The Cathars.

The Cathars, a heretical movement of the Middle Ages, had one more feature besides its gnosticism: it divided people into the perfect and the imperfect. The perfect lived an impossible life, or at least very difficult, for an average person. Thus, so that even a normal, ordinary person might have some hope of salvation, there was a belief that if such a perfect one, a psychic, as they were called in Gnosticism (or a good person, as the Cathars called them), gave an average and therefore still human person, a special absolution, the so-called consolamentum to the dying, before death, then that person would also be saved as a result of it. The perfect one was saved because he was perfect, the others because they received this absolution from them, and based on it, God took pleasure in them and accepted them, even though they were still sinful and carnal.
Does that remind you of anything? It certainly does. Today, we call it clericalism, and this delusion is rampant among Catholics.
It, too, believes that there are men, clerics, or “parish priests and nuns,” as it is popularly called, whom God has chosen for a life of holiness and perfection. In this understanding, holiness and perfection mean that they only pray, read the Bible and the holy books, and do nothing but deal with the Lord God. Therefore, they have neither family nor any other occupation and live in a rectory or monastery, separated from the rest of the world. They are called to holiness, and they save themselves for their holiness.
And then there are the laity who live in the world, have families and jobs, and cannot live anything like that; it is not in their power or ability, and no one expects them to. They are weak and sinful, but they will save themselves because of God’s mercy when God has mercy on them, and despite their sins of worldliness, they will still receive into Heaven. And He will do this if they will at least somehow “support the institutions of the Church,” and if they will at least confess and receive absolution from the priest before they die so that, cleansed of all guilt, they may pass clean before the Judge. And, of course, it is best if such purification occurs regularly, say once a month, and if church attendance is added as insurance, ideally every Sunday, or at least occasionally, on major feasts. Then it should be a sure thing!
It’s similar, very similar.
There are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions in the background, from the idea of holiness as basically a superhuman burden or “just praying all the time” to the concept of Heaven as a place where God will let us in or out at will – and whether He will do so is up for debate, will be determined by whether He is still angry with us for our faults and sins and will pursue us with punishments for them, or whether we have managed to “wash” and cleanse ourselves of everything in confession beforehand and come before Him already clean. He is satisfied and graciously lets you go to Heaven. ..
Oh, it’s all been here before. As Ecclesiastes says, “What has been is what will be again. And what has already happened will happen again. Nothing is new under the sun. If there is anything that man would say: “See, this is something new!”, it was already there in the times that were before us.” (Eccl 1:9-10).