fiefoe

Much strife in their religion:

Fearing a single emperor even more than he had feared two, John excommunicated the victor, who in return denounced the Pope as a heretic.
The order is still powerful, but the stink of the cities is encroaching upon our holy places, the people of God are now inclined to commerce and wars of faction.
The rebels against power are those denied any connection with money, and so every call to poverty provokes great tension and argument... Since today the flock here is dominated, not with weapons or the splendor of ritual, but with the control of money.
When the epoch of penitence was over, for penitents the need for penance became a need for death. And they who killed the crazed penitents, repaying death with death, to defeat true penitence, which produced death, replaced the penitence of the soul with a penitence of imagination. .. They hope to keep souls from sin through fear. {叫人学好真不容易.}
the jumble that had been created as the Franciscans sided with the empire, a triangle of oppositions and alliances that had now been transformed into a square.
"Please," William said, "do not mix things that are separate! You speak as if the Fraticelli, Patarines, Waldensians, Catharists, and within these the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the heretics of Dragovitsa, were all the same thing!"
Bishop of Citeaux (on what to do with the citizens of Beziers: Kill them all, God will recognize His own."

The cast that I can hardly keep track of:

Salvatore: as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food,
It is only petty men who seem normal... When I talk with Ubertino I have the impression that hell is heaven seen from the other side.
Aymaro wants the whole fabric of the abbey.. to become a workshop.
"The abbey was asked to do (the translation) by the lord of Milan, and the abbey will gain from it a preferential right to the wine production of some farms to the east of here.”
Jorge: "Laughing at evil means not preparing oneself to combat it, and laughing at good means denying the power through which good is self-propagating."
Benno: how many times had he himself not been stirred by desires of the intellect so violent that to satisfy them he would have consented to comply with others' carnal desires.

"The Name of the Rose"