Thursday, 6/22/17
In the first reading Paul
told the people of Corinth that he was a true Apostle, and he told them that
they should not accept any new Gospel from anyone who was not an Apostle.
The longest living of the
Apostles was St. John, and before he died, he named a man named Polycarp to
follow him as bishop of Smyna, and he entrusted the Gospel to him. In time, Polycarp entrusted the
Gospel to Iraenius, making him the bishop to follow him.
In the next century when
strangers began preaching their own gospel, Irenaeus explained to them that
Jesus had entrusted his Gospel to the Apostles and to the bishops they
appointed to follow them.
It is the same down to our
time. In 1962 Pope John XXIII invited the world’s twenty-six hundred bishops to
come together for the Second Vatican Council. There, praying each day for light
from the Holy Spirit, in a democratic fashion, over four years those successors
of the Apostles established a present-day expression of the Gospel of Christ.
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