Who Are the Waldensians?

1. Who the Waldensians Are

The Waldensians are a Christian movement founded at Lyon in the 1170s by a merchant remembered as Valdes, who sold his goods, paid for the Gospels to be put into the spoken language of his city, and sent ordinary believers out to preach in the streets. Rome condemned the movement in 1184 over the question of who may preach, and the Waldensians survived as an outlawed church for more than three hundred years in the Alpine valleys of Piedmont and Dauphine before formally joining the Protestant Reformation in 1532. Their descendants worship today as the Waldensian Evangelical Church, with its historic seat at Torre Pellice in north-west Italy.

Two facts make them unusual. The first is age. Almost every Protestant church in Europe dates from the sixteenth century or later, and the Waldensians were already more than three hundred years old when Luther published his theses in 1517. The one comparable case is the Moravian Church, founded in Bohemia in 1457, which section 13 sets beside them. The second is survival. Bodies condemned as heretical in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries usually vanished within a few generations, and the Waldensians did not, which is why historians of medieval dissent study them so closely.

The Names They Go By

English usually says Waldensians. Italian says valdesi, French says vaudois, and the Latin sources call them Valdenses or the Pauperes de Lugduno, the Poor of Lyon. The French word vaudois sounds like the word for valley and has nothing to do with it: the name comes from the founder, Valdes, and the association with the Alpine valleys came a century or more later. Older English books call the founder Peter Waldo, a name that first appears in sources long after his death and that modern historians generally set aside in favour of the medieval forms Valdes or Valdesius.

2. Valdes of Lyon and the Poor of Lyon

Valdes was a prosperous merchant of Lyon who gave away his wealth around the year 1173 and began to live and preach in voluntary poverty. The medieval accounts, written mostly by his opponents, agree on the outline. He heard a jongleur sing the legend of St Alexis, the rich man who abandoned everything, and he went to a theologian to ask what the surest way to God was. The answer he was given was the word of Christ to the rich young man: go, sell what you have, give to the poor, and come follow me.

He provided for his wife and placed his daughters in the abbey of Fontevraud, distributed the rest of his property, and took to begging. The gesture was extreme and it was legible: twelfth-century Europe had a rising commercial economy and a widespread hunger for the apostolic life, the vita apostolica, and men who walked away from money were read as living reproaches to a wealthy clergy.

The Bible in the Language of the Street

The step that shaped everything after was translation. Valdes paid two clerics of Lyon to render books of Scripture and some sayings of the Fathers into the local Franco-Provencal speech, and he learned them and preached from them. Vernacular renderings of Scripture existed before him. What was new in Lyon was a layman paying for one so that laypeople could preach from it in public. Church authorities had no general prohibition of vernacular Bibles at that date, and the alarm they felt was about untrained people expounding texts in public without oversight.

The movement grew quickly and it was mixed. Men and women both preached, in pairs, barefoot or in simple sandals, greeting people with a blessing and reciting Scripture from memory. They called themselves the Poor of Lyon, and to their neighbours they looked like what they claimed to be, Christians doing what the seventy-two were sent out to do in Luke 10.

Rome in 1179

Valdes and his companions took their case to the Third Lateran Council in Rome in 1179, under Pope Alexander III. The account of the English chronicler Walter Map, who examined them there and thought them simpletons, has them presenting their vernacular book and asking for authorisation to preach. What they got was approval of their vow of poverty together with a restriction on preaching: they could preach only where the local clergy invited them. That distinction, between a way of life that Rome could bless and an office that Rome reserved, is the whole of the Waldensian question in a sentence.

3. Why Rome Condemned Them

The Waldensians were condemned for preaching without authorisation, and the condemnation was disciplinary before it was doctrinal. When the Archbishop of Lyon, Jean Bellesmains, forbade them to preach, Valdes and his followers answered with Acts 5:29, that one must obey God rather than men, and they carried on. Around 1182 or 1184 they were expelled from the diocese.

Ad Abolendam, 1184

At Verona in 1184 Pope Lucius III issued the decretal Ad abolendam, with the support of the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, listing the movements to be suppressed. The Poor of Lyon appear in it alongside the Cathars, the Humiliati and others, and the ground stated for the Waldensians is preaching without being sent, publicly or privately, after being forbidden. The decretal also set up the machinery of episcopal inquiry that later grew into the inquisition. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 restated the general condemnation of the heresies named in it.

