An Unknown Fighter for Human Rights

"Bernard Délicieux was a troublemaker of the first order, in the mold of Martin Luther, John Brown, and Mahatma Gandhi." Stephen O'Shea knows that you know those other guys, but Bernard is known to few, mostly to experts on Medieval France, like O'Shea himself. His book The Friar of Carcassonne: Revolt Against the Inquisition in the Last Days of the Cathars (Walker) intends to make Bernard better known and admired. Bernard lived in a strange time, around 1265 to 1320, a time covered by O'Shea's previous books The Perfect Heresy and Sea of Faith, and O'Shea's broad knowledge of the time helps to make it a little less strange for his readers. What makes Bernard an ideal subject for our time to contemplate is that he challenged his church and he challenged his king at a time when such things just were not done. Nowadays, to paraphrase Monty Python, "No one respects the Spanish Inquisition!", but Bernard operated at a time when the inquisition was forming and was becoming the way of enforcing belief, a way that would be codified about a century later. He had sensible and humane objections to the inquisition (O'Shea uses the uncapitalized word since in Bernard's time it was not yet the dark bureaucracy it was to become), and if he failed in keeping it from becoming a blot on human and religious history, he was still on the right side and his was a heroic failure.

We have Bernard's story because the inquisition kept it in its archives, when Bernard was finally brought to it for trial and was broken and imprisoned. Bernard was a Franciscan in the convent in Carcassonne, in southern France. The Franciscans of the time were the underdogs to the other mendicant order, the Dominicans who had been founded by a Castillian priest named Dominic. The Dominicans were thought of as "the hounds of God" (from "Domini canes," get it?), and were in charge of the incipient inquisition. This was despite Dominic's seemingly liberal view of his religious opponents. After all, he had invited the heterodox Cathars to debate. The Cathars were a thorn in the side of Catholicism; they preached, for instance, that Catholic sacraments were illegitimate, that Hell was a fabrication, and that the cross was a symbol merely of imperial Roman torture. The Dominican-dominated inquisition held Cathars as a special target, and the Cathars were persecuted by the church in the Albigensian Crusade begun in 1209. The crusade failed to extirpate them from the region of Languedoc, but it ended the region's independence and brought it into France. Those who were tortured and condemned were executed, or if not executed they were confined within "the Wall," the notorious prison in Carcassonne. Their lands and possessions were confiscated.

Bernard knew unfairness when he saw it. He was to think of the Cathars as fellow Christians who sought salvation as fervently as he and other members of his own church did; he did not consider them diabolical enemies. He believed that there were limits on what society could enforce, and he felt that his church's eager use of the rack and the stake was a betrayal of principles, a betrayal that would have been obvious to Jesus or to Francis of Assisi. Inhumane incarceration, unlawful detention, and the persecutory mindset of the inquisition were to him not part of civilized society. With the Catholic Church overwhelmingly supporting terror, torture, and betrayal (the techniques of which are described here in distressing detail), Barnard's stance was one of principled courage, an example unique in his time. He knew his village was being torn apart by the inquisition, and he determined to make things different.

Bernard was a natural leader, with a gift for oratory. He was able to rally the townspeople to storm the prison. He objected that citizens were being left to rot in the Wall, and that years of merciless persecution had rendered his townsmen fractious and distrustful. He actually nailed these objections to the door of the stronghold of the inquisitors, a foretaste of Luther's similar action. He was able to appeal directly to King Philip the Fair, with the sensible objection that the inquisitors were ruining civic life and trust and thus endangering their devotion to the kingdom. King Philip was won over because he feared unrest in the region. As of 1301, the Dominicans were powerless to arrest those they suspected of heresy, unless the arrests were cleared beforehand by the local hierarchy, including Bernard. It is notable that Bernard did not argue, at least in his presentation to the king, against torture, because torture was simply a legal way of efficiently getting confessions, and a confession was regarded as the "queen of proofs." It is also notable that Philip did not abolish the office of inquisitor. He wanted it harmless, and indeed it was made harmless for a time.