By Gary Topping–
(Editor note: The Boy Monk blog just celebrated its one year anniversary! In honor of the occasion, and in light of the ongoing scandal afflicting the Catholic Church, we invited regular contributors to address the rather timely theme of “When human institutions fail…”)
During the persecution under the Emperor Diocletian (284-305), Christians throughout the Roman Empire were often at serious risk of martyrdom. Predictably, some of them lost their courage and renounced their faith in order to save themselves. Among that group was a considerable number of the three hundred bishops in north Africa. Once the persecution was over, some of the faithful north Africans, called Donatists, created a major schism on the grounds that those unfaithful bishops were not true Christians and that the sacraments administered at their hands were not valid. The Donatist schism became one of the greatest crises in the early history of the Church.
The larger issue at hand was conflicting visions of the nature of the Church. The Donatists, on the one hand, according to historian Thomas Bokenkotter, “claimed to be a pure Church, a Church of the elect, of the holy, of the martyrs, uncontaminated by and fiercely exclusive toward the world, an ark of refuge from evil society.” The orthodox Christians, on the other hand, found a mighty champion in Augustine, bishop of the Diocese of Hippo, later to become St. Augustine. Augustine’s conception of the Church, Bokenkotter continues, “willingly acknowledged the co-existence of saints and sinners” so that “A Church intended to embrace all of humanity could not be so sharply demarcated from the world. . . . The final separation would only take place at the End.” In the meantime, the sacraments of the Church “were holy, even if sometimes its ministers were not.”
Augustine’s position is one we might want to take to heart during our own troubled times of clerical sexual abuse. The question of the validity of sacraments administered by corrupt priests is an issue with us only retrospectively, because any priest credibly accused is immediately removed from pastoral duties. But the larger issue for us is what to make of a church that has been guilty of harboring and protecting such criminals at the expense of their innocent victims which the Church was supposed to be protecting. The Church itself will ultimately have to deal with the problem of child abuse, but for us lay people, I suggest that we ought to adjust our attitude toward the Church and not be naïve about its purity. Instead, we might remind ourselves of Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the tares, to which Augustine referred: both have to grow together until the final threshing.
In other words, don’t be a Donatist!
