Hell is Real

painting depicting hell in the

Church of Debra Berhan Selassie

Gondar Ethiopia

 The Cathars were members of a medieval heretical movement that fell into the same errors as the Gnostics.  The name “Cathar” comes from the Greek ƙάθάρί or “the pure ones.”  Like the Gnostics before them and the English Puritans after them they believed that because of their religious perfectionism they were the true faithful, set apart from the rank and file of sinful humankind.  The Gnostics, the Cathars, and the Puritans all believed that most people, sinful as they are, stand outside the love of God and are damned.  This sort of heresy has plagued the Church from the very beginning.  Many of the early Christian sects that separated from “the Great Church” (the term used to designate the Christian Church before the great divide between the Churches of the East and the Catholic Church of the West) were marked by this conviction that the Church of Christ consisted of those who were sinless.  The Montanists, the Meletians, the Priscillians, the Donatists were among early Christian sects that taught to some extent such puritanism.  Some of the groups that espoused this puritanism were Christian, others were not.  The Manicheans were a non-Christian Gnostic sect to which Saint Augustine briefly adhered before his conversion to Christianity and that fell into this same error.  The Cathar movement which took root especially in southern France in the 12^th and 13^th centuries claimed to be Christian but severely distorted biblical teaching to adjust to their Gnostic convictions and were actually very similar to the Manicheans.  The Puritan movement in late 16^th century England remained Christian and orthodox but drew on Calvin’s understanding of Saint Augustine to teach that the “true Church” of Christ was a community of the elect who, by God’s grace, were preserved from the damnation to which most had been eternally condemned by God.  The mark of the “elect” in each of these systems was personal righteousness, separation from sinners, and a rigid “orthodoxy” as the particular movement defined such orthodoxy. 
This morning I was fortunate to hear a homily by a very impressive young Augustinian friar whose youth belies his spiritual perspicacity.  He drew our attention to the approaching finality of the Christmas season and called us to remember that Jesus was born “on the margins” of his society and that he spent his life with those who lived on the margins.   Jesus came not for those in the establishment but for those who had been pushed to the edges—to the lepers, to the prostitutes, to those who “didn’t belong.”  In other words, he did not come for the ƙάθάρί but for those very ones on whom the spiritually elite look down.
Recently Michael Voris has been pushing the reality of Hell and his certainty that it is filled with people who are not like him.  The usual chorus of Super-Catholic Gnostics has taken up this cry.  I believe in hell.  Saint Thérèse of Lisieux—one of my favorite saints—seemed confident that the Mercy of God would always prevail.   I appreciate her optimism, but I believe we need Hell to preserve the freedom of our human will.  I know that God loves me and will love me eternally and I think the Love of God would eventually wear me down and I would finally surrender to his love, but then I am a pretty weak man when it comes to being loved.  Just say you like me and I give in to whatever you want--love me and I become your pet dachshund. Nevertheless, I claim my freedom to resist—eternally resist if I so choose—yielding to the Love of God. If I want to remain eternally estranged from God, I have that freedom: God gave it to me.   God will love me whatever my eternal destiny--Saint Thomas assures us that God loves even those in hell.  Saved or damned our destiny is to be eternally loved by God.  For some that is a blesing; for others a soul-wracking curse.   I suspect that those who will find themselves in Hell will be those who like the older brother of the Prodigal Son will refuse to come into the banquet because the wrong sort of the people are there.  They will want their heaven to be a reception at Buckingham Palace and be appalled to find that God's heaven  is more "dive chic."   But then i think most people who will find themselves in God's eternal company are those who have spent plenty of time in seedy bars and will be right at home.   

