The ‘Donatists’ are back

My friends, they are back, they live among us: the Donatists!

Who were the Donatists? Fourth-century North African Christians who believed the Church should be the society of the pure, and that anyone who had failed, compromised, or celebrated unworthily was out. Augustine spent twenty years telling them the Church is not a club of saints but a field of wheat and weeds. They lost the argument. They never lost the temptation.

The ‘perfect’ have now come back, because, as it has been said, ‘There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.’ They have come back, and I have bad news: they are watching you!

They have been training in an invisible church: social media.

Their ‘priests’ are avid online preachers with a narrow theological culture and a narrow view of the history of the Church and its life. They cut and sew up pieces of church history and theology; they file down the complexity of Catholicism to forge the new Donatist truth: there is only one way to be Catholic, and it is ours.

They want you to pray in a reverent way, and how could we disagree? But pay attention to this: to pray in a reverent way means to pray their way. They monitor how many times you kneel, and how many times and how deeply you bow. Your hymns are severely scrutinised.

They monitor whether you skip a word or forget a line during the liturgy, and that is because Holy Mass for them is not a relationship in which we encounter the saving power of the Lord, but a spell: skip a word in the book and the spell doesn’t work.

They know everything you can and cannot do according to the rubrics, forgetting the words of St Paul: ‘for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6).

At their worst, they appear to love the rubric more than the people for whom the liturgy exists: if you don’t follow it, they take photos and videos which they share compulsively.

They have replaced a history of liturgical abuses with a liturgical police system.

You cannot make any exception to the rubric, but they can tell you which Pope, Saint and Council was Catholic and which was not.

They want to dissolve, in their ecclesial fundamentalism, the supreme and ineffable mystery of our God and Lord: ‘How rich are the depths of God – how deep his wisdom and knowledge – and how impossible to penetrate his motives or understand his methods!’ (Romans 11:33).

You might think I have it in for those who want the Mass in Latin. Not at all: how could an Italian hate Latin? I wouldn’t even mind celebrating Mass ad orientem sometimes, with my back to the people; I would feel perfectly comfortable doing so.

Still, we must remind some of our brothers and sisters attached to the Latin Mass that they cannot climb onto the pedestal and lecture the rest of us. They have refused the liturgical reform, and they are permitted to celebrate in Latin only thanks to the maternal patience of a Church willing to embrace even her more troublesome children.

So, to be clear: none of this makes me uncomfortable. What I cannot accept is the intolerance inside the Church that seeks to suppress the beautiful, plural face of the Catholic Church.

I love the woman who, wearing a veil, kneels to receive Holy Communion, and I love the community that wants to dance around the altar because the Lord is present in their midst.

I love the community that wants to listen to the word of Jesus in deep and reverent silence, and the community that wants to carry that same Word in joyful procession because the Lord comes to speak to us.

I love the priest who delivers his preaching with solemnity and authority, and I love the priest who tries by every means to get that word to those who are ‘deaf’.

I love listening to the Adoro te devote, and I burst into tears at some contemporary Christian songs, like ‘Holy Are You Lord’.

I love this beautiful face of Christendom in all its colours.

-Fr Mirko Integlia