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This is a 17th-century painting of St. Augustine by artist Philippe de Champaigne. The saint lived in the years 354-430 and is considered a church father and doctor of the church. (OSV News photo/Public Domain, Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

The Donatist comeback


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Syndicated Columnist Filed Under: Commentary, The Catholic Difference

My Lenten reading has included an interesting, if somewhat odd, book about the greatest of the Latin Fathers of the Church: Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare, a philologist currently teaching at Bryn Mawr. The interesting part of the book reframes Augustine as a North African provincial who sees the world differently — and thus thinks differently and more creatively — than the haughty souls in Rome and Milan, the metropolitan centers of the late western Roman Empire. The oddity is that Professor Conybeare quite misses the crucial importance of the Donatist controversy in which Augustine was embroiled for decades.

In Conybeare’s telling, the controversy was essentially a power struggle pitting the North African periphery against the imperial center. This rather completely miscasts what was at stake in the controversy, which Conybeare’s hero, Augustine, fully understood: if Donatism had prevailed, the Church’s entire sacramental economy, as Catholicism conceives it, would have been wrecked (because of the Donatist claim that only sinless ministers could celebrate valid sacraments); the efficacy of divine grace would have been denied (because sin, in the Donatist view, could cancel the effects of baptism); and Christianity would have been reduced to a small sect of the sinless and perfect, rather than a communion of saints and sinners in which the divine mercy, always available to the penitent, is stronger than Satan, evil, and sin.

All of which is worth recalling today because, like other great heresies, Donatism seems to make a comeback from time to time. And one of those times is now. For there are two sectors of the world Church that currently exhibit an unmistakably Donatist tendency to imagine themselves as the only “real” or “true” Catholics.

When the Lefebvrist movement, embodied in the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), recently announced its plans to illicitly consecrate new bishops without an apostolic mandate from the Vicar of Christ, the Pope, it justified this move — and its rejection of the possibility of a serious theological dialogue with Church authorities in Rome — on the grounds that the texts of the Second Vatican Council are fundamentally erroneous (as are John Paul II’s encyclicals Redemptor Hominis [The Redeemer of Man] and Ut Unum Sint [That They May Be One]). Which is to say, implicitly, that the only “true” Catholics are those who reject as heretical the teaching of Vatican II’s dogmatic constitutions on the Church and on divine revelation, those who reject the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite, and those who reject the Council’s teaching on religious freedom as a human right.

And that is a form of Donatism.

So is what has been afoot for some time in Germany. The German “Synodal Path” proposes to reconfigure the Catholic Church’s structures of governance, change its teaching on the moral life to accommodate the sexual revolution, and reimagine the Church’s ordained ministry, creating in effect what Pope Francis once rightly cautioned against: “another Protestant church” that Germany doesn’t need, given the death throes in which German Lutheranism finds itself.

This program amounts to what a German bishop who embodies dynamic orthodoxy, Bishop Stefan Oster of Passau, has called a process of “self-secularization. That process has been made even more distasteful (not to say, duplicitous) by weaponizing the horror of clerical sexual abuse as an excuse for the deconstruction of Catholic faith, practice, and governance. However one describes it, though, the path being taken by the great majority of the German bishops and by the Central Committee of German Catholics is a Donatist path, in which the implicit claim is that a Catholicism indistinguishable from liberal Protestantism is the “real” Church and only those Catholics who tailor the Church to the demands of 21st-century culture (including the new Gnosticism — another recurrent heresy — of the transgender movement) are truly Catholic.

The strange, Donatist parallelism between the SSPX leadership and the German Synodal Path illustrates what’s come to be called the “horseshoe effect:” in a moment of cultural turbulence, social fragmentation, and political dysfunction like our own, the extremes of left and right bend toward each other rather than occupying two ends of a linear spectrum. Both divide the world into “us” and “them.” Both wield the anathema with relish. And in this Catholic moment, the extremes are manifesting a common Donatism — a “remnant” mentality that is a grave distortion of the Catholic understanding of the Church.
If every crisis contains within itself an opportunity, though, the new Donatism offers Rome an opportunity for some essential clarifications.

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