What the Church Was Defending

The Catholic position then and now is that preaching the faith publicly in the name of the Church is an office given with a mission, and that a man cannot take it up on his own authority. Romans 10:15 asks how anyone can preach unless they are sent, and the medieval canonists took the sending to run through the bishops in succession from the apostles. Behind the rule was a practical judgment as well: untrained preachers were teaching in a period of intense religious ferment, some of them badly, and the bishops were responsible for what was taught in their dioceses.

Where the Judgment Went Wrong

Naming what was defensible does not settle the case. The Waldensians of 1179 were asking to do something the Church itself came to want done, which is put the Gospel in the hands of ordinary Christians in their own language. Rome eventually blessed the same impulse when it came with a rule and an obedient superior, and it drove out the same impulse when it came from a layman in a hurry. What began as a dispute over a licence became, through prohibition and enforcement, a separation that has lasted eight hundred years. Pope Francis said in Turin in 2015 that the Catholic Church had shown the Waldensians attitudes and behaviour that were not Christian and not even human, and that judgment is Catholic teaching about Catholic conduct, given by a pope.

4. The Comparison with Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi began roughly thirty years after Valdes with a strikingly similar programme, and he ended inside the Church rather than outside it. Both men were sons of the merchant class. Both stripped themselves of property in a public gesture. Both preached penance to lay crowds, gathered followers who owned nothing, and took the Gospel commands about poverty as literal instructions. The difference in outcome is one of the most instructive comparisons in medieval history.

What Was Different

Francis went to Rome in 1209 and asked Innocent III for approval of a rule, and he accepted the answer he received, including the requirement of clerical oversight and the limits placed on what the brothers could preach. His movement was given a canonical shape: a rule, an approved form of life, tonsured members, and preaching licensed by the bishops. Valdes had already refused a comparable limit in Lyon, and by 1209 the Waldensians had been under formal condemnation for a quarter of a century, so the two negotiations opened from very different positions. Innocent III had also learned from the earlier failure, and he was actively looking for ways to keep the poverty movements inside the Church.

The Waldensians Who Came Back

Some Waldensians did return, and Rome received them on their own terms. Durand of Huesca, a Waldensian leader and an able controversialist against the Cathars, was reconciled by Innocent III in 1208 and founded the Poor Catholics, who kept poverty and preaching under episcopal supervision. Bernard Prim and his companions were reconciled on similar terms in 1210. These groups show that the barrier was never poverty or vernacular Scripture as such, and that reunion was possible for those who would accept the mission from the bishops. Our guide to St Francis of Assisi covers the approved side of the same movement.

5. What the Waldensians Actually Taught

Waldensian teaching started as ordinary Catholic belief plus a claim about lay preaching, and it hardened over the following century into positions that were genuinely at odds with Rome. Reconstructing it takes care, because most of the surviving evidence comes from inquisitors' manuals and trial records written by hostile investigators who had reasons to make the answers fit their categories. The picture below is the one most historians accept, and it describes a movement that varied by region and by generation.

The Early Positions

In the first generation the distinctive claims were few. Any Christian of good life, man or woman, may preach the Gospel. Scripture in the vernacular belongs to the people. Voluntary poverty is the apostolic pattern. The sacraments of an unworthy priest were still accepted, and the Waldensians of Lyon attended Mass and confessed. They were, on their own understanding, Catholics doing something the bishops had wrongly forbidden.

The Later Positions

Decades of exclusion and prosecution drove the movement further. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the northern Italian and Alpine Waldensians commonly held a recognisable set of views: that oaths are forbidden by Matthew 5:34 and James 5:12, so a Waldensian would not swear, which made them easy to identify and easy to convict; that purgatory as the Latin Church described it lacked scriptural warrant, and with it prayers for the dead, indulgences and masses for souls; that the veneration of saints, relics and images had no biblical foundation; that shedding blood in judicial punishment was unlawful for a Christian; and that confession could be made to a worthy lay believer. Some groups also denied that the Roman clergy retained the authority of the apostles at all, on the grounds of the wealth and worldliness they saw.

