Catharism, Calvary Chapel, and Catholicism

 From Nicholas Gulda:

To begin, the terms Cathar and Albigensian are synonymous.  Generally speaking, historians have understood the Cathars to be more or less what Tim referred to them as; “gnostic heretics”.  [3]  Similarly, in his Manual for Inquisitors Bernard Gui (d. A.D. 1331) referred to them as “Manichean heretics”, before giving a brief synopsis of their beliefs.[4]  The heresy itself is often associated with the Albigensian Crusade.  By the thirteenth century the targets of the maturing crusading movement had expanded to include heretics, pagans, and even political opponents of the papacy.  The targets of this particular crusade were the heretics and their Catholic protectors.

 The Cathars/Albigenses of the Languedoc region in the South of France ultimately drew the ire of the papacy.  They had entrenched themselves within the nobility there, facilitated by the fact that it was largely independent of the Capetian monarch to the North.  Initially, the Church’s response of preaching, and public debating seemed to make little headway in rolling back the heresy, and the conventional wisdom was that force was needed.  After the papal legate to the region was assassinated,– apparently on the orders of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (a protector of heretics)­, Pope Innocent III issued the indulgence for what became known as the Albigensian Crusade (ca. A.D. 1209-1229).

 Some omissions aside for brevity’s sake, this is more or less how the origins of the Albigensian Crusade is presented in standard survey works on the subject of the Crusades, such as the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A History (2005), or Thomas Madden’s The Concise History of the Crusades.  Both authors are well known Crusade historians, and both are/were university professors.  Both were recommended reading on a syllabus in a colloquium on the Crusades I took at a secular university.  Both present Catharism as a non-Christian, dualistic religion.[5]  Both happen to be Catholics.

 Additionally, both scholars above have influenced the historiography of the Crusades, are peer reviewed, have reputations to uphold, and are top notch.  Madden also was a contributor to the Encyclopedia Brittanica’s entry on the Albigensian Crusade (hardly a pro-Catholic source).  Nevertheless, since the very notion that Catharism was a non-Christian dualistic religion has been called “a Catholic lie”, we will look elsewhere for a basic understanding of this medieval heresy.

 “Catharism was the greatest heretical challenge faced by the Catholic Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries”.[6]  Thus reads the first line of Malcolm Barber’s work, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages.  He notes that the common view is that it was transplanted from the East in the form of Bogomilism, though some like R. I. Moore believe that it was a home grown dualism.[7]  That it was a form of dualism is a given throughout the first chapter on the topic of the origins/ pedigree of Catharism.[8]

 Like Madden and Riley-Smith, Barber affirms that the Cathars [aka Albigenses] denied the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and that they had a rite known as consolamentum.  After receiving this rite, the mere “believer” became one of the initiated (perfecti), and it was often delayed until just before death.[9]  Like his discussion on the pedigree of Catharism in the first chapter, he includes a robust discussion of Cathar beliefs and practices in the third chapter.  The evidence discussed there contradicts any notion of the Cathars/Albigenses being akin to modern day Evangelicals, as Yardley’s position seems to imply.

 Though I don’t suspect that Mark Pegg would endorse Baptist successionism, he is nevertheless a historian who might possibly be coopted by its proponents.  One major argument in his book A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom is that “a very distinct Christian culture…was accused of being heretical by the Catholic Church”.[10]  He called for a revision of Christian history, arguing that “The Albigensian Crusade…was not a martial pilgrimage against a discrete religion with an organized heretical ‘Church’”.[11]

A survey of three reviews published about Pegg’s book shows that they were overwhelmingly critical regarding this particular aspect of it.  One reviewer said that it was against “academic consensus”, and that the evidence presented failed to convince with respect to the historical revision.[12]  While too mentioning that the scholarship is stacked against Pegg, another reviewer was also critical of his “dismissal of so many primary sources that support a Cathar church because he constantly suspects orthodox intent”.[13]  Of the three reviews, it was the one in the Catholic academic journal which was arguably most sympathetic on the topic of Catharism, but even there the reviewer acknowledges that Pegg is contradicting notable scholars on this topic.[14]

