Peter Waldo

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Peter Waldo/Valdo or Pierre Vaudès or Pierre de Vaux (1140-1218?) was the founder of a radical ascetic Christian movement in 12th-century France.

Specific details of his life are largely unknown. The sources mention that he was a rich merchant from Lyon making his money by "wicked usury", when around 1160 he began living a radical Christian life and gave his real estate to his wife, and the remainder of his belongings he distributed as alms to the poor.

Waldo also began to preach and teach on the streets, based on his ideas of simplicity and poverty, notably that "No man can serve two masters, God and mammon." By 1170 he had gathered a number of followers and they started to be called the Poor of Lyon, the Poor of Lombardy, or the Poor of God. They were also referred to as the Waldensians (or Waldenses), after their leader. They were distinct from the Albigensians or Cathars.

The Waldensian movement was characterised from the beginning by lay preaching, voluntary poverty and sticking to the "Word of God", the Bible. Peter Waldo commissioned a cleric from Lyons around 1180 to translate the Bible, or parts of it, into vernacular, the provençal language.

In 1179, Waldo and one of his disciples went to Rome. They were welcomed by Pope Alexander III, and by the Curia. They had to explain their faith before a panel of three clergymen, including items which were then debated within the Church, as the universal priesthood, the gospel in the vulgar tongue, and the issue of self-imposed poverty. But Waldo and his friend were not taken seriously. The meeting therefore resolved nothing, and Waldo’s and his followers’ ideas, initially regarded with suspicion, were condemned at the Third Lateran Council in the same year, but the leaders of the movement have not been yet excommunicated.

Driven away from Lyon, Waldo and his followers settled in the high valleys of Piedmont, and in France, in the Luberon. Finally, Waldo was excommunicated by Pope Lucius III during the synod held at Verona in 1184, and the doctrine of the Poor of Lyon was again condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and regarded as heresy. The Roman church began to persecute the Waldensians, and many were trialed and sentenced to death in various European countries during the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries.

Most followers were absorbed into the new Protestant churches at the time of the Reformation. They maintain their separate identity in the valley of the Pellice River in Piedmont, an Alpine region of what is now Northern Italy.

[edit] Further reading

Audisio, Gabriel, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170 - c.1570, (1999) Cambridge Medieval Textbooks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521559847