Innocent III (1198-1216), who became pope before becoming ordained a priest, brought Machiavellian political acumen and relentless zeal to ensuring the Church’s life-and-death power over king, count and commoner, whether orthodox Catholic or heretic Cathar. As O’Shea demonstrates, it was undoubtedly fortunate in its leader. As “Believers” they limited their needs and worldliness if deeply committed, they became even less worldly, renouncing sexual congress and finally achieving the status of “Perfect.” By their saintly simplicity of life, the Cathars discredited the fear-driven, revenue-greedy Catholic orthodoxy-and an apprehensive Church retaliated. Worse, they saw much of the Old and New Testaments as merely allegorical and rejected most Sacraments as invalid. Indiscriminate slaughter, with believers perishing with dissidents, was easily dismissed: “Kill them all: God will know his own.”Īs O’Shea concisely describes, Cathars rejected the carnal and material worlds and believed in a duality of good and evil. It began with the Cathars’ peaceful rejection of the grasping Roman Catholic Church and its plutocratic bishops it was ended by the Vatican’s near-genocidal political-military response. In broad terms, the Cathar drama was played out between 1150-1250 in the Foix-Toulouse-Albi-Carcassonne-Béziers area of Languedoc. The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars
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