These are the positions the Catholic Church rejects, and it rejects them still. Prayer for the dead is attested in 2 Maccabees 12:44 to 46 and has been Christian practice from the catacombs onward, and our guide to purgatory sets out the case. The Catholic doctrine of the ministerial priesthood does not depend on the holiness of the individual priest, a point Augustine established against the Donatists at the turn of the fifth century. Neither Rome nor the Waldensians treated these as small matters.

What They Did Not Teach

Two things are worth stating flatly. The Waldensians were not dualists and never denied the goodness of creation, the Incarnation or the Old Testament. They were also not proto-Protestants in the sense of holding justification by faith alone, which no medieval Waldensian text teaches. Their emphasis fell on obedience to the Gospel commands and a strict moral life, and the Reformed doctrine of justification reached them from outside in the 1520s and 1530s.

The Waldensian Bible

Scripture was the centre of the movement's practice. Barbes memorised long passages, often the whole of the Gospels of Matthew and John and much of the epistles, so that the text could be carried where a book could not. Waldensian manuscripts in Occitan survive in libraries at Dublin, Cambridge, Geneva and Grenoble, containing Gospel translations, sermons and moral treatises. For the wider question of how the Church has handled Scripture and its canon, see our guide to the Bible, the canon, and sola scriptura.

6. The Barbes and the Underground Centuries

The barbes were the travelling ministers who held the Waldensian movement together for three centuries of illegality. The word means uncle in the Alpine dialects, chosen because the movement refused the title father for its clergy on the basis of Matthew 23:9. A barbe was trained for several years, usually in a hidden school in the valleys, learning Scripture by heart, a trade for cover, and the routes and safe houses of the network.

How the Network Worked

Two barbes travelled together, an older and a younger, moving as pedlars who sold cloth, needles, spices or small jewellery. The trade explained their presence in a village and gave them a reason to be admitted to a house. Once inside, and once satisfied of the household, they would produce the other goods they carried. Inquisition records from Piedmont, Provence, Austria, Bohemia and Germany describe the same pattern over generations: annual or biennial visits, preaching by night, confession heard, marriages blessed, and the movement's collected alms carried back to the valleys.

The barbes met in a general assembly, held in the valleys, which assigned the districts and admitted new ministers. Where the community was large enough, as in the Val Pellice, the Val Chisone and the Val Germanasca west of Turin, and in the Dauphine on the French side, the Waldensians formed a stable rural population with their own marriage patterns and their own memory. Elsewhere, from Apulia in the far south of Italy to the German-speaking lands, they were scattered households sustained entirely by these visits.

Outward Conformity

Most Waldensians attended the parish church, had their children baptised and were buried in consecrated ground. Conformity was the price of survival, and inquisitors knew it, which is why their manuals are full of questions designed to detect people whose outward practice was faultless. The refusal to swear an oath was the crack that most often gave a household away, and communities where marriages ran almost entirely within a small set of families drew attention as well.

7. Persecution, the Inquisition, and 1487

Waldensians were prosecuted for heresy from the 1180s until the eighteenth century, in campaigns that varied enormously in scale and severity. The pattern was usually local: a bishop or a secular ruler would move against a district, tribunals would examine and sentence, most of those convicted would abjure and receive penances, and a minority who refused or relapsed would be handed to the secular arm and burned. Long stretches of quiet separated the campaigns, and it is the quiet that explains how the movement lasted.

Our guide to the Inquisition, its procedures and the death penalty covers how those tribunals were meant to work, the procedure they followed, and the handing of the condemned to the secular arm. This page will not repeat that material. What belongs here is what the tribunals meant for one specific people who are still alive to remember it.

The Named Episodes

Some episodes are documented well enough to name. Inquisitors worked the Alpine valleys and the German-speaking lands through the fourteenth century, with a large series of trials in Austria and Bohemia in the 1390s. In 1487 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Id nostri cordis calling for action against the Waldensians of the Dauphine and Piedmont, and the campaign that followed, led by the archdeacon Alberto de' Capitanei with troops raised in Savoy and France, drove the population of the Vallouise into the mountains. The killings in the caves above the Vallouise in 1488, where families who had taken refuge were smoked out and died, are the episode French Waldensian memory holds most sharply.

