The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Is Dredging up an Old Heresy

Many Catholics were outraged last week when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops failed to take action to address the clergy sex abuse crisis. Almost as soon as the bishops convened in Baltimore, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the conference president, announced he’d received a letter from the Holy See instructing the conference not to vote on measures that would bring greater accountability to bishops. Instead, they were told to wait for a synod on the crisis that Pope Francis will host in Rome in February.

The news went down like a lead balloon. For some Catholics, it was more than they could bear. Melinda Henneberger, a columnist for USA Today and former Vatican correspondent for The New York Times, announced she was leaving the church. Addressing the bishops directly, she wrote: “After a lifetime of stubborn adherence on my part and criminal behavior on yours, your excellencies, you seem to have finally succeeded in driving me away.”

Henneberger doesn’t make an argument for why she’s leaving, she just says she’s had enough. Like several other Catholic journalists who recently left the church over the sex abuse crisis, her implication is that because so many bishops and cardinals are morally compromised, the church itself isn’t worthy of allegiance or affection.

Tempting as that conclusion might be, Henneberger and the others are giving in to an old heresy, which, like all heresies, keeps coming around in new guises. In this case, it’s a version of Donatism, the notion that for prayers and sacraments to be valid, the clerics administering them must be blameless. As a practical matter, Donatism presents the obvious problem that it’s impossible to find a blameless cleric.

But as a doctrine, it presents yet more serious problems. When Donatism began winning adherents in the fourth century, it drew the ire of Saint Augustine, who famously fought it by arguing that ministers of the sacraments were mere instruments of God’s grace, not its source, which is Jesus Christ. (Read more from “The Clergy Sex Abuse Crisis Is Dredging up an Old Heresy” HERE)

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