In this new series of ti morceaux I’ve decided to give a very basic, brief overview of Church history. As I said last time, we can learn from the past how to better live in and cope with the present. And I think I can do this without getting overwhelmed by details and trivia.
As I mentioned last time, most Church historians categorize our almost 2,000 years of Church history into five main eras. The first of these is probably the best-known to just about every active Catholic. This is the Apostolic Age, which began of course with the “birth of the Church” on Pentecost in the year 33 and lasted to about the year 100.
The “defining characteristic” of the Apostolic Age is, of course, that many of the apostles themselves were still alive. In fact, not just the apostles: other people who actually knew Jesus (or who knew or studied with people who knew Him) were still around and could clarify what He said and meant. When you stop to think about it, while we know the identities of a lot of them from the Bible – people like the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Mary Magdalene, Zacchaeus, St. Peter’s mother-in-law, and the many people fed or cured by Christ – there were certainly many others not mentioned there. Their witness was important!
If I had to pick one “most important thing” that happened during the Apostolic Age, in fact, it would be the writing of the New Testament. The Bible for Jesus and His contemporaries was only what we would call the Old Testament. The apostles and evangelists not only wrote these “new” Scriptures, but the texts began to be circulated and valued – equal to or better! – with the “old” ones!
Thus in the Apostolic Age the spread of the Faith began, away from the Holy Land and throughout the Mediterranean area. Some of our fundamental Church structures (like dioceses and the three kinds of clergy: bishops, priests and deacons) and doctrines (like the Trinity) date from this time as well.
Finally, I usually like to pick one “principal figure” who sort-of exemplifies each age of the Church. For the Apostolic Age, I like to select my patron St. Paul, for he clearly became the most important person both in writing a large part of the New Testament but also in spreading the message about Christ to many places in the Roman Empire. Empowered by the Holy Spirit and in communion with the other apostles, his insights that our Church was not just an offshoot of the Jewish religion but actually that non-Jews (known as Gentiles) could join proved central to our “Catholic” (remember, at its root this word means “universal”) identity.
