TheCityWorships 239
would devote the infant to a life of chastity. Raimondo kept the oblation a
secret for the rest of his life. When, on his deathbed, he revealed the oblation
to his son, the young man promised to keep the vow. At his father’s funeral,
he asked the bishop to make him a frater in thecanonicafounded by his
father, so that he might serve at Raimondo’s tomb.^22
ThePeople’sShare inWorship
Medieval Catholics did not share the view that unreflective believers were
semipagans whose ignorance barred them from true Christianity. The
medieval Church was composed of ‘‘doing Christians as well as compre-
hending Christians.’’^23 That the lay faithful might not fully understand or
mouth the language of the liturgy did not mean that they somehow failed to
participate in the rite. There is a temptation to see bald incomprehension as
the condition of simple people with no Latin. Waldensian heretics, described
by Peronetta de Bruna to the inquisitor Fra Alberto of Castellario in 1335 ,
reflect this prejudice. The heretics had told her that after Christ’s death the
twelve apostles divided into two groups. A group of four ‘‘sang the books of
Christ so all could understand,’’ meaning ‘‘in the common tongue,’’ and a
group of eight sang ‘‘from other books no one could understand,’’ meaning
‘‘in Latin.’’ Out of envy and viciousness, the eight drove out the four and
forced them to go underground. These four apostles were the first Walden-
sians.^24 Was the singing of the other eight, the priests of the Catholic Church,
really an elitist religion thought to be superior to that of the simple faithful?
Jacques of Vitry, that very pastoral bishop of Genoa, writing of the early
Humiliati, put on par the literate laymen who recited the Divine Office in
Latin from a book and their unlettered brothers who joined by reciting qui-
etly their Pater Nosters.^25 Both gave suitable worship to God. They did not
need to do so in exactly the same way.
The evidence is that the lay faithful understood the rites enacted before
them quite well, if not the words themselves, at least the meaning conveyed
thereby. The heretics were exaggerating to make a point. Italians got the
drift of the lessons at Mass when they took the trouble to listen carefully, as
admittedly some failed to do.^26 But the pious who did try could get the basic
message. The layman Francis of Assisi’s conversion came while hearing the
commission of the apostles in Matthew sung at Mass. Latin had enough in
common with his Italian to be broadly understandable, even if Francis had
- Rufino of Piacenza,Vita et Miracula B. Raymundi, 5. 24 [i.e., 2. 24 ], p. 649 ; 4. 50 ,p. 654 ; 5. 54 ,p. 655.
- As Christopher Haigh,English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors(Oxford:
Clarendon, 1993 ), 286 , said of their sixteenth-century descendants. - Alberto of Castellario, ‘‘Inquisicio’’ ( 136 ), p. 220.
- Jacques of Vitry,Historia Occidentalis, 28 , pp. 144 – 43 , and Andrews,Early Humiliati, 125.
- Alexander Murray, however, in his study of six clerical preachers’ criticism of lay piety, ‘‘Piety
and Impiety in Thirteenth-Century Italy,’’ finds that the preachers attacked moral failures and (p. 92 )
minimal church attendance, not deportment at services.