Free The Friar of Carcassonne by Stephen O’Shea

by lawyers of a possible heretical background, as in the past, but rather a riot incited by the Franciscans, the serene brothers of the Dominicans. The rivalry between the Franciscans, the Order of Friars Minor, and the Dominicans, the Order of Friars Preachers, had known verbal extravagance and invidious maneuvering, but physical outrage visited upon a Dominican in the precincts of a Franciscan sanctuary was something far more disturbing. It was akin to a Cathar Good Man swinging a broadsword or landing a haymaker—an act of violence once thought inconceivable.
    None doubted who had masterminded the muscular pushback. The Dominican Bernard Gui would write that Délicieux was “the commander and standard-bearer of the army of the forces of evil.” Other voices of an appalled orthodoxy would pour on further vitriol, as this new obstacle, all the more terrible since Délicieux came from within the Church itself, had emerged to imperil the Holy Office.
    Nicolas d’Abbeville, the inquisitor, pondered his options. The Dominicans were fully invested—professionally and spiritually—in persecution. Even Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the thirteenth-century friars, believed heresy to be a capital crime. To Brother Nicolas, doubtless, his Franciscan counterparts seemed not to be taking their mission seriously. Whether the Franciscans of Languedoc ran a safe house for targets of the inquisition is difficult to answer conclusively. Brother Bernard’s subsequent actions and statements showed that he had no faith in the integrity of the inquisitor and the veracity of his registers, so to him any accusations of heresy were baseless, or at the very least compromised by what he saw as a culture of abuse that had grown up around the inquisition at Carcassonne.
    Yet more fundamental and far more important than that objection was his approach to heresy in the first place. He was as dedicated as the Dominicans to its elimination, but the nature of his pastoral mission differed radically. Where the Friars Preachers wielded the heavy club of torture and imprisonment, the Franciscans in Bernard’s mold relied on the force of example and good works to change hearts and win souls. Their founder, Francis of Assisi, had garnered a large following among the laity for his kindness to his fellow man and his distinctly un-Cathar-like love of God’s creation. Although the brotherhood had grown into a complex, continent-wide apparatus, sometimes participating in inquisitions, most notably in Provence, there were many among the Franciscans who by century’s end had revived the purity of Francis’s example. These Spirituals, as they came to be called, were numerous in Languedoc, its long history of ostentatiously holy heretics acting as a magnet for like-minded men from the Order. They would show that a Franciscan could be as pure and poor as a Good Man. From Narbonne, in the 1290s, the influential theologian Pierre Jean Olivi dominated Franciscan intellectual circles in Languedoc and elsewhere, his philosophical works on the nature of poverty an overlooked landmark in medieval thought. * On his death, in 1298, he was revered locally as a saint, and though his apostles later came to be considered heretical themselves, a man of such gifts could hardly fail to have shaped the outlook of his fellow Franciscans in the South.
    Informed by Francis’ example and inspired by Olivi’s presence, the Friars Minor preached tirelessly, in an effort to persuade. God’s work would be a long process, and if, during that time, those yet unconvinced and unconverted called for help, they would come to their aid, not only out of Christian duty but also in the hope that their actions would demonstrate the rightness of their faith. Given this admirable commitment to patience and piety, the Franciscans of Carcassonne may have sheltered some heretical sympathizers from the wrath of the inquisitor. A present-day specialist