Catholic Calvinism





 John Calvin, inspiration for

those who would expel those
who disagree with them from
the Church

   The subject of whether those who do not agree in full with everything the magisterium of the Church teaches came up in one of my classes yesterday and one of the students had a very interesting insight.  Comparing and contrasting Calvinist ecclesiology (theology of the Church) with Catholic ecclesiology, this student reminded us that the concept of the Church as a spiritual community of those destined for salvation was held by John Calvin and has long been condemned as heretical whereas the Catholic understanding of the Church is that the wheat and weeds grow together until the day of judgment and the Church—until that day when the Divine Judge separates out the saved and the damned—is no more than the visible community of the baptized.  Incidentally Calvinism’s Catholic cousin is Jansenism—a disease that is rampant in some Catholic circles on the web. 

We had a long discussion on the English Puritains—the Calvinist faction within the Church of England in the late 16^th and first half of the 17^th century—who wanted all those who held to “Roman Catholic” customs (such as the Sign of the Cross, the ring at a wedding, the placing of a cross or candles on the communion table, the use of the surplice [the only vestment retained in the Second Prayerbook of King Edward VI and in use in the Church of England at the time], or even a fixed liturgy itself) expelled from the Church of England because they were not being faithful to the Scriptures.   The Puritans were convinced that they knew what authentic Christianity was and those who disagreed with them should be expelled from the Church. 

To a lesser extent the same false doctrine was held by the Cathars in the 13^th century.  The Cathars (also known as Albigensians) were Gnostic heretics who considered themselves the “Pure Ones” from the Greek  καθαρός (pure).  They knew the true faith and all others were on the road that led to damnation.  They alone were the true Christians.  These zealots who think that they can define who are the authentic Catholics and who are not authentic Catholics are cut from the same bolt of cloth.  People may choose—tragically—to leave the visible communion of the Church, but no priest or deacon or lay person can push them out or cut them off.  Ironically, those who argue for others to be cut off from the Church because they don’t hold authentic Catholic doctrine are themselves in violation of sound Catholic faith.  So let the weeds grow alongside the wheat and God will figure it out.   

Follow the Ladies' Lead, Gentlemen

Innocent III blessing Francis and his
first Friars

I recently mentioned the Reformation of Innocent III as a model for Church Reformation that preserves unity in the Church while addressing the need to eliminate areas of Church life that have become a scandal because they are at odds with the Gospel. 

     Innocent was born into a noble Italian family, the counts of Segni, in 1160 and was elected pope in 1198.  He died in 1216.  His family’s stronghold was only about forty miles south-east of Rome and over the centuries there were nine popes from this family, among them being Innocent, Gregory IX, and Alexander IV.  They were a remarkable family and Innocent is often considered to be the most powerful pope in the history of the Church.  Fortunately, for the most part, he used power well.   His nephew, Ugolino dei conti de Segni, who became Gregory IX, was a great friend and patron of Francis of Assisi and also served the Church well both as a Cardinal and later as Pope. 

       There is basis for criticizing Innocent for some of his decisions—the Crusade against the Cathars (Albigensians), the categorization of the Waldensians as heretics at Lateran IV and subsequent persecution, and the Fourth Crusade which ended up attacking and sacking  Constantinople.  We will look at these events in future posts, but these events, flawed as they are from our contemporary perspective, should not be allowed to overshadow a magnificent program of Church Reform which probably prevented a Luther-style Reformation for several centuries. 

