House of Acerbi

Instinctively, he scanned the vicinity for helicopters and listened for the distinctive staccato-like chop of whirling rotor blades. It looked like the choppers were gone … at least for now.

Walking to the edge of a cliff, Leo could see that the weathered ruin of this medieval castle lay next to a sheer rock wall overlooking the river. It was obvious that its builders had taken advantage of its natural defensive position, for it would have been suicide to mount an assault up a sheer cliff, even though, unbeknownst to Leo, the details of history had spared this particular castle from ever being attacked.

Seven hundred years ago, the castle’s residents had abandoned it in place and fled for their lives in advance of a marauding army that had swept across the land putting everyone to the sword, even women and children. Rather than war, it had been stone masons who had reduced the castle to rubble when they had quarried its stone over the years for the construction of houses in a nearby village.

Leo felt a chill run down his spine when he surveyed the large cracked stone and looked out over the golden fields below. Ever since he had first arrived in this area of France, a vague feeling of uneasiness had been tugging at him. There was something about this place that had troubled him, something that he had been unable to put his finger on … until now.

It was at that moment, on a cliff with the wind in his face, that Leo was suddenly struck with the realization of where he was standing. It was here, in this exact part of France, that the Catholic Church had begun its depraved descent into one of the darkest chapters in its long history, for this had once been the land of the Cathars.

Leo had found their story fascinating. He had actually offered a semester-long course on the Cathar religion to some of his graduate students when he was teaching at Boston College, but hardly anyone signed up, so the course was dropped.

The Cathars of the Languedoc, as they were called, were a religious group that suddenly appeared in the Languedoc region of southern France in the 11^th century. Their origin remains something of a mystery. It was as if they had blown in on the wind, much like the wind that now whipped over the men, women, and children who were huddled together behind Leo. Seven hundred years ago, Cathar families had also huddled together on this very hilltop, preparing to flee from a murderous army bent on their destruction.

Long before the days of the Protestant Reformation that eventually changed the face of religion in the Christian world forever, the Cathars had been a separate religion from Catholicism. The word Cathar came from the Greek Katharoi, meaning “pure ones”. Unlike other medieval movements, they had formed their own system of religious beliefs centered on kindness to others, the rejection of material wealth, and the promise of universal redemption inspired by Christ and his disciples.

They regarded men and women as equals, and they opposed all forms of killing, both human and animal. Because of this, they refused to eat meat or any other animal products, including eggs. Many of their ideas would seem startling and rather new-age, even to modern man, but their Christ-like theology of forgiving those who persecuted them was even more astonishing in the 11^th century, a cruel period of history when man still believed the sun revolved around the earth.

Theirs was a dualist theology, for the Cathars preached that there was a complete incompatibility between love and power. Another radical departure from traditional Christianity was their rejection of the established belief in a one all-encompassing god. Instead, they believed in two equal gods of comparable power and status-one benevolent and one evil. In other words, they believed in a good god and a bad god. Basically, it was a different way of looking at the two separate entities of God and Satan, although some would argue that point.

They alleged that the physical world was evil and created by the Satan-like god they called Rex Mundi. He was known as “the king of the world” who ruled over all that was physical, chaotic, and powerful. The other god, the one whom the Cathars worshipped, was said to be a spirit of light that was completely untainted by all things physical. He was the god of love and peace. If modern hippies would have chosen a religion, it would have been the religion of the Cathars.

The Cathars believed that mankind was infused with a spark of divine light. This light, or spirit, had become captive in the physical body in a world ruled by Satan, thus the spirit of humanity was trapped in a sinful world created by an evil god and ruled by his corrupt minions.

At its doctrinal core, their beliefs centered on the New Testament, especially the Gospel of John. Because they embraced the New Testament as their most sacred text, they rejected the traditional view of the Old Testament, proclaiming that the God of the Old Testament was really the devil. Those who followed this line of thinking believed Satan had created the world as a sort of prison for mankind, and that he used the Old Testament to demand fearful obedience from his children. To the Cathars, this made perfect sense. It explained the human condition of suffering and misery brought on by violence, disease, hunger and poverty-all the things that had plagued humanity since the beginning of time, and Satan was behind it all in the form of an evil god that ruled over the earth and all things material.

The true god of the Cathars was a higher god-a god of love-a pure spirit that embraced his human followers. They believed that Jesus Christ was his messenger and referred to themselves as Christians, but the Catholic Church called them something else. To the medieval Catholic Church, the Cathars were heretics.

At the time, the region of southern France known as the Languedoc was not really considered a part of France. The culture of the area was still rooted in the feudal system, but the enlightened Cathars refused to swear an oath to any feudal lord. By the early 13^th century, the tolerant and liberal beliefs of the Cathars had become the dominate religion in the area, much to the annoyance of the Catholic Church, who was being held up to public ridicule when their bejeweled abbots and priests, dressed in their best finery, preached poverty and demanded tithes to be paid to them in the name of the Church. The Cathars referred to the Catholic Church as the Church of the Wolves, while the Catholics countered with accusations that the Cathars belonged to the Synagogue of Satan.

And so it went, back and forth, until finally, the Church had had enough. After the French King, Phillip Augustus, refused to intervene, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc and formed a Holy Army. The first military leader of this army was a Cistercian abbot by the name of Arnaud Amaury, a churchman with a sadistic penchant for terror and killing. He is best remembered for a command he shouted to his troops before they entered the town of Beziers in 1209. When asked by his soldiers how they could differentiate between the Catholics and Cathars, he said “Kill them all … God will know his own!”

Coincidentally, this famous quote was lost to history until it was resurrected by modern mercenaries. Their motto, “Kill them all, let God sort them out” can be found today emblazoned across the fronts of T-shirts worn by wannabe soldiers of fortune who sadly picture themselves as elite warrior-philosophers, even though they have no idea that the origin of their motto can be traced back to a man who prided himself in the killing of innocent women and children.

During this period of history, a war of terror was waged against the indigenous population of the Languedoc by the Church. An estimated 500,000 Languedoc men, women, and children were massacred-Catholics as well as Cathars. During the attack on Beziers, the doors to the church of St. Mary Magdalene were broken down and over 7000 men, women, and children, were reportedly dragged out and slaughtered.

Thousands of others in the same town were blinded, mutilated, dragged behind horses, burned at the stake, and used for target practice before the holy crusader army burned the city to the ground.

After the siege, Arnaud proudly wrote to Pope Innocent III, “Today Your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”

Later, after the massacre at Beziers, Simon de Monfort, an especially dangerous and cruel baron who had successfully laid siege to the walled city of Carcassonne, was designated as the new leader of the Crusader army. The war against the Cathars continued on and off through the 14^th century, setting the precedent for the various church-sponsored inquisitions that were to follow.

The lands of the educated and tolerant Cathars were eventually annexed by France and given to a group of nobles from the north, for in truth, it was a quest for land and Cathar riches that had been the driving force behind the crusade in the first place. In the end, an entire culture had been exterminated in what can only be described as church sanctioned genocide. The crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc has been described by historians as one of the greatest human disasters in history on par with that of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II.

Leo closed his eyes against the relentless wind as he thought of the senseless slaughter that had occurred in the cities and villages and fields all around him. The crusades of the Languedoc are a black mark against the Church that continues to this day, and for good reason, for the world can never forget what a few cruel men can do to a