Essay On The Cathars

789 Words2 Pages

Adam Fouché-Thompson
Malagon, Jorge
WOH2012
4/14/14

The Rise and Fall of the Cathars
The Cathars were a very peaceful group that adopted a life of extreme devotion. Both men and women could become "parfaits". "Parfaits" referred to people who were seen by the Catholic Church as "perfect heretics". They renounced the world and abstained from eating meat and having any sexual contact. The Cathars lived in poverty. The men would travel and preach, and they earned money by cloth making, and shepherding. Followers were not expected to abide by the same ascetic standards as the parfaits, and they were permitted to eat meat and engage in sex. Catharism, or Albigensianism, was a religion which originated in the Balkans long before it made its appearance in the southwestern region of France , around the 12th century. It was a religion like any other, based on good versus evil. Albigensianism was a heretic religion and the catholics were not very fond of this new and upcoming religion. Its creed stated that god never created Earth, Jesus never existed nor did he suffer on the cross. The only ceremony practiced by the Cathars was the consolamentum or baptism of the Holy Spirit. For the Cathars, this was the only means of salvation. The Cathar clergy were those who had already received the consolamentum as part of the ritualistic ordination and had already been saved. The lay Cathars, or Believers, were obliged to receive the same sacrament before death in order to be saved as well. By the early thirteenth century Catharism was a very quickly growing religion in the area of Languedoc. It was supported by the nobility as well as the common people. This was yet another annoyance to the Roman Church. Even in open debates, Ca...

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...usade or immediately after. They often recounted much of the military drama associated with the events of the Crusade and remained relatively silent about the tenets of Catharism. still lives on today in catholic churches. In attempting to present itself in the same light as the popular Parfaits, the papacy created two new preaching orders: the Dominicans and the Franciscans. It is evident that the In this they were consciously emulating Parfaits. The Cathar Tengriist principles were adopted and implemented by the Lutheran and Protestant Churches, and many other existing Christian denominations. Now the Franciscans are typically characterized by their lives of simplicity, penance, poverty, and love for the poor much like the Dominicans, and the Cathars. th is is something t5hat i sreflected throught history there is always more people use excuses to start wars

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