Ad abolendam

Ad abolendam ("On abolition" or "Towards abolishing" from the first line, Ad abolendam diversam haeresium pravitatem, or ‘To abolish diverse malignant heresies’ ) was a decretal and bull of Pope Lucius III, written at Verona and issued 4 November 1184. It was issued after the Council of Verona settled some jurisdictional differences between the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. The document prescribes measures to uproot heresy and sparked the efforts which culminated in the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisitions. Its chief aim was the complete abolition of Christian heresy.

The historical context for the Papacy in issuing Ad abolendam was its reassertion of authority in Europe following the Investiture Dispute with the Emperor, and its discovery of what has been called a 'legislative' means of doing so. The Third Lateran Council of 1179 had already resolved to prevent schisms of the kind that the Investiture Dispute had created, and decretals such as Ad abolendam were intended to enforce this; Fisher has suggested that it was no coincidence that the decree followed the Peace of Constance of the previous year, at which the Emperor was in effect compelled to acknowledge defeat.

The list of proscribed heretical sects was originally decreed at Lateran III and was retained and expanded at Verona in 1184. Lucius condemned all heretical sects and persons who preached without the authorisation of the Roman Church, whether publicly or privately, and placed them under excommunication. Among the particular sects mentioned in Ad abolendam were the Cathars, Humiliati, Waldensians, Arnoldists, and Josephines. More important than the direct attack on heresy, however, was the stipulation of equal measures for those who supported heretics, overtly or indirectly, and modern historians have noted that, these groups being primarily based around Lombardy and the Languedoc, Papal motivation in condemning them was probably as politically motivated as it was theological. All associated with heresy would be placed under excommunication, too; but the heretics themselves were an ill-defined grouping, some of which hardly existed by 1184, and some of whom had never been previously established as heretics. All except the Cathars and the anti-authority Milanese group of the 130s, the Arnoldists, have been ascertained as heretics. Of the others, the Patrenes were reformers (albeit against the so-called Papal Monarchy); the Humiliati, ‘their only error was apparently failing to observe the prescription of lay preaching rather than the teaching of false doctrines;’ The Poor of Lyon- the Waldensians- have been compared to the Cistercians as merely searching for the via apostolic; of the Passagines, nothing is known, and the Josephines are not even associated with any doctrine at all.

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