BRUYS, PIETRO di. — Heresiarch of the first half of the twelfth century, named after his place of origin, perhaps Bruis in the département of Hautes-Alpes, or Les Broues there or in that of Drôme. He cannot have conducted himself as a believing and upright priest, since he was deprived of his parish office and became an agitator of the people against the priests, whom he called impostors and who, together with the monks, were mistreated, imprisoned, and forced to marry by his band of reactionaries. The various dates of his death, fixed by historians through inference, fall between 1132 and 1140; we know that approximately twenty years earlier, that is, between 1112 and 1120, he had begun his heretical propaganda in the dioceses of Embrun, Gap, and Die in the Dauphiné, before moving into Gascony and the regions of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Arles. At St-Gilles, near the mouth of the Rhône, on Good Friday, the indignant populace finished him in the flames that he himself had lit to burn the crosses he had mocked and broken.
Abelard generally condemns him as a subverter of divine institutions and ecclesiastical doctrines, and specifies certain errors that are reported in the more extensive list contained in Pietro il Venerabile (v.): the invalidity of the Baptism of children, because they are incapable of an act of faith; adults were compelled to be rebaptized; the uselessness of material churches, which were demolished, and of liturgical singing, as of every religious art, because prayer can be offered anywhere and inner sentiments do not require obligatory forms of worship; rejection of the cross and of Friday abstinence, because they remind us of the ignominy to which Jesus Christ was subjected; denial of the sacrifice of the Mass and of the Eucharistic Sacrament, which were accomplished by Jesus once and for all; prayers and good works cannot benefit the dead, because they are incapable of merit. In his aversion to the Church, he rejected the foundations of its authority, namely Sacred Scripture, of which he seems to have recognized only the Gospels, and perhaps also the letters of St Paul, though these were to be left to the free interpretation of the faithful, as well as patristic tradition. It is not clear what the positive principles of his religious personalism and spiritualism were; it cannot be said that he anticipated the doctrine of justification by faith, since he recognized the necessity of Baptism for adults. His heresy did not belong to the Cathar dualist current; rather, he was a representative of those heretical movements that, under various pretexts, sought to secularize religious life by removing it from the divine institutions of the Church. B. DIACONIA (v.) one who aggravated his anti-ecclesiastical orientation. His followers were called P(i)terobru(i)zians. For purposes of information, we mention the adventurous hypothesis of the Waldensian E. Tron, who would make B. the founder of the Poor Men of Lyon, or Waldensians, identifying him with P. Valdes or Valdo.
Ilarino da Milano