Sixteenth-Century Campaigns

The worst single episode came after the Waldensians had aligned with the Reformation and were treated as Protestants under a French crown at war with Protestantism. In April 1545, under an order of the Parlement of Aix of 1540 known as the Arret de Merindol, pressed by its president, Jean Maynier d'Oppede, troops destroyed Merindol, Cabrieres and a series of villages in the Luberon in Provence. Contemporary and later accounts differ widely on the number killed and agree that whole villages were destroyed and survivors sent to the galleys. In the same decade the Waldensian colonies in Calabria and Apulia, settled two centuries earlier, were destroyed, with the community of Guardia Piemontese suppressed in 1561.

Casualty totals for the Luberon campaign of 1545 vary substantially between contemporary chronicles, the later trial of d'Oppede, and modern scholarship, so no figure is given here. Where an exact number matters, consult the published editions of the Aix trial records rather than any secondary summary.

8. Why the Waldensians Are Not the Cathars

The Waldensians and the Cathars were different movements with incompatible beliefs, and they are constantly confused. Both were condemned in the same decretal in 1184, both were pursued in the same regions of southern France and northern Italy, and inquisitors' manuals often treat them in successive chapters, which is enough to blur them in later retellings. The theology could hardly be further apart.

What the Cathars Held

Catharism was a dualist system. It taught that the visible world was made by an evil power and that human souls are spirits trapped in matter, and it therefore rejected the goodness of creation, the Incarnation of the Son of God in real flesh, the resurrection of the body, marriage and procreation for the perfected, and the Old Testament as the book of the evil creator. Its structure ran through a class of the perfecti who received the consolamentum and lived under extreme ascetic rules, with a wider body of believers who received it at death.

What the Waldensians Held Against Them

The Waldensians confessed the creed. They held that God made the world and called it good, that the Son of God took real human flesh from the Virgin Mary, that the body rises, and that both Testaments are the word of God. Waldensian preachers argued publicly against the Cathars, and Durand of Huesca, one of their leaders, wrote a substantial anti-Cathar treatise, the Liber antiheresis, before his reconciliation with Rome. On every point of the creed the Waldensians stood with the Catholic Church against the Cathars.

9. Chanforan 1532: Joining the Reformation

The Synod of Chanforan, held in the Angrogna valley in Piedmont in September 1532, is the hinge of Waldensian history. A general assembly of barbes and heads of families met representatives of the Swiss and French Reformed movement, chiefly Guillaume Farel and Antoine Saunier, and resolved to align the movement with the Reformation. The decision converted a medieval dissenting network into a Protestant church.

What Was Decided

The assembly adopted a set of articles that moved Waldensian teaching onto Reformed ground: salvation by grace received through faith, election, a rejection of auricular confession to a minister as necessary for forgiveness, the reduction of the sacraments to baptism and the Lord's Supper, the lawfulness of oaths taken before a magistrate, and the abandonment of the practice of outward conformity to Catholic worship. Ministers were to serve settled congregations and to preach publicly rather than travel in secret. Not everyone agreed. A minority of barbes objected that the movement was abandoning its own tradition, and some Waldensian communities in Bohemia and elsewhere took a different course.

The Olivetan Bible

Chanforan also voted money. The assembly funded the printing of a French Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek by Pierre Robert Olivetan, a cousin of John Calvin, published at Neuchatel in 1535 with a Latin preface by Calvin himself. It became the base text of the French Protestant Bible for generations. A movement that had begun with a merchant paying two clerics to translate the Gospels ended its medieval phase by paying for a printed Bible in the same language, which is as neat a piece of continuity as church history offers.

What Changed and What Did Not

The doctrinal frame changed almost entirely, and the people did not. The same families in the same valleys, with the same memory of persecution and the same reading of their own past, carried on under a new theology. The Reformed doctrine of justification came from Geneva and Strasbourg, and the identity was already there. For the theology the Waldensians adopted, see our guides to Calvinism and Reformed theology and to the Reformation, and for the Catholic response on justification, our guide to faith and works.