        When Innocent ascended the papacy in 1198 he inherited a Church that was deeply fractured.  Personal hostility between the Kings of England and France had overflowed into Church life and led to a deterioration of the state of the Church in the two kingdoms as Church offices were bestowed by the kings on candidates for no reason better than the political needs of the respective monarchs.  Moreover, a centuries-long feud between the papacy and the empire similarly was sapping energy, especially where the Emperor could hand out religious benefices to his political allies to cement their loyalty.       
        The politicalization of the Church was not only filling major posts with many unsuitable candidates, but was leading to a divide between the ordinary faithful and the hierarchy.  The political alliances of the bishops weakened their authority over the faithful who were looking for good and honest guides for their spiritual growth and, not finding it among the pastors of the Church were turning elsewhere.
        In the Rhineland and in the French Languedoc and Pyrénées massive numbers of Christians were deserting the Church for the gnostic Cathar movement. The rigid and austere morality ascribed to the Cathar Perfecti or Holy Men gave them a credibility that the wealthy and powerful Catholic prelates lacked.  Catharism, while strongest in the Rhine and South-west France, was spreading even into Italy, undermining the Church.
       Cathars were Gnostics and their beliefs were, from a Christian perspective, bizarre, but more orthodox were the Waldensians.  Peter Waldo was a wealthy merchant of Lyons France who took the gospel injunction to “sell all that you have, give to the poor, and follow me” seriously.  Doing precisely that, he ran afoul of Church authorities for preaching while not ordained.  Waldo’s charismatic personality and dramatic conversion gave him a credibility that brought him many disciples in France and northern Italy.  A lay movement, the Waldensians soon found themselves decried as schismatics and indeed were broken off from the Catholic Church.  Nevertheless, they grew and even many faithful Catholics admired them for their pacific ways, simple lives, and generosity to the poor.
       Among Innocent III’s reforms, and perhaps the most important of them, was the encouragement of new religious orders that were strongly evangelical in their simple life and service of the poor.  Francis of Assisi was introduced to Innocent who admired him greatly and helped advance the Friars Minor—Francis’ brotherhood of poor preachers who went out and worked with lepers, the lame, the sick poor and others on the margins of society. 
        Another order that Innocent encouraged were a society of priests under the leadership of Dominic de Guzman, a Spanish priest working in the south of France to win people back from the Cathar heresy.  Like Francis’ friars, Dominic’s priests and their coadjutor brothers lived lives of model simplicity.  Dominic, unlike Francis, stressed the importance of education and many of his priests were both brilliant scholars and good preachers. 
       The first new order that Innocent encouraged with the Trinitarians—a community of priests and brothers who were dedicated to freeing captives captured in the Crusades and held by the Muslims.  They raised money with which to buy Muslim prisoners and then exchange them for Christian prisoners.  Their kindness to the Muslim prisoners gave them great credibility on both sides of the wars. 
        The emphasis of these new communities was living a life in imitation of Jesus and his apostles in prayer, fellowship, and simplicity of life.  Perhaps what we need most in the Church today are new—or renewed—religious orders of men and women who take the gospel seriously.  Men and women who will lead simple lives, give themselves to prayer, and dedicate themselves to the service of the poor.  In the years since Vatican II many of the Sisters’ communities have done just that.  Now maybe it is time for the men to follow their example.      

Cathars, Jansenists, and Today's Submariner Heretics

The Palace of the Popes, Avignon, built by Jacques
de Fournier as Benedict XII

Jacques de Fournier was named bishop of Pamiers in 1317 and he undertook a campaign to root out Catharism from his diocese.  Fournier had studied at Paris while a Cistercian monk and then had been abbot of Fontfroide—an important abbey on what is today the border between Spain and France.  This was an area, the Hautes-Pyrenees, where the Cathars had remained strong.  It is not far from the modern pilgrimage center of Lourdes.   Named Bishop of Pamiers, Fournier determined to do something about the survival of Catharism in his diocese.  The Inquisition—not the Spanish Inquisition, just the local diocesan process—interviewed hundreds of people in an attempt to discover and uncover this heresy among a population that for the most part seemed outwardly to conform to the Church.  Fortunately for historians—and to the relief of the local population—Fournier was elected Pope in 1334 and he took up residence in Avignon (then the papal court) with the regnal name of Benedict XII.  He brought all his records with him, but being Pope is a full time job (well, at least for the serious ones and this fellow was serious) and the records just more or less sat around until they eventually ended up in the archives where a historian, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (born 1929), discovered them and wrote a fascinating study: Montaillou, village occitan.  This book is a detailed and fascinating look into life in the fourteenth-century village of Montaillou, a hamlet of 250 people, outwardly  Catholic but secretly given to Cathar belief and practice.  Even the village priest,  Pierre Clergue, was a secret Cathar.  We see that Catharism was not something always distinct from Catholicism but, like many heresies, could infect outwardly faithful Catholics and remain almost undetected.   Montaillou is a very important book historically as it shifted historians from big-picture history to micro-histories which are far more nuanced and give us fascinating details.  You don’t have to be a historian to read it—it is an interesting read on its own.   But the point I want to make is how heresies survive beneath the cover of orthodoxy.  Let me give you an interesting example.         

