Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 53

Preachers women and children of the south of France became educated in the orthodox teachings
of the Catholic church. Education being one of the primary purposes for the establishment of the
convent at Prouille. 130
In regards to procreation and the building up the family of God, the Albigensian
preachers taught that the soul was imprisoned in the flesh, the material body and as such “sexual
acts which produced new bodies to inhabit the temporal realm had no divine sanction; thus legal
matrimony was no better than prostitution.” 131 The Church “knowing that marriage and the
family constitute one of the most precious of human values” teaches,
God created man in His own image and likeness: calling him to existence through love,
He called him at the same time for love…Consequently, sexuality, by means of which man
and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and
exclusive to spouses, is by no means something purely biological, but concerns the
innermost being of the human person as such…The total physical self-giving would be a
lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total personal self-giving…This totality which is
required by conjugal love also corresponds to the demands of responsible fertility. This
fertility is directed to the generation of a human being…The only “place” in which this
self-giving in its whole truth is made possible is marriage, the covenant of conjugal love
freely and consciously chosen, whereby man and woman accept the intimate community
of life and love willed God Himself. (FC, n.11)
Through the reception of the sacraments of the Church God’s people receive their
mission to, “speak the truth in love…to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into
Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is
supplied…up builds itself in love” (RSV, EPH 4:15-16). Quaerens, seeking Christ through the
sacraments, expresses itself in the body of the Church as lived out in each baptized person’s
particular vocation. The body of Christ strengthened through a sacramental life reveals Christ in
the world in which it lives “as ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation…’” (LG, n.9).
130
Ibid., 48.
Walter Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100-1250 (CA: University of California
Press, 1974),33.
131