Drive downtown any city in the United States
and you will find a swath of Christian churches. Anglican. Presbyterian. Lutheran. Methodist.
Among baptists alone there 19 different federations of Churches, including the Alliance
of Baptists, the American Baptists Association, Conservative Baptist Association, Pentecostal Free
Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, and Southern Baptist Convention. All told, there are literally
thousands of denominations of Christians, all claiming the authority and
authenticity to teach in the name of Jesus. And that is fascinating to me. As a Catholic
priest, as someone who’s a part of a Church that makes the same claim—the ultimate claim on
authority, in fact—it seems absolutely ridiculous that all of these Churches would claim to be the
Church of Christ… But it also makes me wonder: what makes the Catholic Church any different?
Are we just another denomination among many? Not exactly. To answer this question, we’ve got to go back to
the beginning of Christianity, to Jesus himself. In John 20, shortly after the resurrection, Jesus
appears to the disciples, breathes his spirit into them, and gives a powerful pronouncement: “As the
Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven
them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” Just a few months earlier, it would have been
unheard of for anyone to forgive sins—the Pharisees attacked even
Jesus for making this claim. Now, human beings have been entrusted
with it. The Apostles are commissioned to do what only Jesus could do, to perform
supernatural tasks, to have authority over sin. When we look to Matthew, we see an even greater
claim. After Peter rightly proclaims Jesus the Christ, Jesus responds, “Blessed are you,
Simon son of Jonah. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father.
And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of
the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom
of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” This is not just the authority
over sins or unclean spirits—this is the authority of the Church on earth to
govern, to set laws that are not of human origin, that do not merely affect the living,
but have an eternal character to them. Founded by Jesus himself, filled with the Holy
Spirit at Pentecost, what the first Apostles lead is not merely a human institution run
on the whims of a few men, it is a divinely founded and guided Church, serving as the living
representation of the Kingdom of heaven on earth. While we know that God can work
through all places and all people, the Church is the one place, the one
people, that can assure us of his presence. Because it is made up of humans with
free will, there will still be sin, there may be horrible leaders, but
because it is guided by the Holy Spirit, we know that it’s ultimate mission of
Truth will be safeguarded from error. That’s the Church that Jesus
founded. That is what Church should be. So what does that have anything
to do with the Catholic Church, you ask? Well, if we continue on to the beginning of
Acts, we see a decisive scene. Because Judas betrayed Jesus, the Apostles who were picked
by Jesus to lead, who shared in the last supper and received his spirit at Pentecost, are down
to eleven. And it could have stayed that way. But it doesn’t. In the first chapter of Acts,
the Apostles find it necessary to replace him, to add someone that Jesus himself did not
choose to the highest authority of leadership. They pray to God, drawing lots, and
so choose for themselves a successor. They choose for themselves someone with the
full authority of the Church, someone who is able to lay hands on the deacons to ordain them,
who is able to give witness to the resurrection and teach about the authentic faith. Just days
after the Ascension—maybe even the same day—we see the disciples progressing the mission
forward, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, doing something that Jesus
did not command or prescribe. This is significant in two ways. First, we can
say that Jesus founded a Church, but he did not leave it fully formed. He was the inspiration, the
institution on which it was formed, but he did not give the Apostles much more than a mission. From
this point, and really, throughout the rest of the New Testament, it is clear that what it means
to be Church develops. Structures take shape, prayers are written, traditions form, and the
daily life of the people adapts with the times. But there’s something even more significant
than this. The legitimate authority of Christ is shown to be handed down to others. It is
not just that the ones Jesus hand-picked made decisions about the life of the Church—these men
designated others to have the same authority. These “overseers,” as St. Paul will later
refer to them, serve as the backbone of the Church from then on out, passing down their
authority from generation to generation. It was the 12 who laid hands on the deacons.
It was from among the 12 that chose the elders to assist them at table. When one died, when
the Church grew and needed more leaders, the group anointed new leaders, assuring that
legitimate authority would be preserved. Outside of Scripture, we can see evidence of this
as early as the beginning of the 2nd century, that the legitimate authority of the Church
was fundamentally tied to the successors of the Apostles. In his letter to the Church in Smyrna,
St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote, “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, even as
wheresoever Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic church. It is not lawful apart from the bishop
either to baptize or to hold the eucharist.” The true Church of Christ is the
institution led by the bishops, the legitimate successors of the Apostles. And where do we find that unbroken line
of valid ordinations in the Church today? In Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Since the time of
Christ, every single bishop that has ever lived has been ordained by a legitimate bishop.
Fo this reason, every single bishop, priest, or deacon, theoretically, could
trace his lineage from bishop to bishop, all the way back to the Apostles,
and ultimately to Christ. The strongest claim we have, I think,
for governing in our world today, why we would argue that we are not
just another denomination among many, is the fact that our authority shares
an unbroken line right to Christ. By virtue of ordination, of passing on the Spirit
of those first chosen, our bishops fulfill the promise given to Peter and the others, to
remove sins, to bind and loose on earth. And this is where the video could stop.
We’ve looked at scripture, I’ve shared the tradition of the Church, and spoke my peace.