      Today in the United States we implement the new translation of the missal.  The monastery where I often attend mass has been using it for over a month now and I am getting used to it.  There are features that I like, and there are features with which I am not impressed.  Ok, that is one man’s experience and I don’t expect the world to revolve to my preferences.  But I do see two curious things.

       One is a strong distinction between the sacred and the secular in language—the use of a language that is not the language of us mere mortals.  We don’t speak of “the dewfall,”  ineffable is a word that my electronic thesaurus doesn’t recognize, and I am a bit taken aback to hear a carpenter’s cup called “a chalice.”  And then there is the entire matter of “and with your spirit.”  Why is there a need for sacred/secular—body/soul dichotomies?  I am all in favor of elegant language and graceful vocabulary but I am suspicious of dichotomies that undermine the mystery of the Incarnation in which the Divine enters fully into our human experience.  There is always something of the Gnostic in everyday Catholicism that suspects the world and denigrates human experience.  It is subtle but this dichotomizing ultimately undermines the mystery of the Incarnation.     

      Equally problematic is the issue of he “for all” and “for many.”  I have written on this before but it is hugely problematic as our Catholic faith condemns as heretical any idea that Christ did not die for all.  He did not die for some, nor even for many, but for all.  The Jansenist heresy taught that Christ only died for those who would ultimately be saved.  Like Catharism at Montaillou, Jansenism is alive and well beneath a veneer of orthodox Catholicism among many American Catholics.  This was not the time to put into the liturgy that Christ died “for many.”  It will be used to reinforce the unhealthy piety of those who have deceived themselves into believing they are the “elect” culled from a world that stands outside salvation.    Just check out some of the (supposedly) ultra-Catholic websites and blogs and you will see a Catholicism riddled with Jansenism and other very uncatholic ideas.   There are other heresies alive and well beneath the veneer of pious and traditional Catholicism—Quietism is one, illuminism another—but Jansenism is the one that scares me most because, as Jean Jacques Olier said about four centuries ago—Jansenism eats charity out of the heart of the Church.  I see that today in figures such as Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” who promote a Catholicism of anger and self-righteousness.  I see it too in the “vigilante” Catholicism represented by self-appointed arbiters of the faith such as the “Catholic Media Coalition” or “Tradition in Action,” or Trinity Communications/Catholic Culture.  Henri Bremond wrote of the Jansenists of his days as “Before penetrating into the depth of the mind Jansenism ruins the peace, condition of all true religion.  Before making converts it makes partisans, sectarians, whom it fatally severs from the mystical currents of their time.” As it was in the past it is now too.     

