This is one charge that is undeniable.
Cathars, or at least Parfaits and trainee Parfaits, refused to eat animal products - not only meat but also milk, cheese and eggs - anything that resulted from coition. Some at least refused to eat honey, apparently on the grounds that it, like the morning dew, was the product of monthly copulation between the sun and the moon !
|
In many respects Cathar parfaits resembled modern day vegans, except that they did eat fish. (The justification was that fish, as they believed, did not reproduce sexually and so could not imprison a soul as other animals could). That fish reproduced asexually was a genuine and widespread belief in the Middle Ages. The same error underlay the Catholic practice of eating fish on fast days. This practice is still alive in the Roman Church, and a vestige of the same error is the common practice of serving fish on Fridays - Fridays having been traditional fast days. Incidentally, the Roman Church classified such diverse animals as beavers and barnacle geese as fish with the happy consequence that their fast day diets were not as boring as they might otherwise have been. Another such wheeze was to eat animal embryos, on the grounds that they lived in water (the fluid within the womb) and so also counted as fish. Inexplicably, but happily, the logic does not seem to have been applied to human fetuses. |
|
|
For many centuries the Roman Church regarded vegetarianism as a capital crime on the grounds that God had given man dominion over the earth and had provided animals for him to eat. Inquisition records include cases of people being required to kill and eat animals, often chickens, to prove that they were not Cathars. Failure to do so meant death. Similarly, vegetarianism was a capital crime. The Mainstream Church was hostile to vegetarianism well into the twentieth century. In Britain a Government Minister, John Selwyn Gummer, could still publicly ridicule vegetarians as being anti-Christian as late as the 1980s, citing the traditional argument that God had given man dominion over the earth and had provided animals for him to eat. |
|
Vegetarians are still regarded as vaguely anti-Christian by many denominations even today.
Contraception
