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Lately, an anonymous E-mail said to me: "In a lecture on the Cathari at the Jean Renoir hall, you Brother Michel and the Arès Pilgrims were mentioned as the new Cathari. Which is not offensive to you and, I might add, even funny." I replied to ask the name of the city and the name of the lecturer, but my reply was returned right away. The reasons for it was "Unknown address." Even though I do not find it offensive that some lecturer has begun comparing us to the Cathari, I find it necessary that whatever distinguishes the Arès Pilgrims from those Good Men and Good Women of an earlier era be brought up.
If we absolutely must be compared to Cathari, we are, let's say, Realized Cathars in the sense that our Christian faith is based on the plain pure reality of the Maker's Word. This was not really the faith of the 11th and 12th century Mystical Cathari, tinged with gnosticism and asceticism.
Our knowledge of catharism, like the knowledge of every religion once wrecked by persecution or forced abjuration, is not flawless. Most of its documents and records disappeared on the stakes lit by the crusaders that the pope and the king of France had sent out against the Cathari. What can be said of them, however?
The Cathari used to see the Gospel's legacy lying in simplicity and goodness regarded as adequate to give individuals and then the world salvation. In this the catharistic faith and the Arès Pilgrim faith are similar, but unlike catharism, which seemingly proceeded from a rejection of the church long gone politicized, autocratic and corrupt, of which the Cathari used to be openly disdainful and even hostile, the Arès Pilgrims show no disdain or hostility to the church and all religions whatever, but they turn away from them only to go beyond. The Arès Pilgrim's faith is not even a return to basics stricly speaking, but it started three decades ago from future prospects made dynamic by The Revelation of Arès, a supernatural event that happened in 1974 and 1977. Both a Cathar and an Arès Pilgrim consider that it is only by its fruit that men can recognize good (Matthew 7/17-20) and that a human is only saved by his or her goodness and penitence, but what an Arès Pilgrim calls penitence a Cathar celled "rule of justice and truth" and performed in an ascetic and abstinent way, which suited the medieval inclinations. Unlike the "rule of justice and truth", penitence and the harvest (the search for every possible penitent lost in the world which has to be changed), the two keystones of the Aresian faith, bring about modern practical experiences and an apostolate in which honesty, love, forgiveness, spiritual freedom and intelligence, are far more important than austerity.
Montsegur

Here are other differences. There's no doubt that either the Cathar or the Arès Pilgrim is not interested in the alleged divine providence, which the structured religions claim they represent on earth. There's no doubt that both the Cathar and the Arès Pilgrim have a fixed stare at the origin of evil, so as to keep it off, but their respective views of the source of evil are quite unlike. On the one hand, an Arès Pilgrim is aware that only man is master of evil as well as good, just as explained by The Revelation of Arès. On the other hand, a Cathar used to see the origin of evil in the "fallen angels, whose leader was Lucifer," who all would have been pushed off Heaven and shut in men's skins, into which they would get regularly reincarnated. This is pure gnosticism. The Revelation of Arès unambiguously denies reincarnation (V/2) and never mentions fallen angels, whatever, as being the source of evil. This belief, which strongly smelt of esotericism, had led the Cathari to read the Bible in a dualistic reductionist way. So they had turned down the Old Testament as satanic and taken to reading only the New Testament. The Revelation of Arès, quite the contrary, urges man to re-read the whole Bible in its light and even the Quran.
Some more discrepancies are notifiable. The Cathari had a sacrament of sorts, one called "consolament", a laying on of hands, which served as baptism, ordination, absolution and extreme unction. The Arès Pilgrims have no sacrament, at all. A Cathar considered Jesus as God's son, not in a trinitarian sense, certainly, but in an immaterial sense. He considered Jesus as a mere human appearance, an ectoplasm, which could not have suffered on the cross. Now, the Bible and The Revelation of Arès never vouch for a so-called immateriality of Jesus. A compelling proof of his materiality is the Jesus I witnessed in 1974, who stood in front of me in the flesh, unquestionably. The catharistic social organization of Arès too was very different. Like the Arès Pilgrims they did not have priests, but they had bishops, though poor and devoid of any secular power, and deacons, who were itinerant preachers, and a religious elite which they called Good Men and Good Women, those whom the Inquisition recorded as "the pure." The Arès Pilgrims have no hierarchy, no clergy, no elite: You are or you are not an Arès Pilgrim and your individual attitude on its own naturally circumscribes this identity.
On the other hand, like the Arès Pilgrims the Cathari had no eucharistic theory of the bread shared out between believers. There is also some similarity as to the ultimate destiny of mankind, the Day when men return to their "luminous bodies" according the the Cathari and the Day that The Revelation of Arès depicts (31/8-12, 35/3). Opprobrium is another similarity. The public opprobrium that every spiritual minority has been held up to. The modern Inquisition is the collusion of the "antisect" organizations: ADFI, CCMM, etc., with the papers and magazines that are their devoted servants. We Arès Pilgrims are not subjected to the cruel martyrdom once experienced by the Cathari, I admit, but we are the butt of organizations which, had not the French constitution kept them from oppressing us, would readily have subjected us to extreme persecutions.

The picture: The "pog" of Montségur (near Foix, Ariège, France), a place of Cathari's heroic resistance. In 1244, at the foot of this rock, more than 220 Cathari, male and female, who declined to convert to the catholic faith, were "burnt in a pale and stake enclosure... where they passed away to the fire of Tartarus."