This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Donatist dispute began with a disputed election. When Caecilian was consecrated bishop of Carthage in 311, rigorist clergy objected that one of his consecrators had himself lapsed under persecution, and set up a rival bishop, eventually Donatus Magnus, from whom the movement took its name. The underlying question was older than the election: does a sacrament worthiness depend on the moral state of the person performing it.
Donatists answered yes. A church that tolerated bishops who had handed over scripture to Roman officials was, on their reading, no longer the holy church at all, and its sacraments carried no real effect. Augustine of Hippo, writing decades later as bishop of Hippo Regius, answered at length that the sacrament belongs to Christ acting through the office, not to the officeholder personal worthiness, so a lapsed minister sin does not travel into the sacrament itself, though it remains his own sin to answer for.
The Conference of Carthage in 411, called by the imperial commissioner Marcellinus at Augustine urging, heard both sides formally and ruled against the Donatist bishops. Imperial penalties followed, and the movement, though it persisted in scattered communities for generations, never recovered its earlier strength, disappearing largely with the Arab conquest of North Africa in the following centuries.