The Inquisition and heresy

Poor preachers and ‘good men’

In the 1170s Valdes, a rich merchant of Lyon often called Waldo, gave his goods to the poor and had the Gospels and other parts of Scripture translated into the language of his region. He and his followers, the ‘Poor of Lyon’, went out two by two to live in poverty and preach, as Jesus told the Twelve to take no gold or silver in their belts (Matthew 10:9-10). In 1179 Pope Alexander III praised Valdes' vow of poverty but forbade him to preach without the bishops' leave. They kept preaching, it is said, answering with the apostles' words, "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). The Waldensians saw themselves as Christians following the apostles' poverty and preaching.

In the same years another church, with bishops of its own, grew in southern France around Toulouse and Albi and in northern Italy. Its people called themselves ‘good Christians’ or ‘good men’; their opponents called them Cathars or Albigensians. They believed that the world of spirit came from the good God and the visible, material world from an evil principle; that the soul is a spirit imprisoned in flesh; and that Christ did not take a real body. So they rejected the church's sacraments and kept a single rite of laying on of hands, and those who received it, the ‘perfect’, ate no meat, did not marry and lived in poverty. Beside worldly clergy, their strict lives won many people's respect.

Most of what we know of them comes from their opponents and interrogators, and few of their own writings survive, so historians disagree about how organised a church they were. The church judged the Cathars' teaching a heresy, since it denied the goodness of creation and the incarnation of Christ; the Waldensians were condemned less for their teaching than for preaching without leave. On heresy itself, see How can I tell a heresy or cult?.

From Verona to Albi

In 1184 at Verona, Pope Lucius III, with the Emperor Frederick I beside him, issued a decree condemning as heretics the Cathars, the Poor of Lyon and other groups. Bishops were to visit their dioceses every year and have sworn witnesses name heretics, and those who would not recant were to be handed to the secular power for punishment. So the Waldensians, who had asked only to preach, were counted among the heretics.

When a papal legate was murdered in southern France in 1208, Pope Innocent III called a crusade against the heretics there and the lords who sheltered them, with the same remission of sins as for the Holy Land. On 22 July 1209 the northern crusaders took Béziers and massacred its people, Catholics and Cathars alike, even those who had fled into the churches. The papal legate, Arnaud Amalric, abbot of Cîteaux, reported to the pope that they had spared neither rank nor sex nor age. The story that, asked how to tell heretics from Catholics, he answered ‘Kill them all, God will know his own’ first appears more than ten years later in a book of stories compiled by a German Cistercian, Caesarius of Heisterbach's Dialogue on Miracles, and many historians doubt that he said it. The massacre itself is certain.

Under Simon de Montfort the war became a conquest of the south by northern lords, ending in 1229 with most of the land under the French king. Along the way groups of Cathar perfect were burned in several places. In the same years Dominic went among the Cathars as a poor preacher, seeking to win them by the word (see The friars). In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council ordered condemned heretics handed over to the secular power (canon 3) and required Jews and Saracens, that is Muslims, to wear dress that set them apart from Christians (canon 68) Fourth Lateran Council, Canons. That canon later led to the badges Jews were made to wear in several countries.

The inquisitors, from 1233

In 1231 Pope Gregory IX laid down laws against heretics, and from 1233 he sent friars, mostly Dominicans, as papal inquisitors to southern France and other lands. An inquisitor arriving in a district preached and gave people a period to come forward, confess and name others; then he summoned and examined the suspects. Witnesses' names were kept secret and there was usually no defence counsel, and in 1252 Pope Innocent IV permitted torture. The repentant were given penances such as pilgrimages, yellow crosses sewn on their clothes or prison; those who would not recant, or relapsed, were handed to the secular power and burned. The church did not carry out the sentence itself, but it knew what would happen to those it handed over.

Historians who have studied the surviving registers find that most of those sentenced received penances and a minority were burned. Yet a system that made neighbours name neighbours and ruled whole districts by fear did deep harm to communities. In 1478 Pope Sixtus IV allowed the Spanish crown to set up an inquisition of its own, which tried first converted Jews suspected of secretly keeping Judaism, and later Muslim converts and Protestants; historians estimate that several thousand people were executed before it was abolished in 1834.

Handing heretics to the state's sword was not one tradition's sin. In Geneva in 1553 Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity, was burned by the city council after Calvin had led the case against him, and Protestants and Catholics alike drowned or burned Anabaptists (see Zurich, Geneva and Scotland). Augustine's reasoning when he accepted coercion against the Donatists was used throughout the Middle Ages to justify such things (see Augustine, doctor of grace). Yet earlier still Chrysostom, on the parable of the weeds, had said that "we ought not to kill an heretic, seeing that so a neverending war would be introduced into the world" Chrysostom.

‘No,’ he said, ‘if you pull the weeds now, you might uproot the wheat with them. Let both grow together until the harvest.

Matthew 13:29-30

Repentance, and the church today

On the Day of Pardon, 12 March 2000, Pope John Paul II confessed the sins of the church's members who had oppressed and harmed others in the name of truth, and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation. In June 2015 Pope Francis visited the Waldensian church in Turin and asked forgiveness for the persecution and cruelty Catholics had shown them through history. The Waldensians received his words gratefully but answered that they could not forgive in the place of forebears who had suffered and died Visit to the Waldensian Temple in Turin, and the Waldensians' reply. Having joined the Reformation in 1532, they live on in Italy as a church of the Reformed tradition.

When a Samaritan village would not receive Jesus, his disciples wanted fire from heaven:

When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do You want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” But Jesus turned and rebuked them. And He and His disciples went on to another village.

Luke 9:54-56

Commenting on the longer form of this rebuke in the Bible he read, Wesley says of the spirit of Christianity, "It is not a spirit of wrath and vengeance, but of peace, and gentleness, and love" Wesley. The words borrowed in the story of Béziers are Paul's, "The Lord knows those who are His" (2 Timothy 2:19); yet a few verses later the same chapter says that the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone, gently correcting those who oppose him (2 Timothy 2:24-26).

The church must still discern false teaching today, but by the word and with gentleness, leaving the human heart and the last judgment to God, for "There is only one Lawgiver and Judge" (James 4:12). Among those who died as heretics were some who truly followed false teaching, and some who loved Scripture and lived in poverty. The next lesson, The Black Death, the Great Schism and Hus, follows Jan Hus, who held to Scripture through plague and a divided papacy and was burned in 1415.

Practice