Temptations in an Apostolic Age

George Weigel just published a piece in First Things entitled “The Donatist Comeback,” and it’s an insightful diagnostic for our time. “Like other great heresies,” Weigel notes, “Donatism seems to make a comeback from time to time. And one of those times is now.”

He’s referring to an ancient heresy that sought to curate a Church that was essentially pure and faultless, restricting who could be considered genuinely Christian and, especially, who could be considered a valid minister of the sacraments. His concern for a “new” Donatism is basically in respect to two groups: the Society of St. Pius X, and the German “Synodal Path.” Both, he notes, are in some way announcing themselves as “the only ‘true’ Catholics,” “divid[ing] the world into ‘us’ and ‘them.’” One may occupy the more traditionalist, conservative side of the spectrum, and the other the more progressive, liberal side, but both, he suggests, are slipping into a mentality “that is a grave distortion of the Catholic understanding of the Church”: that only certain kinds of Catholics are real Catholics, and that only those who believe in a certain subset of moral, political, or liturgical ideals are those who are really faithful to God’s commands.  

The point touches on the way different moments in the history of the Church tend to present different temptations that we would do well to be aware of. We’ve made before the distinction between a “Christendom” time and an “apostolic” time in the life of the Church, both of which come with their own strengths and risks. A Christendom time, for example, can sometimes foster what we might call an “accommodationist” mindset: because the culture is generally Christian in its structures and institutions, that kind of Christianity can sometimes become not just general but generic, or watered down. In other words, the temptation is to accommodate the faith to the worldly way of being that the faith is present in the midst of – to be Christian in name and appearance, just like everybody else is, but not from a place of deep, wholehearted conversion and conviction. So, at a time like that, the Church needs to distinguish itself from the world. It has to articulate faithfulness to the Lord as something that goes beyond subscribing to the generic, inherited morality and belief set that just lives in the air one breathes.

But in an apostolic time, the danger is different. When the Church is already decisively different from the wider world – as, for instance, the early Church was from the ancient world – the main temptation is not accommodation to whatever the reigning cultural currents are. The more serious temptation is schism, schism based upon who are really the “true” Christians.

To put it another way: there’s a tendency to say, “We’re the ones, not you, who are really following Jesus,” leaning into a rigorist or separationist mentality that then loses the unity of the Church. The Church is already the cultural outsider, after all, and this becomes a way of solidifying that distinctiveness, that alternative identity. This sort of thing is unlike those who may see a need to reform the Church – those who want to call the Church to a higher standard, but understand that the Church is a mixture of good and evil, and that the Lord is working out our sin and suffering by his own means through her. The Donatists Weigel mentions did not have this mind among them; they were rigorists, without room for sin or evil. They believed that they were the true Catholics, and that God’s mercy would only go so far when it came to certain sins and certain kinds of sinners. They wanted a pure Church, one comprised only of those who were “really” going for the faith, and excluding those who were weak or lacking in their scrupulous moral or liturgical commitments.

This is the sort of thing that Weigel suggests is creeping into the Church right now, too. And while he names a couple of specific avenues by which it may be doing so, it’s worth noting that the temptation he’s identifying – to be known as someone who’s really serious about this stuff, to belong to something with high ideals and a substantial culture – is something that can take hold in any Christian who wants to be faithful to the Lord’s call, especially when the cultural winds are at our back. A subtle (or not-so-subtle) attitude of superiority or self-sufficiency can find its way in any believer’s heart.

But that kind of attitude is not one encouraged by the Gospel. The Lord’s warnings against disunity and pride are stern; his encouragements toward fostering fraternity and a ready welcome among members of the Church are many. So if our own apostolic moment does prompt our awareness that the Christian way is different from the world’s way, and if our moment does encourage a more dynamic Christian life than a Christendom time may tend to do, we should be careful not to let our zeal and dynamism become scrupulosity, self-righteousness, pride, or condescension. Christ entrusted the Church with the keys to the Kingdom, and it’s beyond us to think ourselves the keepers of a “real” Christianity that he did not endorse. The Church is our vessel to holiness. And we should entrust ourselves to no more nor less than what she asks of us.