During the centuries of darkness and barbarity humankind preserved the memory of those brave and progressive men who refused to put up with the autocracy of selfish and cruel landlords and who rejected the evil and corrupt power of the Church.

The Church still serves the ruling class in bourgeois states, as it has done throughout its history.  The Church ratifies and sanctifies exploitation and diverts the thoughts of oppressed people from the substantial questions of class-society.  And the power of the Church in the Middle Ages was incomparably greater than nowadays.  The Church has always taken persistent and stubborn measures to suppress free thinking.  Despite this there were numerous people who sought an answer to the urgent and unsolved questions of their contemporary society.  These people were called heretics - their teachings criticized the official tenets of the Church and were condemned and persecuted as heresy. 

The heretics taught that the greedy and corrupt leaders of the Church distorted and falsified the will of God.  But what led the true believers of mediaeval society to turn away from the Church to heresy?  The Church preached humility and self-discipline in seeking material goods.  Those who seek happiness in Heaven must accept poverty and humiliation in this world – so they proclaimed.  The purpose of this was to prevent the impoverished and exploited classes from demanding a better life.  At the same time the Church itself became richer and richer, it seized more and more lands.  The Church had become the greatest predator within the feudal order, a phenomenon clearly at variance with its own dogmas.  This hypocrisy soon led to hatred and contempt among ordinary people.

Thus the basis of hatred for the Church was obviously a conflict of material interests within society.  However it was clearly an unconscious resentment.  These people naively fought for the reform of the Church, they called for a return to its original ideas.  The ancient critics of mediaeval Church stated that initially the old, so called “apostolic” Church founded by Christ and his followers was originally benevolent.  They never considered that the re-establishment of the “true”, charitable and devoted Church was an illusion: because of its history, social role and accumulated wealth the Church has become inseparable from the exploiters.