Medieval Heresy & the Inquisition

When, for example, priests are found abusing the confessional by actually soliciting their female penitents to sin, a moral revulsion against such a practice is inevitable. Such a revulsion may in some cases generate an attack upon the whole system of confession—and that is heresy.

An intense dissatisfaction with the moral condition of the world, more especially as revealed in the Church, is one of the dominant features of the neo-Manichaean heresy, known as Catharism or Paulicianism, as well as Waldensianism and Joachitism. The last mentioned actually postulated that Christianity had failed and that mankind stood in need of a new revelation and a new Savior. Corruption in the Church was, then, one of the contributory causes of medieval heresy, and anti-sacerdotalism—opposition to the priesthood—was one of its features.

It must not be assumed, however, that because heretical sects protested against scandals in the Church, they necessarily exhibited a higher standard of morality themselves. The reverse is in some cases the truth. Among the heresiarchs (founders of heresy) and their followers are found men who were mere half-crazed fanatics, others whose passion was more of lust than of righteousness. We have to bear in mind that our knowledge of the heretics is almost entirely derived from their adversaries; unbiased contemporary testimony there is none. Yet, even remembering this, we can appreciate the repugnance that many heretical sects inspired in their own day. In the second place, the Church was itself alive to the need of reform. The best minds always were; and to all, the outbreak of heresies in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though it was ruthlessly and thoroughly suppressed, was a significant warning. Unhappily, the abuses actually tended to increase in the fourteenth century, and the papacy in particular lost heavily in moral and spiritual authority when it allowed itself to become the mere catspaw of the French monarchy at Avignon, and when it became rent asunder by the even greater disaster of the Schism.