Baptists, Cathars, and Dominicans

San Domenico Guzman
–Fresco in Cantarana –
Denise Schenardi, 2007

The Church’s initial response to Catharism was to launch a missionary campaign and Innocent III sent preachers into the Occitan to refute the heretical doctrines.  He also prohibited translations of the scriptures into the vernacular as popular interpretations of the bible were at the root of the heresy’s spreading.  The preaching crusade was not particularly successful due to the support the Cathars had from many of the local nobility who saw that breaking the power of the Church also weakened the power of the French Crown (and thus strengthened their local power of the peasants and the towns) and when one of the coordinators of the papal effort, Pierre de Castelnau, was assassinated, Raymond, the Count of Toulouse, was suspected of ordering the murder.  This led to a change of papal strategy and in 1209 a Crusade was launched to wipe out the heresy by destroying the nobles and the city governments that supported it.
     The failure of Innocent’s  preaching mission was due in great part to a gross miscalculation on the part of the Church as to what would work at rooting out this heresy.  The pope sent Cistercian Abbots as preachers.  Now the Cistercians were a reformed religious order and known for their integrity and austere life, but abbots are abbots and these prelates saw themselves as emissaries of the Pope rather than as preachers of the Gospel.  Huge mistake.  Huge.  The abbots came on horseback with their retinue of chaplains and liveried servants and they stayed in the homes of the rich, the great, and the powerful and they lived well.  This did not impress the converts to Catharism who had been drawn to the sect because of the austerity of the Cathar perfecti or holy ones.  It is a bit like the Tridentine revivalists who think the way to appeal to people today to come back to the Church is for bishops to wear long trains of scarlet silk while conducting elaborate ceremonies in an arcane language.  Duh!  It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.  Anyway, back to the Crusade for a moment. 
     Innocent called a crusade and offered any Catholic nobleman who fought the heretics title to the lands of the various Occitan nobles who were protecting the Cathars.  This involved the French Crown who saw this as an opportunity to extend royal power over this region of what is today southwest France but at the time was a collection of independent baronies.  The French King himself, Philip Augustus,  did not become involved but one of his vassals, Simon de Montfort, led the successfully brutal war in which over 20,000 men, women, and children were killed.    
     Let me just make an aside here.  There are some Protestant groups whose poor knowledge of history allows them to trace their supposed roots back to Jesus and the apostles by identifying themselves with any group that the Catholic Church has ever persecuted.  If you were persecuted by the Catholic Church than you must have been a Baptist!  Won’t earn you a degree in history but sure will make those hymn-singin’, lemonade drinkin’,  bible readin’ po’ folk down in Arkansas and Tennessee feel a might more righteous.   Years ago I was at a rural Baptist Church in Texas—Independence Baptist Church where Sam Houston was baptized.    A gentleman there described the history of the Church, giving us what is known as the “Trail of Blood Baptist” history and according to his story anyone who was imprisoned or killed for their faith in those Catholic Centuries had been Baptist.  He talked about the Cathars as Baptists, unaware that not only did they not practice immersion baptism, but they didn’t even use water.  Nor did he know, even more seriously, that they believed in two gods, a god of light and a god of dark, who were locked in this eternal struggle for men’s souls.  But they weren’t “those Catholics” so they must have been “us Baptists.”  Most Baptists take a more historically critical view and recognize that their tradition comes out of the English Radical Reformation of the seventeenth century and can’t be traced historically to apostolic times. 
     Well, the Albigensian Crusade was pretty much of a failure from a religious point of view—Catharism managed to hold on in Languedoc though often under a veneer of Catholic Orthodoxy.  The fighting was over by 1255 though the Inquisition lingered on to ferret out heretics.  The French Crown eventually triumphed over the nobility and brought the area more and more under central control.  When the French wars of religion broke out in the sixteenth century this area was particularly hard hit as a suspicion of Catholicism remained even after Catharism had apparently died out.  Sometimes, in fact often, religiously divisive movements such as Catharism are not so much about proposing new doctrines as they are about opposing old power structures.  Catharism seems to have been much more about rejecting a Catholic faith that had become over-identified with the power and wealth of the movers and shakers than dangerous ideas of dualism and Gnostic revival. 
     A more positive factor that came out of the Cathar movement was the Dominican Order.  Dominic de Guzman was a canon regular in the suite of the Spanish Bishop of Osma who had been sent on a Diplomatic mission by the king of Castile to Denmark.  As they travelled through the south of France Dominic encountered the Cathars and converted a number of their women members whom he organized into a monastery of nuns at Prouille.  The mission to Denmark completed (unsuccessfully as the marriage they were to arrange fell through due to the untimely death of the proposed bride), Dominic and his bishop returned to France on their way home to Castile.  Dominic saw the papal legates in all their pomp after their preaching had failed to stop the Cathar heresy.  He admonished them:  “The Cathars do not win people to their heresy by the show of power and pomp, by trains of servants and caparisoned horses, by their gorgeous robes—but by zealous preaching, by being humble like the apostles, by poor and simple lives, and by genuine and apparent holiness.  Zeal must be matched by zeal, humility by humility, the pretense of holiness by genuine holiness, preaching lies by preaching truth.”  Dominic decided to stay in France and to do precisely that while his bishop returned home.  Dominic gathered several other priests about him to establish a community of preachers of evangelical truth who, like the Cathar perfecti, would live poor and simple lives as a witness to their faith.  Their preaching was not a huge success in winning back people to the faith, but they did make a difference.  In 1217 Dominic would establish his preaching priests as a new religious Order—the Order of Preachers.  We know them today as the Dominicans.  More about them in future blogs. 

