Individual Successors for Apostles?

The Catholic Church teaches that bishops collectively succeed the apostles rather than through individual replacements for each of the original twelve.

While the bishop of Rome is recognized as the successor of Peter, other historical traditions link specific leaders to individual apostles. For example, the patriarch of Constantinople began to be viewed as the successor of Andrew three centuries after Jesus. Similarly, the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria is considered the successor of St. Mark, though Mark was an evangelist rather than an apostle.

The doctrine of apostolic succession was developed to counter Gnostic Christians, who claimed to possess secret oral and written teachings passed down from the apostles to a select few. In his 1995 encyclical on ecumenism, St. John Paul II noted that the Petrine ministry has been practiced in various ways throughout history.