10. Merindol, the Piedmontese Easter, the Glorious Return

Joining the Reformation made the Waldensians a target in the European wars of religion, and the century and a half after Chanforan was the most violent in their history. Three episodes shaped the memory the church still keeps: the destruction of the Luberon villages in 1545, the Piedmontese Easter of 1655, and the exile and armed return of 1686 to 1689.

The Piedmontese Easter, 1655

In January 1655 the Duke of Savoy ordered Waldensian families living outside the narrow zone where their worship was tolerated to leave their homes in the depth of winter or conform to Catholicism. In April, troops quartered on the valleys turned on the population, and the killings that followed became known as the Piedmontese Easter. News reached northern Europe fast and caused a diplomatic crisis. Oliver Cromwell suspended negotiations with France, sent Samuel Morland as an envoy, ordered a national collection, and pressed for relief. John Milton, then Latin secretary to the Council of State, wrote the sonnet that begins "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold", which is why the Waldensians are known at all to readers of English poetry.

Exile and the Glorious Return

After Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685, pressure crossed the Alps. In 1686 Victor Amadeus II of Savoy banned Waldensian worship and moved against the valleys. Thousands were imprisoned, many died in captivity, and the survivors were allowed to leave for Protestant Switzerland in the winter of 1687. In August 1689 a party of around nine hundred men under the pastor Henri Arnaud crossed from the shore of Lake Geneva and fought their way back over the passes to the valleys in a march of about two weeks. They held out through a hard winter at the Balsiglia in the Val Germanasca, and in 1690 the political situation shifted when Savoy changed sides against France, so the survivors were permitted to stay. The Waldensians call it the Glorieuse Rentree, the Glorious Return, and it is the founding story of the modern church.

The Long Restriction

Toleration after 1690 was narrow and conditional. Waldensians were confined to a defined territory, the so-called Waldensian ghetto in the valleys, barred from owning property outside it, excluded from the professions and from public office, and restricted in worship. That regime lasted a further century and a half.

11. 17 February 1848 and the Modern Church

On 17 February 1848 King Charles Albert of Sardinia issued Letters Patent granting Waldensians civil and political rights, ending more than six centuries of legal disability. The grant covered civil status rather than full religious liberty, which came later with Italian unification, and it allowed Waldensians to hold property, enter the professions and universities, and take part in public life. A parallel emancipation of the Jewish community of the kingdom followed within weeks.

Waldensians still mark 17 February every year, lighting bonfires on the hillsides of the valleys on the eve and holding services and community meals on the day. The bonfires are the most visible thing an outsider will see of Waldensian life.

What They Did With Freedom

The church moved out of the valleys almost at once. Congregations were planted across Italy through the second half of the nineteenth century, in Turin, Florence, Rome, Naples and Sicily, often with support from British and American Protestants. A school of theology founded at Torre Pellice in 1855 moved to Florence and then to Rome, where the Waldensian Faculty of Theology still trains ministers. Schools, hospitals and orphanages followed. Emigration carried the church abroad as well: Waldensian families settled in Uruguay from 1856, founding Colonia Valdense, and later in Argentina, forming what is now the Waldensian Church of the Rio de la Plata. A smaller American Waldensian settlement was founded at Valdese in North Carolina in 1893.

12. The Waldensian Church Today

The Waldensian Evangelical Church is a Reformed Protestant church, small in numbers, concentrated in Italy, and considerably more visible in Italian public life than its size would suggest. It belongs to the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the World Council of Churches, and it is in full communion with a number of European Protestant bodies through the Leuenberg Agreement of 1973.

Membership figures for the Waldensian and Methodist churches in Italy are published by the Union of Waldensian and Methodist Churches in its own annual reports. No total is quoted here because the published figures vary by what they count, whether communicant members, adherents, or people served by church programmes. The church is small, counted in the tens of thousands rather than the millions.

Union with the Methodists

Since 1975 the Waldensians have been governed jointly with the Italian Methodist churches as the Union of Waldensian and Methodist Churches, an integration that left each tradition its own history and its own name while creating one synod, one ministry and one budget. The Methodist presence in Italy dates from British and American missions in the nineteenth century, and the union made both bodies viable in a country where each alone was very small. Our guide to Methodist beliefs and denominations covers the Wesleyan tradition they brought.

