Successors of the Apostles
The successors of St. Francis of Assisi were faced with the challenge of taming his rather wild charism within an Order.
The early Church was presented with the task of holding service and freedom [Christ washed feet; the First Letter of Peter revives the idea of the ‘priesthood of all believers’ [1 Peter 2:9] found in ancient Israel [Exodus 19:6] but then buried] within a disciplined structure.
The first Christians, as we have seen, not being too self-conscious about their Jewish roots, took Jewish titles such as ‘elder’, ‘overseer’, and simply rendered them in Greek. Indeed we might have had Christian rabbis, had not Christ spoken against that title [Matthew 23:8] which meant “great one”.
Such leaders were selected after prayer, and ‘ordained’ by a laying on of hands [1 Timothy 4:14]. Even then things could go horribly wrong, as we read in 3 John 9 where a leader, Diotrephes, had shown himself to be a control freak.
Gradually two ideas began to form: that each church (we would now say ‘diocese’) should have one overseer (we would say ‘bishop’) and that there should be some recognisable historical succession. These two things happened separately of each other.
The early martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch (+107) in his famous series of letters stresses the need for obedience to the ‘bishop’. However, slightly later, another martyr, St. Polycarp of Smyrna (+155), not only did not call himself a bishop, but wrote to the Christians in Philippi and did not speak of there being a ‘bishop’ there.
It was really only in the 3rd century, in the face of numerous heresies, that a common system developed. And a further martyr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons (+202) was the first to stress the need for legitimate leaders as being “successors of the Apostles’ .