The central Cathar rite was consolamentum, or baptism with spirit and fire refered to in the New Testament. The spirit received was the Holy Spirit derived from God and sent by Christ. The consolamentum removed all sin, reversed the effects of the Fall, and restored the lost tunic of immortality. A Consoled person is an angel walking in the flesh, separated from heaven by a thin veil of death. Only a Parfait could administer the consolamentum. It was striking in its simplicity, and seems to have faithfully preserved a ceremony of the very earliest Christian Church.
Cathars had a ceremony corresponding to the Catholic mass or eucharist, but again bearing a striking resemblance the ceremony of the Early Church. They blessed bread and shared it between them, though none imagined that its substance was anything other than bread. (It is odd that even bread could have held any virtue since as a material object it belonged to the realm of the Evil god, and for this reason some Cathars seem to have rejected the idea of blessed bread). At the other end of the spectrum, some Cathars would reserve part of their blessed bread and keep it, perhaps for years, eating of it occasionally though only after saying the Benedicite (As the Church Father Tertullian relates of his contemporaries in the 2nd century).
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