On March 25, 2002, my husband Dan and I stopped in the town of Béziers during a tour through France. It’s a wonderful spot in the Languedoc, buildings crowding up the steep hill that borders the Orb River. The Cathedral of St.-Nazaire is visible from every side, rebuilt on its Romanesque ruins. Béziers is also the site of the opening salvo of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229).
The Cathars
St.-Nazaire over the Orb
Arnald-Amaury, abbot of Citeaux in the north of France, was the Pope’s commander of an army of zealous knights and opportunists. In July 1209, he attacked Béziers, which harbored about two hundred Cathars. Cathars, a reformist sect, had broken ranks with Rome over theological doctrines, including the nature of the Trinity. More to the point, they were persistent critics of clerical worldliness and ecclesiastical corruption. They were a thorn in the side of Innocent III (Pope, 1198-1216).
Arnald-Amaury ordered the destruction of the cathedral into which most of the town’s population had crowded for safety. Perhaps as many as 20,000 men and women, babies and the elderly, died in the assault, most of them crushed or burned when the roof of St. Nazaire collapsed. When his troops asked how to distinguish true believers from heretics, he replied, it is said, “Slay them all; God will know His own.”
Cruelties
The abbot’s instructions seem inconceivably cruel. These were human beings he ordered annihilated. They also were all Christians, and all at least nominally Catholic; about ninety-nine percent of them—all but the two hundred Cathars—followed the dictates of Rome.
There are similar cruelties in our recent past The war Vladimir Putin launched against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The murderous attack of Hamas from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. The genocidal response of Israel that has killed more than 50,000 and wounded more than 100,000.
The unholy alliance of Church and State has perpetrated horrors on whole communities, whole nations of people in the eight-hundred-plus years in between the Albigensian Crusade and the present day. The erasure of tribes indigenous to the Western Hemisphere by European colonizers. The Holocaust of World War II. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and more.
Elon Musk in the Abbot’s Robes
Blow it all up anyway.
I was stricken by the cartoon by David Horsey published in The Seattle Times on February 7, 2025. In that caricature, Elon Musk sports the black garb of Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler ran the SS, the Schutzstaffel or the “Elite Echelon.” Brown-shirted Minions scurry behind Musk to carry out his orders.
Musk collaborates with Trump on a fascist project as heinous as the one carried out by Hitler and Himmler. In looking at the image, though, the Abbot’s words kept ringing in my head: Slay them all; God will know His own.
Only Following Orders
The Satanic Merger
Musk’s minions, his DOGE (“Doggie”) boys will say they are only following orders as they close off government buildings to workers and elected officials alike, and take over those computer systems. Their qualifications for this sensitive work? They know how to follow orders.
Musk says, and Trump confirms, that he is only doing what he has to as a “Special Government Employee” appointed by the President of the United States. He is following Trump’s orders.
Trump believes that he rules by a massive popular electoral mandate and, frankly, by Divine Right. Lucifer’s Army, the “New Apostolic Reformation,” has assured him he does. The adulterous, multiply-married, financially challenged televangelist, Paula White whispers such truths in his ear. She has unfettered access in her position as Director of the just-invented “White House Faith Office.” Trump, it seems, is following some deity’s orders.
It might not be heresy but it sure as hell isn’t Constitutional.