Cathars and sex

[Paul Mackin]

This is getting a little far a field but Sebastian raised the question of
how anti-sex the Cathars were so I located a  paragraph from the
Britannica indicating that while the group ran true-to-form (for gnostic 
dualism) in considering the flesh and sex evil they didn't always practice
what they preached as the saying goes.

"The extreme asceticism made the Cathari a church of the elect, and
yet in France and northern Italy it became a popular religion. This
success was achieved by the division of the faithful into two bodies: the
"perfect" and the "believers." The perfect were set apart from the mass
of believers by a ceremony of initiation, the consolamentum. They devoted
themselves to contemplation and were expected to maintain the highest
moral standards. The believers were not expected to attain the standards
of the perfect."


					P.