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| St Linus, successor to St Peter and a man of many miracles |
Here Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman expounds on how Bishops began....
"While Apostles were on earth there was the display neither of Bishop or Pope: their power had no prominence as being exercised by Apostles. In course of time, first the power of the Bishop displayed itself, and then the power of the Pope.
It is a common occurence for a quarrel and a lawsuit to bring out the state of the law, and then the most unexpected results often follow.
St Peter's prerogative would remain a mere letter, till the complication of ecclesiastical matters became the cause of ascertaining it.
While Christians were 'of one heart and one soul' it would be suspended: love dispenses with laws.
When the Church, then, was thrown upon her own resources, first local disturbances gave exercise to Bishops, and next ecumenical disturbances gave exercise to Popes: and whether communion with the Pope was necessary for Catholicity would not and could not be debated till a suspension of that communion had actually occurred. It is not a greater difficulty that St Ignatius does not write to the Asian Greeks about Popes than that St Paul does not write to the Corinthians about Bishops. And it is a less difficulty that the Papal supremacy was not acknowledged in the second century, than that there was no formal acknowledgement on the part of the Church of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity till the fourth.
No doctrine is defined till it is violated".
(From An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine)
* Just as a point of interest St Linus, second Pope, forbade women to enter the Church without having a veil upon their heads.
Tomorrow I hope to follow through with a post on how the early Bishops developed within Holy Mother Church - Deo volente!
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