against the abuse so prevalent, especially during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, of seeking sacramental absolution without fulfilling the required conditions. This misuse, as the canon indicates, had as its cause the ignorance, negligence, and laxity of bishops and priests, who are here admonished to guard the people against such sacrilege. In canon 5 of his Seventh Roman Synod (1080), Gregory VII solemnly warned the people to choose for their confessors prudent and pious men.[1]
CANON 23
Summary. Those who reject the sacraments are condemned, and the civil power is invoiced to restrain their mischief.
Text. Those who, simulating a species of religious zeal, reject the sacrament of the body and blood of the Lord, the baptism of infants, the priesthood, and other ecclesiastical orders, as well as matrimony, we condemn and cast out of the Church as heretics, and ordain that they be restrained by the civil power. For their partisans also we decree the same penalty.[2]
Comment. This canon is a word for word repetition of canon 3 of the Synod of Toulouse (1119)[3] and was directed against the Petrobrusians, a heretical sect of the twelfth century, so named after their founder, the renegade priest Peter of Bruys, whom Peter the Venerable and Abelard characterized as one of the most dangerous of heretics. Their principal doctrinal tenets were five: (1) Baptism must be preceded by personal faith; hence its administration to children who have not yet attained the use of reason is worthless. (2) Christians need no holy place in which to pray. Their prayers, if worthy, are heard in a barn as well as in a church; hence churches must not be built, and those already built must be destroyed. This doctrine harmonizes with the teachings of the spiritualistic sects of the preceding century. (3) Crosses must be destroyed; because this instrument on which Christ suffered so much, must not be an object of veneration, but of detestation. (4) What is offered daily in the mass is pure nothing. Christ gave His flesh and blood to His disciples once and it cannot be given again. (5) Prayers and good works by the living cannot profit the dead, and God ridicules all ceremonies and chant. The reference in the canon to the rejection of matrimony does not seem to apply to the Petrobrusians. Probably the council had other sects in mind.
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