“Maintaining that the sacraments should not be re

“Maintaining that the sacraments should not be re?ceived from impure priests ...”
“And they were mistaken, but it was their only error of doctrine. They never proposed to alter the law of God. …”
“But the Patarine preaching of Arnold of Brescia, in Rome, more than two hundred years ago, drove the mob of rustics to burn the houses of the nobles and the cardinals.”
“Arnold tried to draw the magistrates of the city into his reform movement. They did not follow him, and he found support among the crowds of the poor and the outcast. He was not responsible for the violence and the anger with which they responded to his appeals for a less corrupt city.”
“The city is always corrupt.”
“The city is the place where today live the people of God, of whom you, we, are the shepherds. It is the place of scandal in which the rich prelates preach virtue to poor and hungry people. The Patarine disor?ders were born of this situation. They are sad, but not incomprehensible. The Catharists are something else. That is an Oriental heresy, outside the doctrine of the church. I don’t know whether they really commit or have committed the crimes attributed to them. I know they reject matrimony, they deny hell. I wonder wheth?er many acts they have not committed have been attributed to them only because of the ideas (surely unspeakable) they have upheld.”
“And you tell me that the Catharists have not mingled with the Patarines, and that both are not simply two of the faces, the countless faces, of the same demoniacal phenomenon?”
“I say that many of these heresies, independently of the doctrines they assert, encounter success among the simple because they suggest to such people the possibility of a different life. I say that very often the simple do not know much about doctrine. I say that often hordes of simple people have confused Catharist preaching with that of the Patarines, and these together with that of the Spirituals. The life of the simple, Abo, is not illuminated by learning and by the lively sense of dis?tinctions that makes us wise. And it is haunted by illness and poverty, tongue-tied by ignorance. Joining a hereti?cal group, for many of them, is often only another way of shouting their own despair. You may burn a cardinal’s house because you want to perfect the life of the clergy, but also because you believe that the hell he preaches does not exist. It is always done because on earth there does exist a hell, where lives the flock whose shepherds we no longer are. But you know very well that, just as they do not distinguish between the Bulgarian church and the followers of the priest Liprando, so often the imperial authorities and their supporters did not distin?guish between Spirituals and heretics. Not infrequently, imperial forces, to combat their adversaries, encour?aged Catharist tendencies among the populace. In my opinion they acted wrongly. But what I now know is that the same forces often, to rid themselves of these restless and dangerous and too ‘simple’ adversaries, attributed to one group the heresies of the others, and flung them all on the pyre. I have seen—I swear to you, Abo, I have seen with my own eyes—men of virtuous life, sincere followers of poverty and chastity, but ene?mies of the bishops, whom the bishops thrust into the hands of the secular arm, whether it was in the service of the empire or of the free cities, accusing these men of sexual promiscuity, sodomy, unspeakable practices—?of which others, perhaps, but not they, had been guilty. The simple are meat for slaughter, to be used when they are useful in causing trouble for the opposing power, and to be sacrificed when they are no longer of use.”