Cathar Influences on Catholic Doctrines

According to the famous French philosopher and writer called Voltaire, people of the 13th century had many reasons to show disapproval and discontentment towards their religious leaders. The Roman Catholic Church had enabled and encouraged many bloody wars and crusades, whereas the monasteries seemed to grow in richness more and more. Greed, love of money, the roots of all evil, hypocrisy of priesthood made people wonder what happened to the principles that Jesus, the founder of Christianity, had left for us people to live by: simplicity, purity, joy of living without material concerns, being true to oneself, to others and implicitly to God. And perhaps most of all, the fact that Christ kept speaking of a kingdom that was beyond what people would conquer by military force or any shrewd policies, a spiritual kingdom.

All these seem to have been forgotten. And when the Catholic force decided to take violent action against the stubborn, unrepentant Cathars, many were tempted to join the crusade due to the promise of gaining wealth and Indulgences. So, in Languedoc or other parts of France, tens of thousand of Cathars were massacred or burned on stake. The Languedoc crusades actually lasted for twenty years, and were caused by the greed of seizing the property of others, combined with the all-powerful Inquisition (in 1204). This strange and new plague, nowhere to be found so far in all the world's religions, initially appeared under Pope Innocent III, and was established on the French territory starting from the year of 1229, under Saint Louis. In this very same year, there was a council in Toulouse which denied lay Christian believers to read the Bible, be it the Old or the New Testament. Indeed, it seemed rather absurd to expect people to have faith, to believe, and at the same time to prevent them from reading the Book on which their faith was founded.

Paradoxically enough, it appears that the today Catholicism has adopted plenty of ideas for which they would have sentenced people to death. For instance, Cathars were against capital punishment. But since those dark, medieval times, the Catholic Church seems to have changed its firm position. Thus, at the end of the 20th century, the Roman Catholic Church (or one of the Popes, at least) has condemned capital punishment as the sin of murdering one's neighbor.

Cathars were vegetarians because they believed in reincarnation. So they would refrain from eating any kind of meat products. Today there are many Catholics who are vegetarians, probably even without thinking that in the Middle Ages their very own church would have burnt them on stake for this.

Cathars refused to fight in wars. Nowadays, Catholic priests are no longer allowed to participate in any war. The fact is, during the medieval crusades, including those started against the "Cathar heretics", many Catholic bishops and abbots took part in those religious wars as military leaders. They have done this for about four centuries. In our fresh new century, however, Catholics are showing their much more pacifist side. Nonetheless, the medieval Cathars were still even more peaceful than the present-day Catholics.

Some Catholic believers are now supporters of euthanasia, and suicide is seen by them with much more tolerant eyes than in the previous centuries. In the past, those who had committed suicide were not buried in consecrated grounds, but in some shameful places at the crossroads, after having been passed a stake through the heart (perhaps to kill the evil spirit inside that person). Today, the Catholic Church almost takes away the blame from the suicided, considering the fact that the person who committed suicide was deeply mentally disturbed at the moment of his action, and therefore they invoke temporary insanity. So again they tend to adopt the Cathar position. Cathars did not regard suicide as a crime, but rather as a way of escaping this dirty, evil-possessed world.

Although I don't personally agree with them, it's interesting to see how Catholicism was changed by the very things they rejected long ago. It seems almost unbelievable to study this strange phenomenon, to realize how people end up embracing the very ideas they killed others for in the old times.