Apostolicity

APOSTOLICITY. - It is the last of the four marks of the Church proclaimed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan creed (v. CHIESA).

In saying that the Church is apostolic, the intention is to assert that it goes back to the apostles in what constitutes its essential constitution, and that it has remained identical from its origins down to our own day. The apostolicity of the Church therefore implies its stability over the course of the centuries: as the Church was in the time of the apostles, so it has remained without any "substantial" change, because there can be, and in fact there have been, accidental changes and developments. The Church indeed, the kingdom of God on earth, is like a grain of mustard seed that develops into a great tree (Mt. 13:31-33) and, while remaining identical to itself in its essential features, grows like a living thing. It adapts itself to times and places in the particulars of its legislation and its social organization, thus 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 an uninterrupted succession of legitimate Pastors (material apostolicity); and essential identity of ministry and of hierarchical-monarchical regime (formal apostolicity).

The Fathers and theologians were led to bring into prominence certain points of particular importance with regard to the controversy against heretics and schismatics, and from the earliest times an attempt was made to turn apostolicity into a distinctive mark of the true Church against the innovating sects. Emphasis was therefore laid: 1) on the historical link that binds the ecclesiastical hierarchy to the apostles by means of ordination and the uninterrupted succession of bishops (apostolicity of origin); 2) on the legitimacy of this succession, since it is not such unless it has been approved directly, indirectly or tacitly by the central authority established from the time of the apostles, proving how the Church had a primate in the person of Peter, as is deduced from the texts of the New Testament, and Peter had a successor in the bishop of Rome, as the immediately sub-apostolic tradition testifies. St. Irenaeus, for example, in the 2nd 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 mission is well 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 it results 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 and of the Church of the times of the apostles, whence apostolicity of society, which can include apostolicity of mission and of doctrine as parts of the whole.

As is easy to perceive, apostolicity, considered as a property of the Church, goes beyond apostolicity considered as a mark or distinctive sign of the true Church. Only elements sufficiently visible and apparent to be verifiable by the average person—who, in the presence of the Churches currently existing, wishes to ascertain which of them best reproduces the features of the primitive apostolic Church—can serve as a mark, as a distinctive sign. These elements do not have the same probative value for all sects; effective against some, they are without value for others. It was enough, for example, for the early Fathers, such as St. Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Augustine, to appeal to apostolicity of origin in order to refute the heretics or schismatics of their time, whereas the same arguments would meet with far less success against the dissident Eastern Churches of our own day, to which the validity of the priesthood due to an uninterrupted ordination of bishops cannot be denied, while they themselves claim to preserve the doctrine of the apostles handed down in the books of the New Testament. Likewise Catholic apologists, from the 16th century onward, were able to demonstrate that Protestants possess none of the elements of apostolicity listed above. But as soon as they sought to use the same demonstration against the Greek-Russian Church, they realized that their arguments lost their value, and that therefore the proofs and even the definition of the marks needed to be reordered. The fact is that many theologians no longer present apostolicity except as a negative mark, that is, as an element whose absence in a Church is enough to prove that it is false, but whose presence, at least under certain aspects, is not sufficient to prove that it is the true Church.

