Pope Alexander III
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Waldensians
The Waldensians, Waldenses or Vaudois are a Christian denomination believing in poverty and austerity, promoting true poverty, public preaching and the literal interpretation of the scriptures. They originated in the late 12th century (around 1173) as the Poor Men of Lyons, a band organized by Peter Waldo, a wealthy merchant of Lyon, who gave away his property around 1176 and went about preaching apostolic poverty as the way to perfection.
They went to Rome, where Pope Alexander III blessed their life but forbade preaching (1179) without authorization from the local clergy. They disobeyed and began to teach unorthodox doctrines; they were formally declared heretics by Pope Lucius III in 1184 and by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. In 1211 more than 80 were burned as heretics at Strasbourg, beginning several centuries of persecution. The movement was brutally persecuted during the 12th and 13th centuries and nearly totally destroyed, but the Waldensian Church survives to this day.
Some Waldenses, and other groups seeking to trace their history through the Waldenses, claim that the Waldenses history extends back to the apostolic church, while the mainstream academic view is that the Waldensians were followers of Peter Waldo (or Valdes or Vaudes).
Cathars
Catharism was a name given to a religious sect with gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France in the 11th Century and flourished in the 12th and 13th Centuries.
Its Manichaean theology held that the physical world was evil and created by Satan, who was taken to be identical with the God of the Old Testament; and that men underwent a series of reincarnations before reaching the pure realm of spirit, the presence of the God of Love described in the New Testament and his messenger Jesus.
The Roman Catholic Church regarded the sect as heretical; faced with the rapid spread of the movement across the Languedoc and the failure of peaceful attempts at conversion, the Church launched the Albigensian Crusade to crush the movement.
Huguenot
In the 16th and 17th centuries, the name Huguenot was applied to a member of the Protestant Reformed Church of France, historically known as the French Calvinists. They were a French counterculture avant la lettre. Used originally as a term of derision which the Huguenots took up as a badge of honour, the derivation of the name Huguenot remains uncertain. The origin of Huguenot beliefs (and perhaps of some of the Huguenots themselves) lies among the Cathars in the medieval past of the eastern Mediterranean.
Notre-Dame Affair
The Notre-Dame Affair was an anti-clericalist intervention performed by members of the radical wing of the Lettrist movement (Michel Mourre, Serge Berna, Ghislain Desnoyers de Marbaix and Jean Rullier), on Easter Sunday, April 9th 1950, at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. Michel Mourre, dressed in the habit of a Dominican monk and backed by his co-conspirators, chose a quiet moment in the Easter High Mass to climb to the rostrum and declaim before the whole congregation a blasphemous anti-sermon on the death of God, penned by Serge Berna.
