The Church absorbed heretical challenges by co-opting individual intellectuals, not popular movements

Evidence

Many heretical movements were manifestations of popular forces aiming to reform the Church and bring it closer to the people by exalting them. The reaction of the Church was often very violent: it has created the Society of Jesus; it has clothed itself in the protective armour of the Council of Trent; although it has organised a marvellous mechanism of “democratic” selection of its intellectuals, they have been selected as single individuals and not as the representative expression of popular groups. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1409

Categorization

• XREF: This is the co-optation mechanism later theorized in hegemony studies: institutions absorb dissent by assimilating individual spokespeople while refusing real popular representation. Directly parallel to how states co-opt ‘moderate Muslim’ voices.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘democratic selection of intellectuals as single individuals’ as the template for Muslim ‘community representatives’ — token co-optation that forecloses actual popular representation.