How It Governs Itself

Authority rests with the synod, which meets each year at Torre Pellice and is composed of ministers and lay delegates in roughly equal numbers. The synod elects the Tavola Valdese, the executive board, and its president, who is called the moderator and serves a limited term. Local congregations call their own pastors and run their own affairs through elected councils. Women are ordained to the pastoral ministry.

The Otto per Mille Decision

One Waldensian policy is worth knowing because it is unusual. Italian taxpayers may assign eight parts per thousand of their income tax to a religious body or to the state, a system called the otto per mille. The Waldensian and Methodist union accepts the funds and, by its own long-standing decision, spends none of them on worship, clergy salaries or church buildings, directing the whole amount to social, welfare, cultural and international aid projects, with published accounts. The number of Italian taxpayers who assign their share to the Waldensian and Methodist union runs far above the church's own membership, which is the clearest measure available of the reputation it holds.

Annual otto per mille choice and distribution figures are published by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the union publishes its own accounts of how the funds are spent. Consult those two sources for any year's numbers.

Where It Stands on Contested Questions

The Waldensian synod has taken positions that place it at a distance from Catholic teaching on several current questions, including the blessing of same-sex couples and end-of-life legislation in Italy. Naming this is part of describing the church accurately. The Catholic positions are set out in our guides to marriage and euthanasia, and the disagreement is real and substantial. Ecumenical honesty means stating it rather than passing over it.

13. Waldensians and Moravians Compared

The Moravian Church is the other Christian body that predates the Reformation and later became Protestant, and setting the two side by side clarifies both. The Moravians, whose Latin name is the Unitas Fratrum, the Unity of the Brethren, were founded at Kunvald in Bohemia in 1457 by followers of Jan Hus, the Czech reformer burned at the Council of Constance in 1415. They organised their own ministry, printed vernacular Bibles, and survived the Thirty Years War in near extinction under the leadership of the exiled bishop and educator Jan Amos Komensky, known in the West as Comenius.

The Renewal at Herrnhut

The modern Moravian Church dates from 1722, when refugees from Moravia settled on the Saxon estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf and founded Herrnhut. The renewed community became the first large Protestant missionary body, sending workers to the Caribbean from 1732 and to Greenland the following year, and it kept a distinctive round-the-clock prayer watch. Moravians on an Atlantic crossing in 1735 impressed John Wesley with their calm during a storm, and Moravian preaching in London stood behind his experience at Aldersgate Street in 1738, so the Moravians sit upstream of Methodism and therefore of the tradition the Waldensians later merged with in Italy.

Province and membership figures for the Moravian Church are published by the Unitas Fratrum, the worldwide Moravian Unity, in its own directory. No total is quoted here.

What They Share

Both bodies began as reform movements inside the medieval Western Church, both were condemned, both survived by hiding or by exile, both put Scripture in the vernacular early, and both later found a home in the Reformation without dissolving into it. Both are also small, and both have an ecumenical record out of proportion to their size. The Moravian motto often quoted as unity in essentials, liberty in doubtful matters, charity in all things describes an instinct the two churches share. Neither is in communion with Rome, and Catholic teaching regards both as ecclesial communities holding a valid baptism, which is the ground the Second Vatican Council's decree Unitatis Redintegratio gives for the dialogue described in our guide to ecumenism.

14. The Legend of Apostolic Descent

A persistent claim holds that the Waldensians descend in an unbroken line from the apostles, or from a faithful remnant that separated from Rome in the fourth century when the Church accepted imperial favour. The claim is not supported by the sources, and the historians best placed to make it, Waldensian scholars themselves, have not made it for well over a century.

Where the Legend Came From

The story grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for a straightforward reason. Protestant controversialists were being told that their churches were new inventions, and a body of believers that could be shown to have kept the Gospel continuously since the apostles answered that charge. Waldensian and Protestant writers, above all Jean Leger in his history of 1669, pushed the origin back before Valdes, sometimes to a figure called Leo in the time of Constantine, and treated Valdes as a restorer rather than a founder. Later, some Baptist successionist writers and some Seventh-day Adventist authors adopted the same framework for their own purposes, which is why the claim still circulates in English-language material.