 For Barber, Cathar sources take a primacy when reconstructing Catharism, but “even orthodox [i.e. Catholic] attacks on Cathar belief are important since they were particularly concerned to define it accurately in order to give weight to their refutations”.[15]  He posits a “moderate dualism” extant in the West up until a Cathar Council at St Félix de Caraman  (ca. 1167) attended by envoys from the Bogomil Church in Constantinople changed the religious landscape to one dominated by “absolute dualism”.  The Charter of Niquinta which emanated from that Cathar gathering seems to be a main component of his argument.[16]

Ultimately, Barber says, it was this absolute dualism that really drew negative attention from the Catholic hierarchy.[17]  Though he argues that there were already established Cathar bishops in places like Albi [hence “Albigensian”] in the South of France, after the Council at St Félix de Caraman there would be a network of sixteen dioceses stretching from Tuolouse to Constantinople.[18]  It is generally said that the Inquisition was the tool that the Catholic Church (in concert with the secular authorities) utilized to ultimately vanquish the heresy.  Barber posits that both the moderate and absolute varieties of it may have survived up until the end of the fourteenth century.[19]

Whatever the case may be, Staples was certainly correct when he rejected the notion that, as he paraphrased Yardley), “the Albigensians are some sort of link in true Christians”.  As Barber indicates, almost since the inception of the Reformation, Protestant authors have been concerned with establishing some basis for historical continuity in response to the charges of novelty coming from their Catholic opponents.  Evidently, the first to attempt to link Protestantism with Catharism in a direct line was Jean-Paul Perrin, who in his work Histoire de Vaudois (1618), erroneously conflated the Cathars with the Waldenses [as the title indicates].

This Protestant affinity for the Cathars would sour a little over a century later.  All of this and more Barber observes in his historiography.[20]  Still, there are those in modern times who try to link Protestantism and Catharism.  The position argued by Pegg, and seemingly by others more recently, is very different from the apparent Baptist successionism (or something in that vein) argued by Yardley.  Moreover, the academic/ historiographical argument against the traditional understanding would seem to beg the question of how exactly to define “Christian”, and who has the authority to determine that? (Read more.)

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Sanctuary States Should NOT Be Rewarded

 From The Enterprise:

An Army sergeant from Dayton has been stationed in Germany for two years. She has not slept in Ohio during that time. On Census Day, the Census Bureau still credits her to Ohio, and in Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992), the Supreme Court said that was fine. Overseas federal employees are assigned to the state that was their usual home, not to the base where they happen to be sleeping. A German tourist standing outside the Ohio Statehouse that same morning is physically in Columbus. Nobody thinks Ohio has earned an extra sliver of a congressman on his account. Presence and belonging come apart. Every census since 1790 has had to pick which one it is counting.

Last month, the Commerce Department published a proposed rule, signed by Secretary Howard Lutnick, rewriting the residence criteria. Proposed section 60.4 would count foreign citizens who also hold US citizenship or a green card, and it marks everyone else holding only foreign citizenship as “Not counted for apportionment.” The rule’s own phrase for the line it draws is “durable permission from the sovereign to settle within the United States.” Aliens whose status is less durable, and less definite in length, than lawful permanent residence fall on the excluded side of that line, along with people here in violation of federal law. Under the proposal, usual residence is the place a person has lawfully spent the most days, as shown by tax records. Comments close October 13, on docket USBC-2026-0628. This is a proposal, not a finished policy. The administration put it through notice and comment in the open, years before the count, rather than issuing a memo in the middle of a census, as Trump attempted in 2020. A 2026 comment file will be the record a court has if the 2030 count is challenged. (Read more.)

