Handout #120

The New Manichaeans or Cathari

The sect, the heresy and the deluded adherents of the Manichaeans acknowledge and confess two Gods or two Lords, namely a good God and an evil God. They affirm that the creation of all things visible and material is not the work of God the heavenly Father--whom they call a good God - but the work of the devil and Satan, the evil God. They thus distinguish two creators, God and the devil, and two creations, One of invisible and immaterial beings, and the other of visible and material things.

Likewise, they imagine two churches: one, the good church, which they say is their sect; this they claim to be the church of Jesus Christ. In their view the other, the evil church, is the Roman church; they impudently call it the mother of fornications, great Babylon, harlot and basilica of the devil, synagogue of Satan.

For baptism with water they substitute another baptism, a spiritual one, called consolamenturn of the Holy Spirit. When for example they receive a person, well or ill, into their sect or their order, laying of hands according to their execrable rite ...They deny the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the womb of Mary Ever Virgin and argue that he did not take a true human body nor true human flesh like other men by virtue of human nature, that he did not suffer and die on the cross, that he was not raised from the dead, and that he did not ascend to heaven with human, body and flesh. All this, they say, is figurative.

They call imperfect heretics those who have in truth the faith of heretics but do not follow them in their life-style and do not observe the rites; they are called believers in the lying language of the heretics.

By contrast, they call perfect the heretics who have professed the faith of the heretics and live their life in conformity to it, fulfilling and observing the rites involved; these are they who dogmatize the others. Bernard Gui, op.cit., I,1. 

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