The Cathars:  Cathar Beliefs:  The Legacy within the Roman Catholic Church

It can be argued that the Roman Church is gradually moving towards the position of the Cathar Church in a number of respects.

From early days in its history the Church that developed into the Roman Catholic Church adopted popular ideas from their Gnostic counterparts. The idea of creating a canonical "New Testament" was one such idea. The first version of the New Testament was collated by a Gnostic called Marcion. The idea of Apostolic Succession is a another example. And what is technically called mitigated Dualism is a third. The idea of a God of Light locked in cosmic battle with a God of Darkness is characteristically Manichaean - ie Gnostic Dualist - idea. Mitigated Dualists taught that the good god will win in the end. Catholics take care not to refer to the evil principal as a god. Modern Catholic teaching on this point is indistinguishable from Catharist belief in its mitigated Dualist form, as long as Satan is denied the title of a god (though Satan is clearly called a god in the New Testament - see 2 Corinthians 4:4).

Part of the reason for this convergence is the history of men like St Augustine. Augustine was a Manichaean - a Gnostic Dualist - but he failed to progress in his chosen religion, and so defected to a group that in time would evolve into the Orthodox and later Catholic Churches. Having failed to progress in the Manichaean hierarchy, he flourished in his new Church but never entirely shook off his Gnostic Dualist theological training.

The writings of medieval Catholic polemicists reveal examples of Cathar ideas that were then regarded as extravagant, but today seem unremarkable. The explanation is that at some time over the last seven hundred years the Catholic Church has shifted ground and adopted the Cathar position.

Example: The Fall of Satan. Cathar ideas of Heaven and Hell included a Fall from heaven, during which a number of angels were expelled from heaven and fell to earth. Here is an extract from Montana of Cremona, a Professor at the University of Bologna who became a Dominican - possibly an Inquisitor, though this is not known for sure. He is listing distinctively heretical beliefs - "What Heretics May Believe, or Rather, Concoct" around 1241-1244:

They also say and teach that this devil [Satan], puffed up by the deception which he had practised in heaven, presumed to ascend into heaven with his cohorts and there joined battle with the archangel Michael and was defeated and driven out. They think that the verse Apocalypse 12:7, "And there was a great battle in heaven. Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought with his angels" is to be interpreted with reference to this battle. This they take literally.

English translation from the preface to Book 1 of Monetae Cremonensis adversus Catharos et Valdenses libri quinque I (Descriptio fidei haereticorum), ed. Thomas A Ricchini (Rome, 1743). For a fuller text see Walter Wakefield & Austin Evans, Heresies of The High Middle Ages (Columbia, 1991), p309.

Few Catholics today would find this remarkable, since it is now Catholic orthodoxy.

Example: The identification of Mary Magdelene with the Woman taken in adultery. Many Christians take for granted the identification of the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3) with Mary Magdelene. In fact the bible, makes no such connection and there is no substantial reason to link the two. Anyone not taught that they are the same person will have no reason to link them, and this seems to have been the position of medieval Catholic clerics. Here is one, a Cistercian chronicler writing around about the Cathars of the Languedoc in 1213-1216:

Further, in their secret meetings they said that Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was evil, and that Mary Magdelene was his concubine - and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the scriptures.

Historia Albigensis - Pierre des Vaux de Cernay (WA & MD Sibly's translation into English (Boydell, 2002) at {11} p 11).

Leaving aside the the author's main point in this text, he clearly reveals that Catholics in his day did not identify Mary with the woman taken in adultery. In other words, on this particular point, modern Catholics hold the same views as medieval Cathars, not medieval Catholics.

Since the Enlightenment, Catholic ideas have moved more quickly. The Catholic Church no longer condemns the Cathar principles of toleration, nor the equality of women as it once did; and its attachment to feudalism has been quietly dropped. The Cathars' absolute condemnation of capital punishment, was abhorrent to medieval Catholic chroniclers and still abhorrent to Catholic apologists when Hilaire Belloc wrote his tract against the Albigensian heresy in 1938 (Hilaire Belloc, The Albigensian Attack, Chapter Five of The Great Heresies). But the Cathar position has since then gradually become more acceptable, and the was finally adopted by the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the 20th century.  The Roman Church - or at least a Pope - condemned capital punishment unreservedly, just as the medieval Cathars did.

A Church in Transition: Catechism of the Catholic Church on capital punishment, 2267: "The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty..." On the other hand: In his 1995 encyclical letter "Evangelium Vitae" ("The Gospel of Life" ), Pope Jean-Paul II presented the Catholic Church's reasons for opposing capital punishment. In his January 1999 visit to St. Louis, Missouri, he called for the end of the U.S. death penalty saying, "the dignity of human life must never be taken away even in the case of someone who has done great evil."

So too for the position on war. Catholic priests are no longer allowed to fight in wars at they did officially up to the nineteenth century and unofficially until the twentieth. Senior Churchmen, including popes like Julius II, were happy to don armour and fight in wars. During the Cathar Crusades, Catholic abbots and bishops took roles as military leaders, as they continued to do for centuries afterwards. No Cathar Parfait and Parfaite fought in the Crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc, even to defend themselves. The position of the Catholic Church in the twenty first century is becoming noticeably more pacifist, though it is not yet as pacifist as the medieval Cathar Church.

Some Catholics are now vegetarians without knowing that their Church would once have condemned them to death for it. 

Many lay Catholics own and read bibles, another Cathar practice that was once a Catholic capital crime. 

Many Catholics - most in the west - practice contraception. Up until the 1960's the Vatican regarded all contraceptive methods, including the "rhythm method", as mortal sins. Since then the rhythm method has not been sinful, another small step in the the direction of Cathar teaching which preferred contraception to conception.

Some Catholics now support euthanasia, and suicide is no longer regarded with the horror it once was.  Not so long ago the Catholic Church was insisting that suicides be buried in unconsecrated ground at cross-roads, with a stake through their heart. Now the Church almost always spares the residual stigma of suicide by the fact or the pretence that the balance of the suicide's mind was disturbed at the time of death. In effect, the Cathar position, finding no doctrinal objection to euthanasia or suicide, is gradually becoming more acceptable to educated western Catholics.

Many Catholics now favour the restoration of women to the positions of authority they held in the very earliest Church and in the medieval Cathar Church - preaching, teaching and administering sacred rites. This is a hot topic in the west and it is not impossible that within the present century the Catholic Church will return to the position held by the Early Church and by the medieval Cathar Church.