This is our argument, take it or leave it… except there’s more. As I’ve thought about this
idea over the years, especially now that I am a part of this succession, in a way, I can’t
help but wonder: can we actually prove this? It’s one thing to say that I could
theoretically draw a line from me all the way back to Jesus… but can we
actually? And down the rabbit hole I went. Apparently, there are smart, dedicated people
in the world who’ve had the same question as me… which is why the website Catholic Hierarchy dot
org exists. There, you can find any living bishop, and see everyone in his line of succession.
I was ordained by Bishop Zarama of Raleigh, who was consecrated a bishop by Wilton Gregory,
who was consecrated by Louis Bernadin, and so on. But as I sure you see, it’s an incomplete
list. Because we don’t have records for every time period, because it takes just
one missing bit of data to break the line, we can’t get all of the way there. In my
case, the list unfortunately ends with a man named Scipione Rebiba, a bishop born
in 1504 and consecrated a bishop in 1541. What about other lines, you ask.
Well, as I clicked around the site, I found that I’m not the only
one who traces back to Rebiba. Not by a long shot. The more I clicked, the
more I realized that seemingly everyone did. As it turns out, Pope Benedict XIII,
Pietro Francesco Orsini de Gravina, a member of Rebiba’s line, consecrated
A LOT of bishops. At least 159. From 1724 to 1729 alone, he consecrated 139
bishops compared to 207 by all other bishops. Except, 90 of those not consecrated by him
were consecrated by people whom he consecrated, meaning that two thirds of all bishops in his
time were connected to his line. Of the 117 outside his line, only 49 bishops
were produced a generation later, compared to 330 in Rebiba’s line. That is a huge
bottleneck that eliminated a lot of extent lines. But how many? Who are the outliers and how
many are there? The rabbit hole got deeper. As it turns out, besides twelve Roman bishops
that were consecrated by Maronite bishops, another story entirely, there only
three other extent Roman lines left: Guillaume d’Estouteville, Johannes
Wolfgang von Bodman, and François de Bovet. These three men account
for 58 bishops alive today. 58! Today there are roughly 5600 Roman bishops,
meaning that 99% of all living Roman bishops, going back just 500 years, go through the
same guy. Meaning, that if we ever find who consecrated Rebiba, and who consecrated that
guy, and so on all the way back to Jesus, there will be 1500 years of just
one straight line of succession. I don’t know why that blows my mind but it does,
and it leaves me with so many more questions. Who ordained Rebiba? Will we ever know? Could it
possibly be someone in the d’Estouteville line, which is actually 100 years older? If so,
it would make the d’Estouteville line the dominant line, but also leave us
with only three distinct lines. Of course, they all have to be connected
somewhere, so where do they converge? Are they all d’Estouteville? Do they trace back much further
into the 1200s, the 800s, the early Church? I know the title and first half of this video
were all about what makes the Catholic Church authentic in its teaching, and
that’s obviously important, but this is entire reason I made this
video. All that other stuff was just set up, a framing device so you’d click. THIS is what I
want to talk about because THIS is fascinating. At this point, documentation is spotty
at times, and so what we’ve dealing with is a map with lots of holes. We’ve got
pieces, some as old as the 6th century, but there’s just too much missing to fill
it in. In truth, the likelihood of finding verifiable documentation going back 2000 years
is unlikely, but it does make you wonder what might be lost away in some corner of the Vatican
archives. What information is already out there, published in an ancient newspaper or
manuscript, just waiting to be translated? For me, the fact that we don’t have
documentation is disappointing, but in no way calls into question the claim on
apostolic succession—the evidence overwhelmingly shows that from the time of Ignatius of Antioch,
through the sixth century, and into the middle ages, succession matters to us. This is how we
govern. This is what holds the Church together. And so, coming back to the beginning I guess, what do we make of the thousands of
Christian denominations? They’re our baptized brothers and sisters. They share in the
life of Christ, and I would never want to hinder whatever good works they are doing to proclaim the
Gospel with their lives. That’s the honest truth. But I can’t help feel divided. I can’t help
but look at the Church Jesus founded, the one legitimately led by the disciples, maintaining
the traditions of the Church for centuries, and feel that they have gone their own way. That may not seem ecumenical,
it may sound a bit harsh, but I don’t know how they can claim otherwise.
There was a point when their denomination didn’t exist, and now it does. Where
do they rest their authority? What makes them think that they are the
Church of Jesus? I don’t get it. This is not to say that their work is
useless or that I’m dismissing them outright. I firmly believe that many of the Protestant
denominations have contributed to the mission of Christ, even in ways that the Catholic
Church hasn’t. I just wish that the reforms they offered could have been from within. I
wish that they hadn’t felt a need to start something new, to break from the succession of
authority, to claim a new type of authority. We’ve made our mistakes along the way and
certainly had our part to play in the division. The Catholic Church certainly needed reform
then, and I know we still need it now. My hope in this all, I guess, is that we can meet in the
middle, that our Protestant brothers and sisters can admit the same, and maybe, hopefully, by the
grace of God, one day come to give up protest.
