BRUYS, PIETRO di. - Heresiarch of the first half of the 12th century, so named from his place of origin, perhaps Bruis in the department of the Hautes-Alpes, or Les Broues, either there or in that of the Drôme. He cannot have conducted himself as a believing and upright priest, since he was deprived of his parish office and became an agitator against the priests, whom he branded as impostors; these, together with monks, were maltreated, imprisoned, and forced to marry by his band of reactionaries. The various dates assigned to his death by historians, arrived at by induction, fall between 1132 and 1140; we know that about 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 on to Gascony, the regions of Narbonne, Toulouse, and Arles. At St-Gilles, near the mouth of the Rhône, on Good Friday, the indignant populace put an end to him by burning him alive, a fire he himself had kindled to burn the crosses he had mocked and broken.
Abelard condemns him, in general, as a subverter of divine institutions and ecclesiastical doctrines, and specifies certain errors that are listed in the broader refutation by Peter the Venerable (v.): the invalidity of infant baptism, since children are incapable of an act of faith; adults were compelled to undergo rebaptism; the uselessness of material churches, which were demolished, and of liturgical chant, along with every form of religious art, because prayer can be made anywhere and inner sentiments do not require obligatory cultural expressions; 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 Jesus performed once and for all; prayers and good works cannot benefit the dead, since they are incapable of merit. In his opposition to the Church, he returned to the foundations of its authority, namely Holy Scripture, of which he seems to have accepted only the Gospels, and perhaps also the letters of St Paul, though leaving them open to the free interpretation of the faithful, and patristic tradition. It is not clear what positive principles underlay his personalism and religious spiritualism; one cannot say that he anticipated the doctrine of justification by faith, since he acknowledged the necessity of baptism for adults. His heresy does not belong to the dualistic Cathar current; he is rather a representative of those heretical movements that, under various pretexts, sought to free religion from the divine institutions of the Church. B. found in the heretic Henry the Deacon (v.) an exponent who intensified his anti-ecclesiastical stance. His followers were called P(i)etrobru(i)ziani. By way of information, we note the adventurous hypothesis of the Waldensian E. Tron, who would make B. the founder of the Poor of Lyon or Waldensians, identifying him with P. Valdès or Valdo.