Arthur Guirdham wrote, “Certainly Catharism must have largely spread by example and emanation, but this is not really the whole story. How did it come that a creed that which seems, to many modern students, to have been austere and pessimistic spread with such rapidity? … One factor is, I think, consistently overlooked. In the Middle Ages, people were dominated by the fear of Hell. Catharism to some extent dissipated this fear … If this world is the worst Hell one has to put up with, it must have been, even at its lowest, vastly preferable to perpetual damnation of the Orthodox Christians of the epoch.” What can Creator tell us about the rapid spread and popularity of Catharism?

This was a cultural emergence of a deep inner yearning for oneness with the divine. It was divinely inspired in fact to help accomplish that, to help move forward the dialogue, and trigger a reconsideration of time-honored and deeply held beliefs that had become carved in stone through centuries of obedience to the Scriptures, and the narrow interpretation of existing clerics who embraced certain messages more than others, and became quite heavy-handed in dispensing stern lectures and damning indictments for conduct considered "sinful," and painting a quite dark picture of the fate of individuals who stray and may have no way out. This is contrary to divine thinking because we are always understanding and forgiving. What needs to happen mostly is for people to forgive themselves. We cannot save them if they have concluded they are condemned—that is the power of the church to cause damage that is irreversible. When they make a pronouncement and a decree that people are damned by their "sinful conduct," they are becoming judge, jury, and executioner personally, and as well, taking on the karmic consequences of harming all those they preach to in branding them as "unforgivable" and "doomed." This is encouraged through inner corruption to be the case, and that is why many clerics through the ages have tilted towards a more conservative and harsh dispensation of rulings and judgments about parishioners and supplicants desiring absolution and divine healing and assistance to give them some hope in turning their lives around, but instead are met with condemnation and exhortations to confess their sins, and so forth. But not all will accept the church has "fixed them" because their belief in the divine is shaky and they still feel unworthy, and this, in fact, condemns them through their own choice of thoughts. Even though the ideas were implanted in them by religious dogma, they have free will choice to follow faulty thinking and judgmental distortions of divine intention, and thus harm themselves, and we are powerless to stop them. When people are exposed to teachings that put into better balance the reality of personal responsibility as the main driver of things that happen, with God having a supporting role in a loving manner and not a harsh overseer looking for reasons to judge and condemn them, that will resonate because it is divine wisdom on display, and if that breath of fresh air a new potential branch of religion brings forth threatens the established order of conventional religious thinking, there will likely be a backlash to condemn the presumed heretics, and that is what happened during this period in history when this woman lived with her partner and both were condemned for their enlightened perspectives, simply because they were a departure from conventional thinking, not because they were wrong. So this was a double tragedy and deserves close study because it illustrates the truth of the divine being more lofty than given credit for by parts of the Scriptures and religious dogma of the institutions still preaching today.