1 - The Poor of Lyons

Summary

The beginnings of The Poor of Lyons (or Waldensians) lie in the late 1170s, when a man by name of Waldes (to whom in the fourteenth century would be added the Christian name Peter), a wealthy burgher of Lyons, who had made his fortune in commerce and finance, experienced a religious conversion, distributed his property to the poor as commanded by the Gospels, and began to preach voluntary poverty, a life in the spirit of the Gospels and penitence. Neither Waldes nor his first disciples launched a new theology or sought to leave the Catholic Church. All they wanted was to live in poverty, to wander and preach the Gospel. Right from the start, Waldes commissioned a translation of the New Testament, some parts of the Old Testament and portions from the writings of the Church Fathers, to make them accessible to every Christian who wished to know the will of God. Thus he and his disciples could read these texts aloud in a language understood by their audience, and to preach accordingly in the vernacular. The Church failed to adopt The Poor of Lyons and use them to its purpose, as it would later do with the Franciscans. At the Third Lateran Council (1179), Pope Alexander III praised Waldes for his voluntary adoption of poverty, but refused to allow him to preach without the permission of the bishop of his diocese. This permission was not given. Waldes and his disciples continued to preach without permission, and in 1182 they were expelled from Lyons. The duty to preach was a central tenet of the faith and the consciousness of their mission for The Poor of Lyons, as spelled out in the Epistle of St James, 4:17: ‘Therefore to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.’ Just as they could not renounce the ideal of voluntary and complete poverty (which the Church interpreted as advice to those wishing to live the perfect life, rather than a commandment), so they could not forgo preaching. At the Church Council of Verona (1184) they were denounced as disobedient and were excommunicated, and at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) they were condemned as heretics and irreversibly excommunicated.