A wealthy merchant of Lyon, who had built part of his fortune by lending money at interest, a practice then considered the sin of usury, hears a street singer tell the story of a young man who abandoned wealth and a bride to live in poverty as a pilgrim. The song about Saint Alexius strikes deep in Peter Waldo and changes the course of his entire life.
Waldo did not know Latin well enough to read the Scriptures on his own. So he hired clergymen from Lyon to translate the Gospels and other biblical books into Franco-Provençal, the language spoken in the city, a rare step in twelfth-century Europe.
Reading the words Jesus addresses to the rich young man in Matthew 19:21, he decided to sell everything he owned. He repaid those he had wronged through the interest charged in his business dealings, left part of his wealth to his wife, and, without telling her, placed his two young daughters in the convent of Fontevrault. His wife, unhappy with the decision, even appealed to the archbishop of Lyon against her husband.
Around 1170, he began preaching in the streets alongside other laypeople, known as the Poor Men of Lyon. They championed voluntary poverty, direct reading of the Bible, and the right of any believer, including women, to proclaim the gospel without clerical ordination.
In 1179, Waldo went to Rome to seek approval from Pope Alexander III during the Third Lateran Council. The pope praised the vow of poverty but forbade lay preaching. Waldo disobeyed, convinced that silencing the gospel was worse than defying the hierarchy.
The break came in 1184: Pope Lucius III excommunicated the group at the Council of Verona, alongside other movements considered heretical. The condemnation was not only about lay preaching: the Waldensians also rejected mandatory confession to priests, prayers for the dead, and indulgences, and denied that only an ordained priest could validly consecrate the Eucharist, positions the Church viewed as serious doctrinal error. Persecuted, they scattered through the alpine valleys of Piedmont and southern France, seeking refuge.
The movement itself split. In 1205, the so-called Poor Lombards, who accepted manual labor for preachers, elected their own leadership, and held a different view of the Eucharist, broke away from Waldo, who expelled them from the group. Sources cannot confirm with certainty when or where he died: the most cited tradition points to c. 1205 in Piedmont, but some historians date his death between 1217 and 1218, possibly in Germany.
The Waldensians withstood centuries of persecution and, at the Synod of Chanforan in 1532, formally joined the Protestant Reformation then emerging in Europe. They still exist today as a church, a rare testimony of biblical faithfulness spanning nearly nine centuries.
