Posted on 09/17/2013 5:42:00 AM PDT by NYer
Ping!
Good article. There is nothing new under the sun after all, I guess.
Still, the Pope said something yesterday that I thought was true: there has been some fundamental shift that has occurred in society, and it is impossible to return to what we once had. That is, the entire modern vision of what it means to be human has undergone a profound change, sort of an official adoption of Gnosticism with its complete rejection of physical reality, that makes it impossible for Christians to communicate.
Look at the most elementary of biological facts: men are men and women are women, and no amount of claiming that you are not really what your body is will change that. Yet our society asserts that physical reality means nothing. Since Christianity is based on physical reality (the Incarnation), we Christians find ourselves now living in a completely alien environment where we are speaking and thinking in a suddenly foreign language.
While human life was in the crosshairs, animal life was sacrosanct. The Albigensians would never take an animal’s life. This was because they believed in something like reincarnation, so a dead person’s soul might be within an animal.
It never occurred to them that they might be "reincarnated" as a sick child? Or that an alive person's soul resided in a sick child?
Generally a good article.
However, it should be remembered that almost everything we know about the Albigensians was written by their enemies, at a time when rhetoric against one’s enemies (or the enemies of God) was often unrestrained by anything resembling respect for truth.
Check out what the same people at this time said about the Jews, and somewhat later said about Protestants. (And what Protestants said about them, and about the Jews for that matter.)
Not defending those of Albi, just pointing out that the bare truth about them may have been embroidered somewhat.
Anything not of God is of Satan, and contradictions don't matter to him.
They ignore the teaching of Ecclesiastes.
They ignore the teaching of Ecclesiastes.
I have posted this before and apologize for the repeat but, each time I read such statements, there is a flashback to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Pro Eligendo homily delivered to the College of Cardinals before they entered the conclave that resulted in his selection as pope.
How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves - flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires.
FULL TEXT
This homily was delivered in April 2005. Like Paul VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae, one can regard Ratzinger's homily as quasi prophetic. Insofar as Pope Francis stating that a fundamental shift has occurred in history, we know from history that it repeats itself. Perhaps not in our lifetime, it is conceivable that some future generation may one day experience the conservative values we experienced in post WWII America.
Probably the “society” the modern Gnostics are building will implode at some point; it’s based on unsustainable ideas and no foundation whatsoever.
Very thought-provoking article. The Evil One is adept at recycling his most effective lies.
Pray that people return to God....SOON!
I’ve had evangelical protestant friends point to the Albigensians as the “underground remnant” of true Christianity in opposition to the Catholic church of their day.
(This allows protestants to offer a timeline going back before the Reformation.)
Anyway when I explain what the Albigensians really believed, they either concede the point (and implicitly acknowledge that their pastor was misleading them about the Albigensians) or accuse me of lying for the church.
Some details that are often missed when discussing the Spanish Inquisition, were first, that the laity in Spain were utterly horrified by not just the heterodoxy, or even heresy, but the rise of debauched and perverted paganism, often using the church itself for its purposes.
Second was that the existing Spanish royal inquisition was not only ineffective in dealing with this, but in some ways sponsoring it. This is why the desperate petition to Rome for a real Inquisition, carried out under the auspices of what is now the Holy Office.
While Christendom in Europe swept away paganism, in many cases, it did not destroy it, just drove it and its practices underground. In many parts of Europe, even today, pagan practices have been integrated into the local practice of Christianity.
With the rise of official atheism in France, spreading outward through Europe, eroding national churches already in decline, it is no surprise that pagan beliefs are again returning to the fore.
Likewise, heterodoxy and outright heresy, in some cases arising from within the church itself.
Speaking of "maniacal":
The Cathars spent much of 1209 fending off the crusaders.
The Béziers army attempted a sortie but was quickly defeated, then pursued by the crusaders back through the gates and into the city.
Arnaud-Amaury, the Cistercian abbot-commander, is supposed to have been asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics.
His reply, recalled by Caesar of Heisterbach, a fellow Cistercian, thirty years later was 'Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.'—'Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own.'[53][54]
The doors of the church of St Mary Magdalene were broken down and the refugees dragged out and slaughtered.
Reportedly, 7,000 people died there.
Elsewhere in the town many more thousands were mutilated and killed.
Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses, and used for target practice.[55]
What remained of the city was razed by fire.
Arnaud-Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent III, 'Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.'[56][57]"
In another report:
"An estimated 200,000 to 1,000,000 people were massacred during the crusade.[2][3]
The Albigensian Crusade also had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition. "
But at least there were no gas chambers, or crematoria, so it's all cool, right?
What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.
Even the thing of which we say, "See, this is new!" has already existed in the ages that preceded us.
There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-11
No. I don't recall saying that. I don't recall defending the Inquisition, or Crusades, at all.
Very interesting first hand experience. I bet some of those conversations are quite animated.
Attempts to reform corruption and suffocating power in the Roman Catholic Church began with false starts and failures long before Martin Luther's 95 Theses in 1517.
Names like Jan Hus (†1415) and Girolamo Savonarola (†1498) come to immediately mind.
But the core essence of Protestantism is devotion to what the Bible actually says, as opposed to what some bishops somewhere claimed it sort-of means.
So where-ever you can see such devotion before Luther, there you might say are pre-Protestants.
But you really can't have serious Protestants until you have a lot of Bibles available, and many people able to read them, and that didn't really begin until Gutenberg's Bibles, circa 1450.
So Cathars-Albigensians could not be considered pre-Protestants, except in their "maniacal" feelings about fundamental corruption and wickedness in the Roman Catholic Church of their day.
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