oil by claude Dubois museum Arques city
the church which ordered the massacre of the inquisition of the Occitans, and also in Spain, and in many other countries, demands forgiveness (the assasins who ask for their forgiveness 800 years later). The Vatican is the house of Satan. http://www.cathar.info/cathar_news.htm
The clear consensus among those present was that this apology marked an important historical event. The bishop was born in Pamiers, so understood local sensibilities. He and his clergy recognised that the wound inflicted in the thirteenth century was still raw and bleeding in the twenty-first, that the embers were still glowing. He has done pretty much everything that could be expected of him. Those present, from supposed neo-Cathars to government functionaries, from academics to Catholic clergy appeared happy with the day's events. Many were visibly moved.
A great a success as it was, the bishop's apology is widely seen as only the start. As Bertrand de la Farge put it, "Today's event is the first step of a process". Medieval Bishops of Pamiers played a small and late (though well publicised) part in the persecution of the Cathars. Those who share a much greater portion of responsibility for the persecution of the Cathars include the whole of the Catholic Church as a corporate entity, the papacy, the Cistercians, the Dominicans and the archbishoprics of Narbonne and Toulouse. Cistercians promoted a Crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc, and the head of the Cistercian Order, the Abbot of Cîteaux, personally commanded the Crusade during its initial phase. Dominicans created and manned the first papal Inquisition, the organisation tasked with the extirpation of the Cathars after the Crusade. The bald fact is that along with local bishops they were responsible for burning alive countless thousands for the crime of disagreeing with them - not for anything else. That eight-hundred year old wound is unlikely to heal until they each make unconditional apologies with the same grace as Monseigneur the Bishop of Pamiers. Representatives of the Cistercian and Dominican Orders had been invited on the 16th October, but were not present at the ceremony.
