What absolute total and complete garbage and lies. History testifies to the exact opposite and did not begin with Ellen White. The Waldenses were not rabble rousers, lazy, indolent, but were well known by the princes and rulers of those territories throughout Europe where they settled, to be industrious, honest, and Christian. By contrast, Rome chose to exterminate them through inquisitions and papal bulls denouncing them as heretics, but the local lords of the land were, despite being faithful Catholics and reluctant to disobey and upset the Pope, were even more reluctant to destroy the best and most noble of their populations.
To quote Wylie...
It was the year 1487. A great blow was meditated. The process of purging the Valleys languished. Pope Innocent VIII, who then filled the Papal chair, remembered how his renowned namesake, Innocent III, by an act of summary vengeance, had swept the Albigensian heresy from the south of France. Imitating the rigor of his predecessor, he would purge the Valleys as effectually and as speedily as Innocent III had done the plains of Dauphine and Provence. The first step of the Pope was to issue a bull, denouncing as heretical those whom he delivered over to slaughter. This bull, after the manner of all such documents, was expressed in terms as sanctimonious as its spirit was inexorably cruel. It brings no charge against these men, as lawless, idle, dishonest, or disorderly; their fault was that they did not worship as Innocent worshipped, and that they practiced a "simulated sanctity," which had the effect of seducing the sheep of the true fold, therefore he orders "that malicious and abominable sect of malignants," if they "refuse to abjure, to be crushed like venomous snakes." To carry out his bull, Innocent VIII appointed Albert Cataneo, Archdeacon of Cremona, his legate, devolving upon him the chief conduct of the enterprise. He fortified him, moreover, with Papal missives to all princes, dukes, and powers within whose dominions any Vaudois were to be found. The Pope especially accredited him to Charles VIII of France, and Charles II of Savoy, commanding them to support him with the whole power of their arms. The bull invited all Catholics to take up the cross against the heretics; and to stimulate them in this pious work, it "absolved from all ecclesiastical pains and penalties, general and particular; it released all who joined the crusade from any oaths they might have taken; it legitimatized their title to any property they might have illegally acquired, and promised remission of all their sins to such as should kill any heretic. It annulled all contracts made in favor of Vaudois, ordered their domestics to abandon them, forbade all persons to give them any aid whatever, and empowered all persons to take possession of their property."
To place the blame entirely on secular rulers to exterminate heresy is just lunacy, when one considers such as the above, crusades bring arranged with promises of indulgences and riches to anyone who killed a heretic. Those promises didn't come from the prince, they came from Rome.
The pious and Christian character of the Waldensian people was, for centuries, a direct testimony against the character and hatred of Rome against them. It was unreasonable, malicious, and evil. And you blame civil law!!! How blind you are.
So it wasn't civil law that justified those persecutions, what laws then were the popes using? What laws justified the killing of heretics, the confiscation of property, and indulgences granted to the killers?