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The Mathematics of Beauty, #1: Harmony, Monotony, and Cacophony

 From The Way of Beauty:

This is the first of six posts on the mathematics of beauty1: the traditional body of knowledge, running from the ancient Greeks through the Church Fathers and into the design of Western art and architecture, which held that beauty has a mathematical structure and that this structure can be studied, learned, and applied. It was a standard part of an artist’s and an architect’s formation for centuries. Today it is virtually unknown, and I think its recovery is essential if we are to build beautifully again.

As six posts devoted to a single subject is a lot to post on consecutive weeks, I will post them on alternate weeks.

In this first post, I want to establish the problem by looking at some buildings, and to say something about how this tradition relates to natural science, which is the other great tradition of describing the world by number. The posts that follow will set out where the tradition came from, what it consists of, how it is used in practice, why it was abandoned, and what its recovery would mean.

 If you examine almost any building constructed since the Second World War, the chances are that it will conform to one of two simple guiding principles of architectural design, and in both cases, the results are often bad. These two principles are even spacing and random spacing. The first generates visual monotony; the second generates visual cacophony. I have chosen these terms deliberately to set them against what traditional architecture always sought to achieve instead: harmony. (Read more.)

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The New Face of An Old Heresy

 This article sums up the point I make in my novel The Night's Dark Shade. From Postliberal Order:

In the early thirteenth century, a fanatical religious movement known to history as Catharism or Albigensianism spread throughout southern France.  Its fashionableness led self-interested local nobility to favor it.  But so bizarre and subversive of social order were its doctrines that political and ecclesiastical authorities beyond the region judged its suppression to be urgent.  At first the preferred methods were preaching and public disputation, with the new Dominican order taking the lead.  But these appeals to reason proved inadequate, and after a papal legate was murdered by a Cathar, a military solution seemed unavoidable.  Thus was launched the Albigensian Crusade – a venture notorious for excess and whose participants did not all have pure motives, but which did succeed in destroying the toxic movement.  

What was the content of Catharism?  It was grounded, first and foremost, in the conviction that the world is absolutely permeated by evil.  This is not the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, but something much darker.  For the Cathars, the natural order is not the creation of a benevolent deity from whose grace we have fallen.  Rather, they held that it always was in the first place the product of an evil power.  And they identified this evil power with the God of the Old Testament, the authority of which they rejected.  On the Cathar conception of salvation, the imperative is not to redeem the natural order but to be altogether liberated from it, and thereby to be “Pure Ones” (the literal meaning of Cathari).  

Those closest to achieving this were known as the Perfect, who took on the full weight of Catharist moral discipline.  Its chief component was renunciation of marriage and children, which were regarded as wicked insofar as they perpetuated the evil natural order of things.  Meat and dairy products were also eschewed, given their connection to procreation. Private property was rejected.  Capital punishment and war were condemned as intrinsically immoral.  Yet suicide was not only permitted but commended for those judged ready for it.  Infanticide was sometimes practiced.  And as the murder of the papal legate illustrates, the Cathars would sometimes resort to violence in order to protect the movement itself.

Most adherents of the Cathar movement (the “Believers” rather than the Perfect) were not expected immediately to adopt its austere ethic in its entirety, though.  Hence, while complete abstinence from sex was considered the ideal, sexual indulgence was tolerated among Believers as long as it did not lead to procreation.  Indeed, sexual practices of the kind that carried no risk of pregnancy were judged permissible, and extreme debauchery was frequently a part of Cathar life.  Whereas the Church favored sex when it was procreative, the Cathars favored it only when it was not procreative.

Since the God of the Old Testament was identified with the devil, biblical heroes like Abraham and Moses were dismissed as diabolical agents, and divine acts of judgment like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned as murderous.  While the Cathars regarded themselves as the Children of Light, they judged those who approved of living as human beings have always lived – marrying and having children, practicing sexual restraint outside of that context, owning property, using animals for food, resorting to war and the death penalty when justice and order made it necessary – as the Children of Darkness.  Since these things are just commonsense preconditions of the social order, it is no surprise that ecclesiastical and political authorities judged Catharism to be radically subversive of that order and in need of suppression. (Read more.)