What the Evidence Shows

The earliest documents about the movement, both hostile and internal, place its beginning with Valdes at Lyon in the 1170s and describe it as a new thing. No text before that date mentions a Waldensian church. The name itself derives from the founder. Waldensian historians of the twentieth century, including Amedeo Molnar and Giorgio Tourn, established the Valdes origin as the account the church itself now teaches, and the church's own museums and publications in the valleys present it that way. Dropping the legend costs the Waldensians nothing they should mind, since a documented eight hundred years is a remarkable thing to be able to prove.

15. What Pope Francis Asked in Turin in 2015

On 22 June 2015, during a pastoral visit to Turin, Pope Francis entered the Waldensian temple on Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and asked the Waldensians to forgive the Catholic Church. He was the first pope ever to set foot in a Waldensian place of worship. Speaking to the congregation and to the moderator of the Tavola Valdese, Eugenio Bernardini, he said that on the part of the Catholic Church he asked their forgiveness for the attitudes and behaviour shown towards them that were not Christian and not even human, and he asked it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What Else He Said

The address did not stop at the apology. Francis named the unity of Christians as the work of the Holy Spirit and spoke of walking together, praying together and serving the poor together while theological differences are still being worked through. He acknowledged directly that real differences remain between the two churches on ministry, the sacraments and moral questions, and he declined to describe the visit as a settlement of them. He also thanked the Waldensians for their charitable work in Italy.

The Waldensian Reply

The Waldensian and Methodist synod met at Torre Pellice that August and gave a considered answer. The synod welcomed the visit and the words with respect and warmth, and it declined to pronounce a formal pardon, on the ground that forgiveness belongs to God rather than to a church council. It also asked that the request be matched by concrete steps, and Waldensian commentary at the time pointed to practical matters in Italian life where Catholic institutional weight bears on a small minority church. The reply was neither a rejection nor an embrace, and it read as the answer of a body that has learned to be careful.

The text of the pope's address of 22 June 2015 is published on the Holy See website among the addresses of that pastoral visit to Turin, and the synod's response of August 2015 is published by the Union of Waldensian and Methodist Churches. Quote either from the published texts rather than from press summaries.

The Longer Ecumenical Record

The 2015 visit sat on top of decades of quieter contact. Catholic and Waldensian scholars in Italy have worked together since the 1960s, and a joint Catholic and Protestant Italian translation of the Bible, the Traduzione Interconfessionale in Lingua Corrente, was produced with Waldensian participation. Local Catholic and Waldensian congregations in Piedmont share prayer during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. A joint text on mixed marriages was agreed between the Italian Bishops' Conference and the Waldensian church. None of this amounts to communion, and all of it is a change from the previous eight hundred years.

16. What a Catholic Should Take From This

The Waldensian story asks a Catholic reader to hold two things at once: that the Catholic Church has the fullness of what Christ gave, and that Catholics did terrible things to a people whose original request was to read the Gospel aloud in the language of their neighbours. Both are true. Holding them together is what honest church history requires.

Four Things Worth Carrying Away

First, the original dispute was about the licence to preach rather than about the creed, and it was solvable. Durand of Huesca proved it was solvable in 1208. Second, the Church learned. The impulse Valdes represented was absorbed successfully in the mendicant orders within a generation, and vernacular Scripture is now placed in every Catholic's hands by the Church's own instruction. Third, persecution does not work on convinced people, and eight centuries of Waldensian survival is the evidence. Fourth, a pope has apologised, on their ground, in their building, and Catholics should know it happened.

What Is Still at Stake

Real differences remain and they are not small. The Waldensian church holds two sacraments where the Catholic Church holds seven. It does not hold the ministerial priesthood in the Catholic sense, or the Real Presence as Trent defined it, or a magisterium that can teach definitively, or the intercession of the saints, or prayer for the dead. It has taken positions on marriage and on end-of-life law that Catholic teaching rejects. Our guide to the differences between Catholics and Protestants lays the ground out in full, and our guide to Christian denominations places the Waldensians on the wider map.

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