Cathari Sentence Examples
Another resolution, of importance for the history of the treatment of heresy, was the canon which decreed that armed force should be employed against the Cathari in southern France, that their goods were liable to confiscation and their persons to enslavement by the princes, and that all who took up weapons against them should receive a two years' remission of their penance and be placed - like the crusaders - under the direct protection of the church.
The seventy decrees of the council begin with a confession of faith directed against the Cathari and Waldenses, which is significant if only for the mention of a transubstantiation of the elements in the Lord's Supper.
Election took the place of ordination, but even here the Lombards showed their difference from the Ultramontanes, and recognized only two orders, like the Cathari, while the northern body kept the old three orders of bishops, priests and deacons.
The tendencies which they represented had been present when the middle ages were yet at their height; but the papacy, while at the zenith of its power, had succeeded in crushing the attacks made upon the creed of the Church by its most dangerous foes, the dualistic Cathari.
The efficacy of prayers for the dead, and indirectly the doctrine of purgatory, were denied by early Gnostic sects, by Aerius in the 4th century, and by the Waldenses, Cathari, Albigenses and Lollards in the middle ages.
But it was unquestionably from Marcionite impulses that the new sects of the Paulicians and Bogomils arose; and in so far as the western Cathari, and the antinomian and anticlerical sects ' Marcion was the earliest critical student of the New Testament canon and text.
There was this in common among the Cathari, Waldenses, Albigenses and other heretical bodies that overran so many parts of Western Europe in the second half of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th, that they all inveighed against the wealth of the clergy, and preached the practice of austere poverty and a return to the simple life of Christ and the Apostles.
Priscillian perished for insisting that it was such; and seven centuries later the Church began to burn the Cathari by thousands because they took a similar view of the Christian life."
The Albigensian theologians and ascetics, the Cathari or perfecti, known in the south of France as bons hommes or bons chretiens, were few in number; the mass of believers (credentes) were perhaps not initiated into the Catharist doctrine; at all events, they were free from all moral prohibition and all religious obligation, on condition that they promised by an act called convenenza to become " hereticized " by receiving the consolamentum, the baptism of the Spirit, before their death or even in extremis.
In 12 4 5 the royal officers assisting the Inquisition seized the heretical citadel of Montsegur, and 200 Cathari were burned in one day.
AdvertisementThe name of Cathari (see CATHAxs), taken by the adherents of this new teaching, sufficiently shows the Oriental origin of their opinions, which spread from Bulgaria amongst the Sla y s, and followed the routes of commerce into central Europe.