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‘The Heartland Visa’: The Push for a New Visa Category to Repopulate American Towns With Foreign Workers

 From Natalie Winters:

The Economic Innovation Group, a think tank co-founded by Facebook’s founding president Sean Parker, spells out the transaction in its Heartland Visa proposal:

“In exchange for living in a Heartland Visa community, workers with sufficient earnings will gain permanent residency”

A struggling town supplies the address. Washington supplies the immigration pathway. Foreign workers receive the prospect of a green card, while the Americans already living there receive another promise of economic revival.

The ambition is national. EIG’s blueprint identifies more than 1,700 potentially eligible counties, home to 58 million people. It proposes a minimum of 100,000 visas annually.

These communities’ economic pain has become the sales pitch for changing who lives in them.

And the campaign is still being pushed in Washington.

EIG’s first-quarter 2026 lobbying disclosure lists Heartland Visas and the Heartland Visa Act of 2024. Its second-quarter filing, submitted July 20, names them again. Together, the filings report $360,000 in lobbying expenses across the organization’s policy agenda; they do not break out spending on this visa campaign.

The documents name John Lettieri and Catherine Lyons as lobbyists. This is an organized effort to turn a demographic proposal into federal policy. (Read more.)

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Finding Sir Lancelot

From Medievalists:

Today, being the world’s only Lancelot wall paintings preserved in situ, the Siedlęcin set ranks among the most outstandingly complete and well preserved in Europe. The story of Arthur’s greatest knight, his glittering career, adulterous love for Guinevere and subsequent downfall has been told in two registers and should be ”read” from the lower to the upper one, from left to right (as in case of many other examples of medieval cycles). 

The lower register shows Sir Lancelot and his cousin, Sir Lionel, claiming the world shortly after they had been knighted. To prove their valour and knightly skills in hand-to-hand combat they set off for their first big adventure. The story goes with the tale of Lionel’s capture and Lancelot’s duel with the knight named Tarquin, whom Lancelot defeats and kills. Thanks to this victory sixty-four knights imprisoned in Tarquin’s castle (including Lionel and four other knights of the Round Table) obtain their freedom. 

The upper register shows fair Guinevere with her ladies before the walls of Camelot. Lancelot accompanied by his entourage presents himself to her. The next scene depicts the wicked knight Meleagant as he carries the queen away. He is going to be ultimately slain by Lancelot. The latter hurries to his lady’s rescue, suffering – among many a hardship – a total humiliation of riding in a cart, a form of travelling reserved for criminals. He rescues the queen in the end, the sinful nature of their love being shown in a depiction where they hold their left hands – a clear symbol of their adulterous affair. (Read more.)

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The Name of the Rosary

While editing and rewriting sections of my novel about medieval France I researched the development of the rosary. I came across a fascinating blog called Paternosters which was a name given to prayer beads in the medieval period. Here is an article about the origins of the the word "rosary" which I found quite interesting. To quote:

To get back to beads, however, traces of the earlier meaning of bid/bede as "a prayer" still remain. For instance, a wealthy patron in the Middle Ages may have supported poor bedesmen, who had promised to pray for the patron, and may have provided a bedehouse for bedesmen or bedeswomen to live in. Likewise, “bidding one’s bedes” in the Middle Ages does not so much mean praying with a literal string of beads, as it means praying for one’s bedes, that is, the people or requests one is obliged to pray for.

The word “rosary” originally meant a garden devoted to the growing of roses (c1440, “This mone is eke rosaries to make, with setes [seats]”)....Probably both the rose-garden concept and the book title contributed to the idea of referring to a collection of written prayers and devotions as a (metaphorical) rosary, such as the 1526 Rosary of Our Savyour Jesu or the 1533 Mystik sweet Rosary of the faytheful soule.