It is to be held, however, that at least one element of apostolicity can be given as a positive mark, that is, as belonging exclusively to the true Church: apostolicity of mission, as we define it, namely insofar as it encloses the primacy of Peter and of his successor, the bishop of Rome, is a mark that belongs exclusively to the Roman Catholic Church. But if this primacy is excluded, as certain theologians do, one no longer sees how apostolicity of mission constitutes a property that fulfills the conditions of the positive mark, as it is defined by the majority of authors, since one of the conditions is precisely that the mark can easily be known and verified. If one does not admit the existence, from the origin, of a mother-Church to which the particular Churches must necessarily have had recourse, it will be very difficult to maintain that certain dissident Churches of the East are devoid of apostolicity of mission. There is yet another method for arriving at identifying the true Church with the mark of apostolicity, and it consists in seeking among the various Churches currently existing the one that comes closest to the Church of apostolic times and of the first Fathers. Given that Jesus Christ founded only one Church, the true one is that which has preserved the essential features of the primitive Church. It is by this path, which may be called one of comparison and transcendence, that Cardinal J. H. Newman (d. 1890) came from Anglicanism to Catholicism. "All parties," he writes, "are agreed that, among all the systems existing, the present communion of Rome is in fact the image that comes closest to the Church of the Fathers, free to believe, if one wishes, that it can be brought still closer on paper" (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Difficulties of Anglicans). With this method one does not deny that certain dissident groups possess elements of apostolicity, of holiness, etc.; one only means to say that the Roman Catholic Church possesses these marks in a degree superior and transcendent to all.

APOSTOLICITY of CHURCHES. "It is a tendency that manifests itself as early as the end of Christian antiquity and then spreads ever more widely 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 charged by them and under their supervision, there can be no doubt; but it is likewise evident that Christian propaganda (and already the ancient writers were aware of this) did not exhaust itself in the apostolic age and was supplemented both in breadth and in depth by the work of successive Christian generations continued through the centuries and not yet exhausted.

It is almost always easy, from the Carolingian age onward, to follow the fortunes of this propaganda, particularly in the West; it is not equally so, however, for the preceding age, owing to the lack of reliable monumental or historical sources. An attempt was nevertheless made to pin things down, and for the East this gap was partly filled by the apocryphal acts of the Apostles and by those curious catalogues that circulated under the false names of Epiphanius, Hippolytus, Dorotheus, which claimed to compile the list of all the 70 or 72 disciples of the Saviour (Lk. 11:1), gathering their names haphazardly and distributing them among the cities chiefly of the East, but also of the West, and for the most part making them bishops of those same cities. Other hagiographers in the West, then, each on his own account, inserted into those catalogues the figures who suited their case more or less well, transferring them as bishops into the apostolic age and thus seeking, in some way, to give them successors. Then the compilers of the various Acta, or Gesta, or Passiones believed themselves entitled to supply by their narratives whatever was lacking in sound historical tradition, in order to give greater fame to their heroes or, as often happened, to give particular prominence to the glory of their own Church and also to create solid support for local rights and privileges as against other Churches. And since each of these authors wrote independently of the others, when he was not engaged in polemic against rival Churches, it should not be surprising that there are open contradictions among them; if one adds further that they lived centuries away from the events they narrated and that their culture was always very limited, then their anachronisms, their naiveties, their proceeding even according to uniform schemes, modified only by a touch of local colour, their basing themselves on apocryphal documents held to be genuine, are no cause for surprise. Sometimes there may even have been the intention of deceiving the readers, wholly or in part, for some interest. On this point v. ATTI DEI MARTIRI.

In the celebrated letter he wrote in 416 to Decentius, bishop of Gubbio, Pope Innocent I (Jaffé-Wattenbach, 311) could affirm that "no apostle propagated Christianity in the West except Peter (and Paul, if one will, his inseparable companion and co-founder of the Roman Church)... But Innocent does not affirm as a fact known to him or in any way verified by the Roman Chancery that Peter had personally founded this or that particular Church in Italy or elsewhere; he asserts only as a general fact, deduced from certain facts, that all the churches of the West derived from that of Rome, and therefore had been instituted either by the work of Peter or by that of another pope... He therefore intended to make only a general affirmation impossible to contest, without concerning himself, or passing judgment, on particular cases." (Lanzoni, pp. 82-83). Not all the propagators of legends took account of Innocent's words, perhaps because in their ignorance they did not know them, although they were very widely circulated; others, on the other hand, claimed to specify precisely where he had remained on general grounds, 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. Apollinaris of the 7th century, thanks to which Apollinaris, first bishop of Ravenna, is presented as a disciple of St. Peter; it was the moment when the city aspired to autocephaly as against Rome; the reasoning was this: St. Apollinaris was a successor of St. Peter in the same way in which the Roman bishop was his successor; therefore the see of Ravenna could stand on an equal footing with that of Rome. Without going so far in its conclusion, but perhaps emulating Ravenna, the Church of Aquileia already by the end of the 8th century claimed to have been founded by St. Mark, companion of Peter at Rome; disciples of St. Mark were said to have founded the Churches of Verona, Padua, and Pavia. Of Brindisi it was said that it had been founded directly by St. Peter, because he was said to have passed through there on his way to Rome; Reggio Calabria was said to have been founded by St. Paul because in Acts 28:13 it is clearly stated that he stopped there. Other ancient Italian Churches had their evangelization traced back to St. Peter in order to give an honourable explanation of their venerable antiquity. Milan, on the other hand, around the 11th century had recourse to St. Barnabas at a moment of rebellion against the Holy See (Lanzoni, p. 1009 ff.).