The Cathars--The "Perfect Ones"

The wealth of the Church was a

lightening rod for grouips such as

Cathars

Well, it was way back in September—September 20^th to be exact—that we left off our series on Church Reform.  We had been talking about dissent in the medieval Church with the sagas of Peter Waldo and the Umiliati—two different expressions of frustration and anger with the wealth and power of the Church.  The sagas ended up quite differently if you remember, Waldo and his followers were forced into schism by a medieval papacy unable to grasp that genuine Reform might come from lay leadership and the Umiliati ended up becoming a religious order due to a papacy that knew how to harness lay charisms for the good of the larger Church.  We will talk more about the very charismatic pope, Innocent III, who cut through the morass of canon law to empower laity to take an active voice in preaching the Gospel, but first we need to look at another group around at the same time, the Cathars.
       The Cathers (Catheri in Latin) were also known, popularly, as the Albigensians because there were so many in and around the city of Albi in France, but its influence spread far beyond the Languedoc.   Cathars were prominent not only in the South of France but the Rhineland and Italy and not unknown elsewhere.  It is a mystery to historians how the sect originated but, although there is no historical connection,  it does bear certain similarities to the Manichean sect to which Saint Augustine had belonged before his conversion in the fourth century.  Like the Manicheans, the Cathars proposed the idea that there are two Gods—a spiritual god who created our spirits and an evil god who created the material universe into which human spirits have been tricked and entrapped.  The soul must escape this created universe and return to its pure spiritual nature.  It does this by renouncing material realities, especially any of those things that have to do with sexual intercourse and generation as it supposedly is by a sexual curiosity that souls are entrapped into generation into the physical/material world.  Another ancient heresy that taught this same doctrine as the Manicheans is Priscillianism but there is no historical evidence for a survival of either Priscillianism or Manicheanism that would explain the Cathars.  By the way—both Manicheanism and Priscillianism were Gnostic sects and Catharism, while a medieval and not an ancient theology, should also be seen to be in the Gnostic tradition.  
       Another ancient heresy with which Catharism shares some similarity of doctrine is Donatism.  Donatism taught that the validity of the sacraments as channels of grace depended on the worthiness of the minister.  A bishop or priest who was himself sinful therefore could not effectively minister to others.  Donatism was widespread, especially in North Africa, in the fourth and fifth century but this particular doctrine about the worthiness of the ministers resurfaced among the Cathars as it would surface again during the Protestant Reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
        Catharism spread like wildfire in the eleventh century in great part due to dissatisfaction of the common people with the wealth of the institutional Church and lax morality of the clergy.  The use of Latin in liturgical celebrations had reduced the rites of the Church to vague and unintelligible rituals that appeared as superstitious and even magical.  That these rites—baptisms, marriages, funerals, blessings of fields and crops and other rites of everyday life—required offerings of either money or in kind to an often undisciplined clergy from ordinary and even impoverished faithful while the wealth of the Church was vigorously displayed in its buildings, art, vestments and vessels eroded the faith of intelligent if uneducated people.    Lay ascetics who practiced the highly disciplined life of the Cathar holy men—sexually abstinent, economically poor, vegan in diet (food coming from sexual congress—both meat and dairy—being forbidden) impressed many far more than did the too often indolent clergy.  The simple rites—a “baptism” by laying on of hands and a holy communion of bread blest only by the recitation of the Lord’s Pryer—spoke effectively to simple people.  While most converts were unwilling to accept the full discipline of the sect—vegetarianism and celibacy being two of the notable stumbling blocks—large numbers of initiates flocked to the movement remaining at a catechumenal stage until their last moments of life when they would seek the  “consolementum” or laying on of hands.  Of course, it should not be presumed that all Cathar holy men lived up to the demands of their ascetic vocation any more than all priests live up to theirs, but there is a consensus that the rumors of debauchery and charlatanism were more polemics by the institutional Church to destroy the credibility of the movement than serious and credible charges.  While there certainly would have been some charlatans among them, their widespread success in making converts indicates greater credibility than some Catholic historians allow. 

