DOLCINO, fra'. - Heretic, a native of the Novara region, who placed himself at the head of the sect of the Apostolics after Gerard Segarelli, who had been its new founder, was sent to the stake at Parma in 1300.
Indeed, from August of that year dates a letter or proclamation of his in which he asserted that the Congregation of the Apostolics was entirely spiritual, with a way of life of its own and without any bond of exterior obedience, but interior only, established by God in the last times for the salvation of souls; its adversaries and ministers of the devil were the secular clergy along with many of the people and of the powerful, and with them all the religious, especially the Franciscans and the Dominicans; he distinguished four ages in the world and four successive states in the Church from Christ to the end of the world. He then prophesied the events that were to follow in the next three years and particularly that Frederick of Aragon, king of Sicily, was to be emperor, create new kings and put Boniface VIII to death. These prophecies not having come true, fra' D., in December 1303, published a new letter, in which he proclaimed himself head of his sect, which comprised more than 4000 followers from every part of Italy, subject and united together only by a bond of interior obedience.
He spread his doctrines in the valleys of Trentino, where that Margherita joined him who was his faithful companion to the end; he then passed into the Valsesia, and profiting from the political-religious divisions of the country he fortified himself together with his fanatical people on Mount Revello, resisting the combined arms of the bishops of Vercelli and of Novara and even of the marquis of Monferrato. Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him in 1305 and had three bulls of condemnation sent in August 1306. Finally on 23 March 1307 he was captured by starvation together with Margherita and six of his most faithful followers and sent to execution along with them. The sect, however, into which Cathar and Waldensian errors had flowed, especially from the Italian branch with communist tendencies and abhorrence of oaths and of every ecclesiastical and civil authority, was not immediately extinguished entirely, and traces of it are found here and there still in the first half of the 15th century.
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Pio Paschini