In FRANCE, the origin of the Churches rests almost entirely on the numerous legends inspired by claims to be vindicated or local interests to be defended. The first attempt appears in the 5th century, when certain bishops asked St. Leo the Great for metropolitan rights for the see of Arles, adducing the reason that Trophimus, a disciple of St. Peter, had been its founder; the request remained unanswered, although other privileges had been obtained. The other French legends are no older than the 8th century: such is that of St. Dionysius, first bishop of Paris, who was said to have been the Areopagite converted by St. Paul, and which enjoyed such great credit in the Middle Ages, especially through the diffusion of various writings attributed to him; such is that of St. Martial of Limoges, who is one of the seven bishops of the Passio s. Saturnini, which has come down to us in a manuscript of the first half of the 9th century, in which Martial appears, for the first time, 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 relate. The most famous, moreover, of all the French traditions, that of Sts. Lazarus and companions, does not go back beyond the 11th century.

In SPAIN, the apostolic claims are linked to St. Paul and St. James. For the former there seem to be serious probabilities supported by documents of high and venerable antiquity, such as a letter of the apostle himself (Rom. 15:24-28), that of St. Clement to the Corinthians (ch. 3) and the Muratorian Fragment; however, there is no document whatsoever of the founding of Churches, while the first notice of the famous seven bishops sent by St. Peter, unknown to all antiquity, appears only in the 9th century. The preaching of St. James in Spain must be considered more inconsistent and legendary, since besides contradicting historically established facts, it is condemned by the silence of all local writers of ecclesiastical history from the 5th to the 8th 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 that tradition. Then, toward the end of the 9th century, an attempt was made to identify the tomb of the apostle, and the persuasion became general, until from 1130 onward it was universally believed; subsequently acts, letters, and legends multiplied, all concerned with lending support to the tradition.

In ILLYRICUM, from a passage of St. Paul (Rom. 15:19), of debatable interpretation, it seems that the Gospel was preached there by the Apostle himself; the references 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 2nd century and the first half of the 3rd there is no notice whatsoever of organized churches.

Perhaps the Christianity preached in the apostolic age in southern Illyricum did not then have the strength to take root permanently.

In ancient PANNONIA, Sirmium claimed apostolic origin, but the source is a false transcription of the Synaxarion that copies the list of the 72 disciples of the Lord. Likewise the claims of Noricum also depend on the 8th-century Passion of Hermagoras of Aquileia, or on forged documents drawn up around the 9th century with which Lorch (Lauriacum) sought to impose its supremacy over Passau (Passavia).

In DALMATIA, Split (Salonae) boasts of having had as its first bishop St. Domnius or Domnio, who is said to have been a disciple of St. Peter and a martyr under Trajan; but in reality he lived and died under Diocletian, as the most ancient documents affirm, such as the Hieronymian Martyrology, the Liber Pontificalis, and the Paschal Chronicle of 395. The apostolic legend comes from a group of writings of the 8th century.

Agostino Amore