POVERI LOMBARDI. – Heretical sect, widespread in Lombardy, arising through separation from the Poor of Lyon or Waldensians. Already in the earliest period of Valdo’s evangelical-pauperist movement, perhaps through his own activity, groups of followers were formed in Lombardy, in doctrinal and hierarchical union with their coreligionists in France, under the direction of the same founder. After the sects of the Poor of Lyon and the Humiliati were condemned by Lucius III and Frederick I Barbarossa (Verona, 1184), the extremist group among the latter influenced the Lombard Waldensians through its forms of life; these, in turn, communicated their anticlericalism to the heterodox Humiliati. The two heretical factions merged to form the sect of the p. l.
Around 1205 the illiterate Waldensian “elder” Giovanni da Ronco (a Piacenza locality near Corneliano) separated the congregatio or societas of the “fratres italici,” who were also called “pauperes spiritu,” from the “ultramontane” brothers, also called “pauperes de Lugduno” or “leonistae.” The division, vainly resisted, was influenced by the increased effectiveness of the Lombard group, which also spread into Germany under the name of Runcarli or Runcaroli (from the aforementioned locality of Ronco), and above all by the difference in doctrinal principles and organizational forms. Whereas the members of the French community, democratically arranged under Valdo’s authority and direction, renouncing wealth, abandoned wife and home and, leaving business and work, traveled as pilgrims and begged, the p. l. appointed their own leader and government and, under the influence of the Humiliati, engaged in associated labor, possessing houses and fields, preserving the marital bond, and permitting the separation of spouses only by exception. Like the French Waldensians, the p. l. believed that Jesus Christ had forbidden in the New Testament the secular authorities to exercise coercive power, particularly with regard to the death penalty for heretics and the use of oaths; they considered themselves restorers of the true Church and intensified their moral and doctrinal aversion to the Catholic Church, which they held to have deviated from the time of s. Silvester and the emperor Constantine; they denied the Catholic priesthood the power validly to confer the Sacraments, to preach, and to command; they asserted that it was lawful to rebel against it and to transgress ecclesiastical precepts, and attributed to laymen of good conduct the ability to consecrate the Eucharist. However, during an assembly in the Milanese territory, some who subsequently formed a secessionist faction called “de Prato” refused the Eucharistic rite performed by Giovanni da Ronco with a wine jug, reaffirming the Catholic principle that only a priest ordained by the Roman Church can perform sacramental acts, and that only a prelate or priest validly exercises his office. The French Waldensians, too, for some time maintained these sacramental ties with the Catholic Church.
In May 1218, an official meeting in the vicinity of Bergamo between the French Waldensians and the p. l., intended to attempt a return to unity of doctrine and organization, failed, and subsequently the doctrines of the two currents developed in an increasingly heterodox direction. Around 1235 the p. l. imposed observance of celibacy to the point of forcing husbands to separate from their wives even against their will. They had as their bishop a certain Andrea “de Gruara”; the power of consecration was reserved to their priests, called “sandaliati”; women, too, could preach.