), collecting their names haphazardly and distributing them among the cities of the East above all, but also of the West, and for the most part making them bishops of those cities. Other hagiographers in the West, each on his own account, then inserted into those catalogues such figures as suited their purposes, more or less well, transferring them as bishops to the apostolic age and subsequently seeking, in some way, to provide them with successors. Then the compilers of the various Acta, or Gesta, or Passiones, considered themselves entitled to make up through narratives whatever was lacking in sound historical tradition, either to bring greater fame to their heroes or, as often happened, to highlight the glory of their own Church and also to create firm support for local rights and privileges in opposition to other Churches. And since each of these authors wrote independently of the others, when he was not engaged in controversy with rival Churches, it should not be surprising that there are open contradictions among them; if one adds that they lived centuries after the events they narrated and that their learning was always very limited, their anachronisms, their naiveté, their tendency to proceed according to uniform patterns, barely modified by some touch of local color, and their reliance on apocryphal documents regarded as genuine, are hardly surprising. At times there may even have been an intention to deceive readers, wholly or in part, for some particular interest. On this subject V. ATTI DEI MARTINI.
In the celebrated letter that Pope Innocent I wrote in 416 to Decentius, bishop of Gubbio (Jaffé-Wattenbach, 311), he could affirm that “no apostle propagated Christianity in the West apart from Peter (and Paul, if one wishes, his inseparable companion and co-founder of the Roman Church)...” But Innocent does not assert, as a fact known to him or in some way established by the Roman Chancery, that Peter had personally founded this or that particular Church in Italy or elsewhere; he merely asserts as a general fact, deduced from certain facts, that all the Churches of the West derived from that of Rome, and therefore had been established either through the work of Peter or of another pope... He therefore intended to make only a general assertion, impossible to contest, without concerning himself with, or passing judgment on, particular cases.” (Lanzoni, pp. 82–83). Not all propagators of legends took account of Innocent’s words, perhaps because in their ignorance they did not know them, although they were very widely known; others, on the contrary, sought to specify precisely where he had remained general and to establish at least some of those Churches that St. Peter had founded directly or through his immediate disciples.
In ITALY the oldest example in this field is presented to us by the Passio s. Apollinare of the seventh century, through which Apollinaris, the first bishop of Ravenna, is presented as a disciple of St. Peter; this was the moment when the city was aspiring to autocephaly in relation to Rome. The reasoning was as follows: St. Apollinaris was the successor of St. Peter in the same way as the Roman bishop was his successor; therefore the see of Ravenna could stand on an equal footing with the Roman see. Without going so far in its conclusion, but perhaps emulating Ravenna, the Church of Aquileia was already claiming, by the end of the eighth century, to have been founded by St. Mark, Peter’s companion in Rome; disciples of St. Mark were said to have founded the Churches of Verona, Padua, and Pavia. Brindisi was said to have been founded directly by St. Peter, because he was supposed to have passed through there on his way to Rome; Reggio Calabria was said to have been founded by St. Paul because in Act. 28:13 it is clearly stated that he stopped there. Other ancient Italian Churches had their evangelization attributed to St. Peter in order to provide an honorable explanation of their venerable antiquity. Milan, however, around the eleventh century, turned to St. Barnabas at a moment of rebellion against the Holy See (Lanzoni, p. 1009 ff.).
In FRANCE, the antiquity of the Churches rests almost entirely on the numerous legends inspired by claims to be asserted or local interests to be defended. The first attempt appears in the fifth century, when certain bishops asked St. Leo the Great for metropolitan rights for the see of Arles, giving as their reason that Trophimus, a disciple of St. Peter, had been its founder; the request went unanswered, although other privileges were obtained. The other French legends known to us are no older than the eighth century: thus, that of St. Dionysius, the first bishop of Paris, who was said to have been the Areopagite converted by St. Paul and who nevertheless enjoyed such great credit in the Middle Ages, especially because of the circulation of various writings attributed to him; and that of St. Martial of Limoges, who is one of the seven bishops in the Passio s. Saturnini, transmitted to us in a manuscript from the first half of the ninth century, in which Martial appears, for the first time, as having been sent by St. Peter together with two other priests. The same may be said of all the other legends: documents devoid of historical value, very far removed from the events they claim to report. The most famous of all French traditions, moreover—that of Saints Lazarus and his companions—does not go back beyond the eleventh century.
In SPAIN, the apostolic claims are linked to St. Paul and St. James. In the case of the former, there seem to be serious probabilities, supported by documents of high and venerable antiquity, such as a letter from the apostle himself (Rom. 15:24–28), that of St. Clement to the Corinthians (chap. 3), and the Prammento narratoriano; yet there is no document whatsoever concerning the founding of Churches, whereas the first report of the famous seven bishops sent by St. Peter, unknown throughout all antiquity, appears only in the ninth century. The preaching of St. James in Spain must be regarded as still more insubstantial and legendary, since, in addition to contradicting historically established facts, it is condemned by the silence of all local writers on ecclesiastical history from the fifth to the eighth century. The tradition must have arisen when the collection of pseudo-Abdias (v.) and the Byzantine Apostolic Catalogues became known in the West, since these apocryphal writings are the oldest written source of this tradition. Then, toward the end of the ninth century, an attempt was made to identify the apostle’s tomb, and the belief became widespread, until from 1130 onward it was universally accepted; subsequently, acts, letters, and interested legends multiplied in order to lend support to the tradition.
In ILLYRICUM, from a passage of St. Paul (Rom. 15:19) whose interpretation is debatable, it seems that the Gospel was preached there by the Apostle himself; the allusions to apostolic preaching in St. Justin (Dialogus cum Tryphone, 117), Origen (in Eusebius, Hist. eccl., III, 1), and Tertullian (Adversus Iudaeos, 7) are not sufficiently clear and convincing and leave one perplexed, since throughout the second century and the first half of the third there is no information whatsoever about organized Churches.
Perhaps the Christianity preached in the apostolic age in southern Illyricum did not then possess the strength to take lasting root.
Nell'antica PANNONIA, Sirmio rivendica l'origine apostolica, ma la fonte è una falsa trascrizione del Sinassario che copia la lista dei 72 discepoli del Signore. Così anche le pretese del Norico dipendono dalla Passione di Ermagora di Aquileia del sec. VIII, o da falsi documenti elaborati verso il sec. IX con i quali Lorch (Lauriacum) voleva imporre la sua supremazia su Passau (Passavia).
In DALMAZIA, Spalato (Salonæ) si vanta di aver avuto come primo vescovo s. Doimo o Domnio che si dice discepolo di s. Pietro e martire sotto Traiano; ma in realtà vissuto e morto sotto Diocleziano, come affermano i più antichi documenti, quali il Martirologio geronimiano, il Liber Pontificalis, e la Cronaca pasquale del 395. La leggenda apostolica proviene da un gruppo di scritti del sec. VIII.