From here it was a short step to applying the term “rosary” to the specific prayer practice we have been discussing, including its string of beads.

Other European languages also call the rosary by a name referring to roses. In German it is a rosenkranz, in French a rosaire, in Italian and Spanish a rosario, and in Hungarian it is a rózsafüzért (literally a “rose string”). However in Austria it is more commonly a betschnur (“prayer string”) and in France, often a chapelet. (Read more.)

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Freedom & Justice Return to Latin America

 From The Enterprise:

Most Americans picture USAID as sacks of grain and boxes of malaria medicine. In Latin America that picture was badly incomplete. The agency’s inspector general reported that democracy, human rights, and governance made up its largest program category in the region, and the portfolio was candid about its purposes. It funded “political competition and consensus building,” civil society, independent media, the free flow of information, governance, human rights, and election-related work. Political competition is the contest for power itself. An agency that funds it inside another country has entered that country’s politics, whatever label it prints on the grant.

A political party resembles a business storefront. Voters see the sign, the candidates, the slogans. Behind the storefront runs a supply chain: the advocacy groups that draft policy, the institutes that produce studies, the journalists who decide which stories count as news, the monitors who certify an election as clean, the lawyers who bring the lawsuits, and the foreign validators who tell other capitals which side speaks for democracy. A party can survive a bad candidate. It struggles to survive losing its supply chain. USAID ran no storefronts in Latin America, but it financed a large share of the supply chain, and the goods on those shelves suited one kind of store far better than the other.

El Salvador shows how the arrangement worked in practice. When USAID concluded that Nayib Bukele’s government was backsliding, its inspector general recorded that the agency moved money away from four government institutions and toward civil-society groups working on transparency, anti-corruption, and human-rights monitoring. It paid for legal assistance and advocacy, for protecting activists and journalists, and for mechanisms that helped civic organizations and media push back against the government. Bukele did not deserve the pushback. Salvadoran voters had handed Bukele enormous majorities, and a US agency, having judged him objectionable, used American tax dollars to strengthen the people opposing him at home. Bukele saw it plainly. In a February 2025 post on 𝕏, he wrote that funds sold as democracy promotion were mostly “funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements.” (Read more.)

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Beyond Love Songs: Troubadours and Cathars

 From Medievalists:

Although the troubadours’ poetry does not explicitly indicate a connection to Cathar beliefs, Aroux, Péladan, and Rahn postulated that the troubadours intentionally wrote in an ambiguous style called trobar clus (“closed style”) so that their affiliation to the Cathars would be disguised, lest they be persecuted for associating with a heretical sect. According to Aroux, the troubadours’ jongleurs travelled around France while singing their songs, and along their travels, revealed the lyrics’ secret messages to select listeners. While certainly interesting, these authors’ theories are highly speculative and suspect, and as stated by Karen Sullivan in her book Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature: "…in more recent years, critics have tended to dismiss the possibility of a link between Catharism and troubadour verse, to the point where two new surveys of medieval Occitan poetry do not even bother to refute this notion."

Despite the consensus among most scholars that the troubadours’ poetry does not indicate signs of Cathar influence, there is still contention among some who insist that certain troubadours harboured an affinity for the heretical sect, especially Peire Cardenal. Select verses from Cardenal’s works denounce and admonish the Catholic clergy – who he thought to be hypocritical – which has led some authors to believe that he was a Cathar sympathizer (since Cathars were very much opposed to the Catholic church). Cardenal’s disdain for the clergy is exemplified in his poem “Clergues se fan pastors.” The poem reads as follows: “Clergue se fan pastors, et son aucizedor, e par de gran sanctor, qui los vei revestir” which translates to “churchmen pass for shepherds, but they’re murderers. Dressed in their robes, they seem so saintly.” (Read more.)

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