Part 2 of Alex Christopher's work Pandora's Box.Never really liked the Catholic Church(It was why I told my parents at the age 14,that I had enough and was not going to be going to Church anymore)and throughout my adult years I came to understand the Church had done some down right disgusting things in the past. I am not sure,maybe because it was my association with the church when I was young, but more likely it was my Mothers involvement as a Catholic that kept me from looking at this institution as critically as I have with other subjects.
In the last couple of months,as some readers might be aware,I have been republishling some of the work of Anna von Reitz,and it is her work that has made me realize just how corrupt and despicable this church is,and I am not even talking about the sex scandals. I am not trying to make light of the suffering and abuse of this latest scandal,but it does not compare to the millions this church has murdered. And adding these chapters to what I have been thinking lately,it dawned on me,that it is this forsaken Church,that covets this land,and has from the beginning!
[.....By about 1200 A.D., most of the population of Languedoc and Provence patronized Cathar churches in preference to Catholic ones. There were Roman churches in southern France where a mass had not been said in several generations.
On the simplest level, the popularity of Catharism is easy to explain. The Roman clergy was corrupt and suffered by comparison with the Cathar "parfaits" or "perfected ones" who passed for Cathar clergy. Saint Bernard, who travelled to Languedoc to preach against these heretics in 1145 A.D., was impressed by them: "No sermons are more Christian than theirs, and their morals are pure", he wrote.
By "Christian", the good saint must have meant Christian in spirit, because the Albigensians certainly were not Christian in dogma according to the tenets of the Roman Church. Indeed, there are some who suspect that Saint Bernard was extremely impressed with the Cathars and became one. in secret.
Cathar "Christianity" rejected the idea of the death and crucifixion of Jesus. Catharism seems to have rejected the propriety of this sacrifice, and perhaps even the notion of salvation, as these concepts were understood by Roman Catholics of the 13th Century and modern Christians of all sects nowadays. Instead, the Cathars stressed the reality of "unconditional love" and the still-existing living legacy of love bequeathed by Jesus as one, and perhaps the latest, manifestation of God's boundless love. It seems as though some of the Cathars, and certainly some of the higher-ranking Templars were able to accept Mohammed within this context, not as a living example of God's love incarnate as Jesus was viewed, but as a legitimate messenger speaking and writing about God's love.
As "Christians", these Cathars therefore rejected the cross, the Roman Catholic "crucifix", as a proper symbol to focus meditation upon, or worship of. the love that Christ was and remained. Instead, one important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of "peace" or. more accurately the more subtle concept of "grace", that state of being in God's love. After the first crusades, when European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked conographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, which also means "grace" and with the idea that a person could be a "vessel of grace".....]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/01/part-2-pandoras-boxthe-knights-templara.html
