Franciscan Media: Help Me Find Beauty

Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the Christian heresy of Catharism gained momentum in northern Italy and southern France. Like the heresy of gnosticism in the first few centuries, Cathars were dualists who believed reality consisted of two opposing cosmic forces. The spiritual realm (like the soul and the heavens) was good while the material realm (like the body and world) was corrupt and inherently evil.

St. Anthony of Padua faced daily challenges with the Cathars when he was assigned to preach in southern France from 1224-1227, as Father Pat McCloskey, OFM, points out. St. Anthony’s skilled preaching in combatting the Cathar heresy would earn him the nickname “Hammer of the Heretics.” As preachers like St. Anthony demonstrated, heresies like Catharism that demonize material reality simply did not compute with Church teaching or the ethos of the Franciscan movement which invites prayerful gaze upon creation as a source of divine beauty. Creation, as St. Bonaventure would note, contained divine vestiges (or “footprints”) that can lead the soul into contemplation toward union with God.

So, what does any of this have to do with today? The medieval heresy of Catharism may have been buried in the past by, yes, Church-sanctioned military crusades, as well as convincing preachers like St. Anthony, but if I’m honest with myself, this failure to see beauty in the material realm has taken on different forms in my own life...

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