The moral discredit of the clergy must have been deep indeed for souls to have turned toward Manicheism with such ardor.
Italy may well be grateful to St.Francis; it was as much infected with Catharism as Languedoc, and it was he who wrought its purification.

He did not pause to demonstrate by syllogisms or theological theses the vanity of the Catharist doctrines; but soaring as on wings to the religious life, he suddenly made a new ideal to shine out before the eyes of his contemporaries, an ideal before which all these fantastic sects vanished as birds of the night take flight at the first rays of the sun.
A great part of St.Francis's power came to him thus through his systematic avoidance of polemics.

The latter is always more or less a form of spiritual pride; it only deepens the chasm which it undertakes to fill up.

Truth needs not to be proved; it is its own witness.
The only weapon which he would use against the wicked was the holiness of a life so full of love as to enlighten and revive those about him, and compel them to love.[33] The disappearance of Catharism in Italy, without an upheaval, and above all without the Inquisition, is thus an indirect result of the Franciscan movement, and not the least important among them.[34] At the voice of the Umbrian reformer Italy roused herself, recovered her good sense and fine temper; she cast out those doctrines of pessimism and death, as a robust organism casts out morbid substances.
I have already endeavored to show the strong analogy between the initial efforts of Francis and those of the Poor Men of Lyons.

His thought ripened in an atmosphere thoroughly saturated with their ideas; unconsciously to himself they entered into his being.
The prophecies of the Calabrian abbot exerted upon him an influence quite as difficult to appreciate, but no less profound.
Standing on the confines of Italy and as it were at the threshold of Greece, Gioacchino di Fiore[35] was the last link in a chain of monastic prophets, who during nearly four hundred years succeeded one another in the monasteries and hermitages of Southern Italy.