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 And even this initial division of the mission field was soon superseded.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:

• «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».

• 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.