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.