Kevin Frederick
Author of With Their Backs Against the Mountains: 850 Years of Waldensian Witness.
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Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bonesshow more
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones;
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all th' Italian fields where still doth
swayMilton's Sonnet 18, "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont."
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
But there is a great deal more to the Waldensian heritage than the massacre of Easter 1655. Waldensians themselves would likely look upon the "Glorious Return" of 1689 as their most famous moment, when their fighting pastor Henri Arnaud (a Waldensian but also an officer in the Dutch army of William of Orange) led a small contingent back from their Genevan refuge to briefly reoccupy their Piedmont homeland and hold off a massive Catholic Savoyard force that might otherwise have reinforced Louis XIV and England's deposed James II in combat against the forces of England's new sovereigns, William and Mary.
The Waldensians, contrary to Milton's belief, were not descendants of the earliest Christians of the days of St. Paul. They were founded in the late 12th century by Waldo of Lyons as the "Poor of Lyons," coming into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy not, however, because of any practice of apostolic poverty but because of their tradition of lay preaching, which challenged the clerical monopoly. With their increasing alienation from Rome, the Waldensians became the first of the proto-Protestant sects, predating both Wycliffe and Huss.
After a long history, the Waldensians finally achieved religious liberty from the House of Savoy in 1848, at which point their numbers began growing and created an "Amish problem" of too little farmland, leading to migrations, some to Uruguay and others to the United States. Italian Waldensians are affiliated with the United Methodists (likely, I think, because of the tradition of lay preaching) while their congregations in the United States affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA), sharing Presbyterianism's self-governing polity as a reformed church.
Most Waldensian congregations in the United States have passed on, but there remains one vibrant Waldensian Presbyterian Church in Valdese, NC, in the PC(USA)'s Western North Carolina Presbytery. The author of With Their Backs Against the Mountains is the now-retired pastor of this congregation, and the book is written as a series of sermons which he delivered on Waldensian history.
Note: This book appears to have been self-published. Copies are available in very limited numbers on ABE (though I suspect it might be for sale in the Waldensian Museum in Valdese), but it can be easily obtained on Amazon Kindle.
Waldensian Presbyterian Church of Valdese
Waldensian Heritage Museum (Valdese)
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