Catholic persecution of the Waldenses

[Odell]

I have done a little bit of reading up on this and I realize they were not exterminated as some claim. I have read that the Church sentenced some (not to death) but many were sentenced to prison. Now how do we justify this? I can argue pretty well against acuzations of bad popes. God works through sinners just as he did the high priest whom prophesied about Jesus yet played the major role in His condemnation. But was this an expample of a pope being evil? Did he have the right to persecute the Waldenses?

Was it like a house arrest kind of like how we handled Galileo?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Fr_of_Jazz]

I have done a little bit of reading up on this and I realize they were not exterminated as some claim. I have read that the Church sentenced some (not to death) but many were sentenced to prison. Now how do we justify this? I can argue pretty well against acuzations of bad popes. God works through sinners just as he did the high priest whom prophesied about Jesus yet played the major role in His condemnation. But was this an expample of a pope being evil? Did he have the right to persecute the Waldenses?

Was it like a house arrest kind of like how we handled Galileo?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I would highly recommend reading , NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989.The Waldensian Dissent**Persecution and Survival c.1170 - c.1570
As you’ll find out the Waldensians were heretical in some beliefs and were one among several heretical sects at the time. They were excommunicated and some of their doctrines rejected, but there are no historical sources as of the 1989 available about the life of the founder after this.

Also there is a lot of nonsense about them: no historian with acces to the sources holds that they go back to the apostles or Pope Sylvester (pp., 3-4, 7); they actually differed greatly from Protestant belief until they joined the Reformation and then changed their beliefs to match (172-4).

What I have found when evangelicals bring up historical issues like this is:–when I tell them if you’re going to bring up history let’s act like historians and I’ll buy a scholarly work on the subject and let’s read it and, based on the sources, discuss the events in the context of the times, they want nothing to do with it.

It’s a waste of their time since their goal is not intellectual coherence or better understanding, but the purely practical aim of getting Catholics to leave the Church. There are always other unsuspecting RCs at whom they can throw spurious and incoherent objections and who are better prey to pull from the church and hence a better use of their time.

 

[Randy_Carson]

I have done a little bit of reading up on this and I realize they were not exterminated as some claim. I have read that the Church sentenced some (not to death) but many were sentenced to prison. Now how do we justify this? I can argue pretty well against acuzations of bad popes. God works through sinners just as he did the high priest whom prophesied about Jesus yet played the major role in His condemnation. But was this an expample of a pope being evil? Did he have the right to persecute the Waldenses?

Was it like a house arrest kind of like how we handled Galileo?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Heresy jeopardizes the soul; consequently, those who taught heresy were causing the eternal damnation of those taken in by them.

More serious than murder when you look at it that way, eh?

 

[colmywaykurtz]

I have done a little bit of reading up on this and I realize they were not exterminated as some claim. I have read that the Church sentenced some (not to death) but many were sentenced to prison. Now how do we justify this? I can argue pretty well against acuzations of bad popes. God works through sinners just as he did the high priest whom prophesied about Jesus yet played the major role in His condemnation. But was this an expample of a pope being evil? Did he have the right to persecute the Waldenses?

Was it like a house arrest kind of like how we handled Galileo?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

There’s some confusion in my mind about this, too.

Within the last year or so I read a biography of St. Vincent Ferrer. I seem to remember reading in it that, during his apostolate, St. Vincent almost single-handedly converted most of these heretical sects (Waldensians, Catharii, Albigensians, etc) back to the Catholic faith.

Protestant mythology holds that these were all heroic proto-Protestant martyr groups, destroyed by the “evil” Catholic Church.

It’s mostly the English Protestant school of historiography that has covered up the truth about this, and done a particularly good job where most Americans’ knowledge of history is concerned.

As far as any of them being imprisoned, I don’t know.

 

[SPH1]

Propaganda does not seek a rational discussion but rather attemps to obtain a reaction on a sub-rational level. IMO, Protestantism has made use of propaganda more than any other world religion, and English Protestantism the worst yet.

 

[Jehannette]

Heresy jeopardizes the soul; consequently, those who taught heresy were causing the eternal damnation of those taken in by them.

More serious than murder when you look at it that way, eh?

Indeed, heresy is to the soul what murder is to body:

2105 The duty of offering God genuine worship concerns man both individually and socially. This is "the traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ." By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works toward enabling them “to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in which [they] live.” The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken in each man the love of the true and the good. It requires them to make known the worship of the one true religion which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church. Christians are called to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.

2109 The right to religious liberty can of itself be neither unlimited nor limited only by a “public order” conceived in a positivist or naturalist manner. The “due limits” which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by the civil authority in accordance with “legal principles which are in conformity with the objective moral order.”

2246 It is a part of the Church’s mission "to pass moral judgments even in matters related to politics, whenever the fundamental rights of man or the salvation of souls requires it. The means, the only means, she may use are those which are in accord with the Gospel and the welfare of all men according to the diversity of times and circumstances."

As the “common good” of a Catholic society would the “salvation of souls,” a Catholic prince would have both the duty and obligation to punish heresy and heretics.

 

[Odell]

Indeed, heresy is to the soul what murder is to body:

As the “common good” of a Catholic society would the “salvation of souls,” a Catholic prince would have both the duty and obligation to punish heresy and heretics.

This guy says doctrinal error is not a capital offense.

 

[Jehannette]

This guy says doctrinal error is not a capital offense.

