Now, I do not mean that the Church’s structure is ill-considered, because it isn’t. To begin with, much of the reason it looks the way it does has to do with what is called the apostolic succession, which originates in the fact that Christ himself commissioned twelve men to be his first apostles and to continue his work (after his death and resurrection and ascension) by dispersing themselves to the four winds, baptizing and spreading the gospel, and likewise commissioning other men to do the same, and so on; so that the Church, by maintaining a tradition of ordaining only men, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, has seen herself as extending backward in time to those first apostles, and, by way of them, to Christ.