--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, new.morning <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Interesting segment on an Inquisition series on PBS> TURQ -- did > you happen to see it (do you get PBS there? -- if not its probably > downloadable).
No to both. But unless the stuff below is a put-on by you, it doesn't sound worth downloading. > A major theme of the Cathatr story that I was not aware of > was priests making "sacred love" to fair young maidens. You were probably not aware of it because it never existed. Unlike the Catholic priests of the day, who tended to have a mistress or two on the side, the Cathar priests (which included both men and women) were celibate, and actually *practiced* their celibacy. This was only a restriction for the perfecti (priests); the lay Cathars had no restrictions on their sexuality. If such a claim *was* made in this show, I'd love to see documentation of it. I haven't found any in almost 200 sources I've read. The Cathars "take a lot of crap" from pseudoscholars and New Age types who make up stuff about them. They can do this because there is so little real documentation of who and what they were. Interest- ingly, most of the valuable source material on the Cathars comes from the records of the Inquistion itself. You would expect that if there were any allegations such as the ones you make above, that's where they would appear. But they don't. The monks of the Inquisition may have been fanatics and madmen, but they *were* monks, and tended to write down *exactly* what the heretics they were trying said in their trials. That's why these trial records are so valuable when trying to reconstruct an era from which many of the other records were destroyed. In other words, I'm cutting you a break by assuming that in your statement above about priests you are talking about are the *Catholic* priests of the day, not the Cathar priests. If you weren't, I suspect that you made it up just to get a rise out of me, because you won't be able to find any legitimate scholarship on the Cathars indicating that *they* took any "liberties" with women. They were almost *boring* in the purity with which they approached their religion. It's almost impossible to find any record of scandals among the Cathar perfecti. And, since much of the scholarly work done on the Cathars in recent years was done by Roman Catholic priests who would have *loved* to have found some kind of scandals to document to justify the Crusades and the Inquistion, I think it's safe to assume that if they couldn't document any, the scandals probably didn't exist. > Perhaps not a new phenomenon, but the "rap" these guys had > would make turq, curtis and others jealous -- and taking > copious notes. > > http://www.pbs.org/inquisition/cathars.html > > Premieres May 2007 > Check your local listings > > By Dr. Stephen Haliczer > Northern Illinois University > (edited from an interview by David Rabinovitch) > [The Church and The Meterial World] > > The Cathar heresy was a major challenge to the Roman Catholic > Church. It combined a tradition of itinerate preachers in the > forests of France with a very aesthetic quality. The Cathars > rejected the Roman Catholic, the entire church structure. They > said they were the only true Christians. They developed an > alternative religion, an alternative hierarchy, an alternative > priesthood that attracted many adherents in that period, which > is why the Cathar heresy above all occasioned the founding of > the inquisition.