In the Middle Ages, a Catholic prince was the law on his land. If he wanted to publicly hang petty thieves, such was his prerogative. So, too, if he wanted to punish, even with death, those individuals who were publicly promoting false beliefs, such was his prerogative, also. Who are you or I to judge? Just as it is a crime in our day to stand-up in a crowded movie theater and yell “Fire,” or publish classified emails on the Internet, it was a crime in the Middle Ages for a person to publicly express beliefs in a Catholic kingdom which were (and are) contrary to the One True Faith & Church.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

But was this an expample of a pope being evil? Did he have the right to persecute the Waldenses?

We have to be careful not to inject our contemporary taken-for-granted assumptions about the structuring of secular and religious authority back into medieval times.

Just because someone is a Pope or a bishop or a priest … doesn’t automatically mean his authority is purely spiritual, ethical and exhortative and without civil teeth (as it is today in most Western countries).

In fact, quite the reverse seems to have happened in the high middle ages - Popes, bishops, priests … these were effectively titles to de facto purely secular authority. Think of these men as simply Kings, Judges, Lords, Magistrates all working under a relatively single system of law (which only the Catholic Church provided in those times). Just because it was **dressed **as religion doesn’t mean it is true religion. Thus the secular power has the right to impose capital punishment.

Obviously the mixture of secular and religious authority of that period runs a little deeper than being merely “dressed” in religion - but not a bad starting point to make sense of a time very different from our own.

And how did that mixing of religion and civil authority (known as “Christendom”) come about? Prob due to the demise of the Roman Empire which slowly lost moral authority (read more and more civil unrest and loss of respect for authority) from the time of Jesus.

By the time of Constantine (300AD), the first Christian Roman Emporer, he realised that the Roman Empire could regain ethical authority if Christianity was made the State religion. From this time onward, and even through the Dark Ages, civil authority roles (deriving from Roman structure) more and more became filled by allegedly virtuous and respected Christians - eventually ordained christians.

I believe this sort of thing used to happen in a small way in rural popultaion centres of Ireland. Country priests (more or less educated and respected), the only “authority” for miles around, de facto tended to garner huge prestige and in the absence of a consistent civil administration seemed to attract considerable civil powers (whether de facto or de juro I am not sure) and effectively acted as magistrates with civil powers in the 1800s.

We still see vestigial evidence of this sort of thing - Church records (eg baptismal register entries) used to later authenticate civil documents that are missing or never recorded in rural areas (e.g. registration of birth).

 

[Mintaka]

Priests had a lot of say in Ireland, but the only punishments they could hand down were purely church penalties. Like, canon law, “I don’t want to see you coming to Communion” type of penalties. They also had a lot of influence, being supposed to be like a father to their parishioners, but that’s it.

The Irish always had their own magistrates/lawyers and their own civil and criminal law code. You want to look for “brehon law” (the anglicized, take-mercy spelling of breitheamh).

 

[Odell]

We have to be careful not to inject our contemporary taken-for-granted assumptions about the structuring of secular and religious authority back into medieval times.

Just because someone is a Pope or a bishop or a priest … doesn’t automatically mean his authority is purely spiritual, ethical and exhortative and without civil teeth (as it is today in most Western countries).

In fact, quite the reverse seems to have happened in the high middle ages - Popes, bishops, priests … these were effectively titles to de facto purely secular authority. Think of these men as simply Kings, Judges, Lords, Magistrates all working under a relatively single system of law (which only the Catholic Church provided in those times). Just because it was **dressed **as religion doesn’t mean it is true religion. Thus the secular power has the right to impose capital punishment.

Obviously the mixture of secular and religious authority of that period runs a little deeper than being merely “dressed” in religion - but not a bad starting point to make sense of a time very different from our own.

And how did that mixing of religion and civil authority (known as “Christendom”) come about? Prob due to the demise of the Roman Empire which slowly lost moral authority (read more and more civil unrest and loss of respect for authority) from the time of Jesus.

By the time of Constantine (300AD), the first Christian Roman Emporer, he realised that the Roman Empire could regain ethical authority if Christianity was made the State religion. From this time onward, and even through the Dark Ages, civil authority roles (deriving from Roman structure) more and more became filled by allegedly virtuous and respected Christians - eventually ordained christians.

I believe this sort of thing used to happen in a small way in rural popultaion centres of Ireland. Country priests (more or less educated and respected), the only “authority” for miles around, de facto tended to garner huge prestige and in the absence of a consistent civil administration seemed to attract considerable civil powers (whether de facto or de juro I am not sure) and effectively acted as magistrates with civil powers in the 1800s.

We still see vestigial evidence of this sort of thing - Church records (eg baptismal register entries) used to later authenticate civil documents that are missing or never recorded in rural areas (e.g. registration of birth).

Do we have scriptural examples of this? Didn’t the kings of Israel play major roles in regards to both political and spiritual.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Do we have scriptural examples of this? Didn’t the kings of Israel play major roles in regards to both political and spiritual.

I believe so.
Go to almost any culture at any time and we will find that the mix of political/spiritual authority is hard to separate and inextricably bound up together - in a variety of varied ways depending on time/religion/race/country.

The Muslim world (if you take away the enforced veneer of any colonial/exported democracy that may be present) seems to work a lot like Christendom did in Medieval times.

The separation of Church/State powers in modern OECD nations is really the abberation not Shariah law!