The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade

The Cathars were a radical religious sect that had taken root in southern France and by the early thirteenth century a good part of the population of the area were Cathars.   The Cathars held radically different beliefs from Christianity and are properly considered a different religion entirely, rather than a perversion of Christianity itself.[1] They believed that there were two worlds the spiritual and the material, only the spiritual was clean of sin while the material world was inherently sinful.   In order to escape the inherent sinfulness of their human existence the Cathars underwent a ritual known as the consolamentum.   This ritual was a kind of combination … More after the Jump…