Question: You have referred to the Albigenses as true Christians, yet every encyclopedia I’ve ...

Question (composite of several): You have referred to the Albigenses as true Christians, yet every encyclopedia I’ve looked into says they were Manicheans who believed in a good god and an evil god, that they were involved in ritual suicide and immorality. How could you possibly have made such a terrible blunder?!

Response: In fact, the Albigenses were true Christians, but their Roman Catholic persecutors and murderers managed to destroy most of their records and to publish lies about them that have lasted to this day. By God’s grace, however, enough original documents have been preserved to prove that they were indeed genuine Christians, though modern records from the nineteenth century onward all quote the slander of their accusers.

Abraham Mellinus in his History of the Persecutions and Martyrs published in 1619 writes that the Albigenses and Waldenses were one and the same and were also called Catharists in some regions. The name Albigenses was given to the Waldenses in the area of Albi in Southern France. Mellinus calls them “pious, upright and moral people.” P.  J. Twisck in his Chronicles writes, “There existed the Waldensian or Albigensian brethren...very pious, orthodox and godly Christians [who were] slandered by their accusers.” Jean Paul Perrin Lionnois in his History of the Waldenses and Albigenses quotes a manuscript dated A.D.1120 that contains orthodox sermons by those whom it says were later called Waldenses and Albigenses. The Martyrs Mirror, published in 1631, says that the Waldenses and Albigenses were one in belief, sometimes called Albi-Waldenses, and much the same as the Anabaptists. Christen Martelaersboeck, writing in 1619, equates the Waldenses with the Albigenses.

Mellinus writes that the “Confession of the Waldenses and Albigenses Drawn Up By Those of Merindol and Cabriere” was sent to the King of France and publicly read “in the King’ s Parliament at Paris” and it is very biblical, containing nothing that even hints of Manicheanism and the other false charges leveled against these persecuted people. Citing this creed, Mellinus says, “Thus far extends the confession of faith of the Waldenses and Albigenses...which confession...at the close of the 12th century...anticipates and refutes all the shameful doctrines which have been unjustly imputed...to the Albigenses as though they had been Manicheans.”

A letter from Oliver Cromwell (a Puritan) to the Duke of Savoy dated May 25, 1655 protests the imprisonment and slaughter of the Waldenses, whom he calls “our dear brethren in Christ.” At that time the great English poet, John Milton, wrote a poem commemorating the victims of the terrible Easter massacre of the Waldenses in 1655, in which he says, “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints ...mother with infant....”

The first Waldensian refugees arrived in America in 1656 and the immigration continued into the 1920s. Their descendants, with us today, and the churches they founded, bear witness to their true faith and furnish additional proof of the malicious lies that Rome has hurled at them in order to cover its crimes.

The above is only a fraction of the solid documentation we have—some of it even from their Inquisitors—that the Waldenses and Albigenses were not Manicheans at all, but true Christians.