Rambling Apostolic Rant

The gospel for today contains St. Matthew's list of the twelve apostles, who are given "authority over unclean spirits" and entrusted with Jesus' own fundamental proclamation, "The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Sometimes I think when it comes like a passage like people say in their hearts, 'Ugh, a list of names...whatever!' I know that some preachers feel that way, because I've heard them. But on the contrary, I say that a list like this places a very challenging and powerful claim before us.

The mission and authority of Jesus is handed over to a specific collection of people; real historical people who are named and identified specifically. The proclamation of the Kingdom, the Resurrection faith, and the authority passed on by Jesus are not the property of just anyone who decides he should have them.

This can be very hard for us Americans to hear; the do-it-yourself, independent attitude is very powerful within us. We have this idea that we only have to form a committee made of members who might or might not know something about the question at hand, and by some supra-rational process they will come to an infallible authority. Unfortunately, Christianity is not a do-it-yourself kind of thing. It is a proclamation and a faith given to specific community of persons, and remainig therein. To suggest that we can become Christians by ourselves, much less preachers and teachers of the faith without this community, is a form of Pelagianism. Here I'm reminded of one of my favorite ditties, Hilaire Belloc's Pelagian Drinking Song, which starts like this:

Pelagius lived at Kardanoel
And taught a doctrine there
How, whether you went to heaven or hell
It was your own affair.
It had nothing to do with the Church, my boy,
But was your own affair.

This is why it is important for us, if we want to be Christians in the best way we can, to find ourselves in one of the apostolic churches, those communions that derive concretely and historically from the Apostles to whom Jesus entrusted his mission and authority. By this we mean one of the 23 particular churches (rites) that make up the Catholic Church or one of the Eastern or Oriental Orthodox churches. Of course there are a lot of gray areas here; both Catholics and Orthodox have schismatic groups that have maintained apostolic succession, and some Anglicans and Lutherans claim it too. But why would someone place themselves in such an ambiguous place, much less settle for less by joining an "ecclesial community" with no realistic claim to derive from the Apostles at all?

For me, in the course of my own conversion, it became a no-brainer. Based on my reading of the Scriptures and first experiences of prayer, I had decided that I wanted to become a Christian. As I began to learn the history of Christianity and how sacramentality follows directly upon the confession of the Incarnation, one of the sacramental, apostolic churches seemed like the only possible choice. Being a European American, Latin rite catholicism was the clear option.