I’m Catholic, of course, but would you mind explaining, for my benefit, how we came up with the Sacrament of Holy Orders? I’m not disagreeing with you at all, but how can I explain it to my Protestant friends? Is it related to apostolic succession in some way?
Thanks in advance
First, we didn’t “come up with” the Sacrament - it was Jesus who said to the Apostles, “Do this in memory of me,” thus authorizing the Apostles to say Mass.
It was the Apostles who passed down this authority to “do this” to their successors and to those they ordained. This succession continues even today, in the Catholic Church.
Remember, authority can only be given by someone who has the authority to pass down authority - parents authorize babysitters to speak in their name (other babysitters can’t do this); company owners authorize managers to speak in their name (other managers can’t do this), etc.
Random people can’t come along and do this, and people can’t just appoint themselves to be babysitters or managers, without authorization from the original authorities.
Jesus also said, with regard to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins …” when He cured the paralytic, in Matthew 9:1-8 - thus, we see that Jesus has the authority, which He then gives to the Apostles in the Upper Room on the Sunday evening of His Resurrection, when He said, “Peace be to you! As the Father has sent me, I also send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” in John 20:21-23.
Now, how is it that the Protestants lost this succession? Well, a glance at the history of the Reformation shows us that none of the Protestant reformers was a Bishop in good standing with the Catholic Church - thus, whoever they ordained was not ordained lawfully, and did not receive the authority that Christ had given to His apostles.
Martin Luther was an Augustinian priest. He had no authority to ordain anyone (he was not a Bishop), so those he ordained did not receive what he did not have the authority to give them - authority to confect the Sacraments. John Calvin was a lay man, so those whom he ordained also did not receive anything that he neither had, nor had authority to pass on - that is, authority to confect the Sacraments.
So, the Protestants who trace back to Martin Luther and John Calvin, because they could not receive the authority of the Apostles through either of them, we know that they did not receive any authority - meaning that, even now, they still don’t have any authority to confect the Sacraments.
The Anglicans are a little trickier, because they did have lawfully ordained Bishops ordaining their priests, and they did, in fact, have authority to do this (although they were in schism) for a short while, until one of their Kings decided to change the wording of the Ordination ceremony to explicitly exclude any reference to the Sacraments, in order to differentiate Anglicanism from Catholicism and make it more like Lutheranism. At that point, because the form of the Ordination ceremony had fundamentally changed, the authority that goes with it was no longer being passed down. (The Anglicans obviously disagree, but this is the position of the Church.)
