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The 4th-5th century Donatists of ancient Christian North Africa wanted a church of the pure only.
Donatists and their kind were the followers and of (inter alii) the rigorous heretical schismatic Donatus Magnus.
During Diocletian’s persecution (303 onward) priests and bishops under threat sometimes of death had caved in and had handed over sacred texts and offered incense sacrifice to the divinity of the Emperor. For the Donatists, those “traditores… handers-over” were forever tainted. Obsessed with Old Testament concepts of ritual purity, Donatists believed that these fallen bishops could, by physical contact, pass their sin to another in conferring ordination. Those traditores who had returned to ministry in the Church passed on their stain through contact. As a result, Donatists were also obsessed with the appearance of holiness in the members of their purist church. For Donatists, through those traditores and successive sinner-ministers all the lay people received the taint and guilt from their sinner-priests to the point that the whole Church would be stained and sinful.
Donatists thought that the Church had to be outwardly, visibly impeccable in contrast to the fallen world. If their bishops and priests outwardly appeared holy enough, lay people who followed them could be certain that their Donatist Church was holy.
St. Augustine of Hippo (+430) in North Africa, confounded these Donatist heresies by teaching how the validity of sacraments does not depend on the holiness of the human minister but rather on the holiness of the true minister, who is Christ.
Despite her sinful members, the Church remains spotless and holy. Therefore, the Catholic Church’s sacraments are valid even if her priests and bishops are manifestly sinners. This teaching would be eventually formulated with the phrase ex opere operato, namely, the sacrament is administered by Christ through the rites having been performed by the minister who will always in some way be sinful not being God, as opposed to ex opere operantis, namely, by actions of the minister doing the work. Validity is guaranteed from the work (sacrament) having been conferred by Christ, not on the work of the possibility even sinful minister conferring it. There is no question of the holiness of Christ at work in the sacraments provided we are disposed to receive the graces.
While the Donatists wanted throw out vast numbers of people who had sinned or were tainted by sinners, St. Augustine worked to preserve the Church’s unity, saints and sinners together until God could sort them out. He used the Lord’s parable about the wheat and the tares (Mat 13:24-30) which is the Gospel reading for this Resumed 5th Sunday after Epiphany. It is an appropriate reading for the end of the liturgical year because it deals with the Final Judgement and the separation of the blessed from the damned and their different fates. Here’s the RSV:
At that time, Jesus spoke this parable to the crowds: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field; but while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?’ He said to them, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The servants said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he said, ‘No; lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
This scenario presents a real issue. Sowing the aggressive and ruinous tare or darnel (Lolium tementulum) was an act of biological terrorism. Darnel is a poisonous weed that looks like wheat with entangling root systems, rather like some groups in the Church. There were harsh Roman laws in Jesus’s time about sowing these in grain fields or orchards. Hence, the Lord didn’t invent a fictional scenario: people did this horrible thing to each other.
Christ’s listeners would have grasped the severity of the attack immediately. This is why the servants wanted to weed out the darnels right away. But the master says, and this is the parable’s mashal twist that gives force to the nimshal message: allow the wheat and darnels to grow side by side; at harvest time they will be separated, the wheat gathered into storage, the weeds bundled and burned. I don’t have to spell that out, do I?
During the difficult and prolonged Donatist controversy that tore the unity of the ancient Church in North Africa to sheds, Augustine used this parable to describe the Church as a corpus permixtum malis et bonis… a body thoroughly mixed through with good and evil people. They will eventually be separated. The body, the Church, itself is good and holy and spotless, but her members can be wicked, all dressed up in fancy titles and clothes, with letters after their names and deceptive smiles, side by side with the truly righteous.
God knows who they are. God cannot be deceived.
Perhaps stemming from his own self-examination of conscience, his prayerful reflection on his own life, while Augustine affirmed that lay people have every right to expect their priests to be holy, and to behave as if they are holy, priests mustn’t ape holiness, wear it like a costume merely. Augustine knew that priests themselves are pardoned sinners, striving for and with those whom they serve. As he put it in a sermon, “I am a bishop for you, I am a Christian with you” (s. 340, 1).
We are all mixed up in the Church.
You can take that anyway you want. It’s polyvalent.
Errors are taught alongside truths. Open, publicly scandalous people are admitted to Communion while many who want to receive reverently on the tongue while kneeling before their God are scolded and denied. The new-fangled rites which do not all that much reflect the written desires of the Council Fathers are executed with so many options that they are hard to recognize from place to place while the consistent and solid traditional rites that fueled conversions, the missions and evangelization of the world are marginalized. Some who have no business being in leadership or teaching positions are vaunted while the qualified are ignored or they withdraw in self-defense from the scrum.
Here is the Postcommunion for this Resumed 5th Sunday after Epiphany…
Quaésumus, omnípotens Deus: ut illíus salutáris capiámus efféctum, cuius per haec mystéria pignus accépimus.
A Latin pignus is “a pledge, gage, pawn, security, mortgage”. It is a token of proof. Mysteria is essentially interchangeable with sacramenta or the rites that confect sacraments.
Literal version:
We beseech You, Almighty God, that we may grasp hold of the salvation of which we have received a pledge by these mysteries.
St. Thomas Aquinas in his great Sequence for Corpus Christi has us sing of reception of Communion:
Sumunt boni, sumunt mali:
Sorte tamen inæquáli,
Vitæ vel intéritus.Mors est malis, vita bonis:
Vide paris sumptiónis
Quam sit dispar éxitus.Both the wicked and the good
Eat of this celestial Food:
But with ends how opposite!Here ’tis life: and there ’tis death:
The same yet issuing to each
In a difference infinite.
In the traditional rite for Holy Communion outside of Mass, as the priest reposes the Blessed Sacrament or his Pyx, he says the famous O Sacrum Convivium, also of St. Thomas’ Office for Corpus Christi, which has been set to beautiful music through many centuries.
O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
We have the reality and we have the pledge. We have it and we don’t. We are on the road, arrived by baptism, but not yet arrived in consummation. We consume now what we will one day no longer sense under signs but in unveiled reality.
Our neighbors are also veiled realities and works in progress so long as we are drawing breath. Each one is a pledge, in a sense, something not yet fulfilled.
You might have a role in changing a person’s sors… his outcome…. his exitus… how he turns out in the end.
In the end, the Lord will do the sorting. Until then, our pledge-cards have our tasks in life upon them, to live according to our vocations, striving for the good, true and beautiful, staying strong in our identity within our corpus permixtum malis et bonis and nonetheless spotless holy Mother the Church in spite of attacks on that identity from without and from within.