The Humble and the Proud--Popular and Institutional Views of the Church

The Basilica of Sant' Ambrogio in

Milan, the center of the Umiliati

movement

Peter Waldo wasn’t the only evangelical voice in the twelfth century Church protesting the clerical monopoly on preaching the Gospel and complaining about the Church’s alliance with the rich and powerful in their exploitation of the Christian poor.  The Umiliati were a movement among the working classes centered in northern Italy in the twelfth century.   They don’t seem to have had a founder but to have risen somewhat spontaneously among the dislocated workers who turned to one another for support and help.  The rich merchants and manufacturers had their guilds in which they offered each other collaboration and support but the workers were left each one for himself (or in some cases, herself).     
     The twelfth century was a time that the cities of Europe were expanding with unparalleled rapidity.  After the year 1100, much like the urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest United States would see after World War II, the cities of Italy and France—and to a lesser extent, Germany and England—saw in influx of people moving to the cities and towns from the rural areas looking for work.   Farmers left their farms and villages in search of city work that would give them a better life and a brighter future.  But in the villages and on the farms they had traditional networks of family and neighbors who were there for them in times of need.  Should a breadwinner be injured or become sick or die, the social network of families connected by blood and marriage would close in around the victim and offer him and his family the support they would need to carry on.  In the cities, however, there were no such networks.  The families and friends were back in the village or scattered among various towns and cities.  Sickness and death in the city meant poverty and starvation.  And it was in this environment that communities began to spring up “in a Christian spirit” among the new urban working class, communities of people who without the obligations of blood or marriage or ancient friendships voluntarily were there for one another in mutual support.  Inspired by stories of how the early Christians were of one heart and one mind and that there was no one in need among them for they shared all things in common (Acts 4), they banded together in mutual prayer, fraternity, and support.  They met together for prayer and meals, priests among explained the scriptures to them in their own language, and using the scriptures as a reference point, they discussed matters of life that were important to them.   Unmarried members of the movement often lived together in communities that resembled small monasteries or convents.  They tried to shape their lives to their faith.  They resolved not to swear oaths but let their yes be a yes and their no, a no.  (Matthew 5:37)  They turned their poverty from a distress into a sign of unity.  They opted to live as simply as they could, getting the name umiliati or the “humble ones” from their plain undyed clothes.  They often left their employment and started what we might call workers cooperatives and, so many of them being workers in the cloth industry, gained fame for producing an inexpensive (and lower quality) wool affordable by the poor.   
     This was very spiritually enriching for them, but it was threatening to the manufacturers who employed them.  This movement  empowered the working classes, uniting workers in mutual support and making them less easy for their employers to exploit.  The Archbishop of Milan—a Umiliati stronghold—and other bishops as well as the political and social leaders of the city panicked at the growing strength of the Umiliati.   Milan had had a history of the working classes opposing the Archbishop and the upper classes in the Patarene movement and the Umiliati were suspected of undermining the political dominance of the rich merchants.  
     The group was brought to the attention of Pope Alexander III in 1179 and he commended their piety but forbad them to continue their meetings and what he perceived to be lay preaching.  They did not conform to his restrictions and Lucius III excommunicated them along with the Cathars, the Arnoldists, the Waldensians and other groups at a Council at Verona in 1184.  A reconciliation was effected with Pope Innocent III but that is a story to come in a few days.