Why Is Rome - Not Jerusalem - The Center Of Catholicism ?

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The Three Temptations Of The Church

In Volume I of Jesus of Nazareth, authored by Pope Benedict XVI before he became pontiff, the three temptations of Christ in the desert before entering public life are considered. The devil poses these temptations to try to confirm his suspicions that Jesus is the chosen one of God, and the temptations themselves are geared to be attractive to one who wants to be accepted as the promised Messiah. The Pope also makes applications of the temptations to the Church – three tempting approaches that would assure the acceptance of the Church and its message, but would be unworthy of the Church.

1) Regarding the first temptation, “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread” (Mt. 4:3), it is clear that an easy way for Jesus to win acceptance of his Messiahship would be to become a “bread king.” One thinks of the incident in which he multiplied the loaves and fishes for a crowd of five thousand, which incited the crowd to try to take him by force and make him king (Jn. 6:15) – so that he had to flee into the mountain to escape. If he provided such largesse often, an easy path to acceptance by the masses would be paved for him.

As applied to the Church, Benedict envisions the Church being afflicted by the same temptation:

Is there anything more tragic, is there anything more opposed to belief in the existence of a good God and a Redeemer of mankind, than world hunger?… Are not social problems—the primary, true yardstick by which redemption has to be measured?… Marxism—quite understandably—made this very point the core of its promise of salvation. Should we not say the same thing to the Church? If you claim to be the Church of God, then start by making sure the world has bread—the rest comes later.

A very serious temptation of the Church is to gain acceptance of its authority and message by solving social problems. Liberation theologians during the 70s allied themselves with Marxism, thinking this alliance would draw people to the message of the Gospel. But the Kingdom of God is a separate message, connected, but not identical, with social justice.

Liberal Catholics, identifying the Gospel with social justice, often are willing to literally “throw out the baby with the bathwater” – voting for rabidly pro-abortion candidates on the grounds that they are for social justice (along with most atheists and secularists). The right to life of the most vulnerable human beings is considered somehow irrelevant to this “social justice.”

2) In the second temptation, the devil transports Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, and challenges him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge concerning you’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone” (Mt. 4:5-7). This challenge to “push the envelope” of God’s forbearance would satisfy the devil’s curiosity, but Jesus responds that we “should not tempt the Lord God.”

The Pope comments,

The structural question concerning the remarkable scriptural discussion between Christ and the tempter thus leads directly to the question about its content. What is this dispute about? The issue at stake in this second temptation has been summed up under the motif of “bread and circuses.” The idea is that after bread has been provided, a spectacle has to be offered, too.

Imagine the instant influence and adulation Jesus could have acquired, if there had been a crowd gathered down below the temple, looking up and seeing him literally being carried down by the angels; or if, in his preaching, he had used his miraculous powers to draw attention to himself in front of crowds, e.g. by levitating.

There is a temptation among some segments of the Church to draw people in and make conversions through “signs and wonders.” The Medjugorje cult now is the chief example of this. Pilgrims have been coming in the tens of thousands for over thirty years to an unauthorized Marian shrine, where the Madonna is alleged to have been appearing almost on demand to six visionaries over 33,000 times. Visitors often return with tales of seeing solar phenomena imitating the miraculous “dance of the sun” at Fatima in 1917, and having their rosaries mysteriously turn a golden tint; Randall Sullivan, in The Miracle Detective, reports an incident when the visionaries were pulled miraculously in two minutes to the top of Cross Mountain at Medjugorje.

But the messages of the “Gospa” at Medjugorje are heterodox messages: “all faiths are identical;” some people are in hell because “they have committed grave sins that God cannot pardon;” people in heaven are “present with the soul and the body;” and a disobedient priest-director, Fr. Zovko, is a “saint,” in spite of his suspension from priestly functions. This Madonna allegedly entrusted ten secrets to the visionaries, none of which have been revealed; predicted a “great sign” which never appeared; and said that her last appearance would be on July 31, 1981, but apparently changed her mind, and decided to continue appearing. This Madonna also, strangely and uncharacteristically, supports the Franciscans in their disobedience to Vatican orders, and tells the visionaries to ignore their bishops. These are strange “fruits” of a visitation by the Madonna. Disobedience is the sin Satan (famous for his own non serviam) identifies with most closely; once inculcated, it branches out into greed, lust, wrath, and other capital sins.

Medjugorje supporters point to many “good fruits” – conversions, return to the sacraments, etc. – but one can also be sure that there would have been all manner of conversions and repentance, possibly lifelong, if Jesus had decided to manifest his supernatural powers in public.

Yves Chiron chronicles 71 apparitions supposed to have taken place after Medjugorje, between 1981 and 1991. This is a spectacular way to get some people to flock to the sacraments and convert, complementing the “bread” with “circuses.” But lasting faith ordinarily grows in low-key surroundings in the silence of the heart.

3) In the third temptation, from a very high mountain, the devil “showed [Jesus] all the kingdoms of the world, and their glory, and he said to Him, ‘All these things will I give you, if you fall down and worship me’” (Mt. 4:8).

The Pope observes that, as applied to the Church,

The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes…. Faith and religion are now directed toward political goals. Only the organization of the world counts. Religion matters only insofar as it can serve that objective.

First of all, one should notice that Jesus did not contradict the devil regarding the alleged power he had over the world. Like a Mafia boss, Satan, within the limits allowed by God, has tremendous power to reward those who are forwarding his purposes, and make things difficult for anyone who gets in his way. But Jesus was not interested in any kind of “power sharing” or détente with evil.

The temptation of the Church, similarly, is nothing so gross as devil worship, but much more subtle – making accommodation with evil, to be seen as “progressive,” and thus winning many of a progressive mentality to its side. For example, the current rush of some Catholic institutions to accept the Presidential mandate for coverage of contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilizing procedures is an accommodation that has mustered much support from liberals, who congratulate such institutions for no longer being “stuck in the dark ages,” inimical to modern progress. Some, seeing how “progressive” the Church has become, might overcome their hesitancy and desire to become associated with this modernized Church. This sort of Church, in their eyes, would be an asset for their plans of organizing or reorganizing society, no longer an unwelcome obstacle. But power-sharing with evil has a way of boomeranging.

At the end of these three temptations, the Gospel tells us that angels came to minister to Jesus. Likewise, if the Church is able to avoid easy, pragmatic ways of evangelizing the world, we can be sure that supernatural help will arrive to give an extra boost to its efforts.

Source: Crisis Magazine

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Are All Sins Equally Bad? Are All Saints Equally Good?

Colijn de Coter,
Saint Michael Weighing Souls (detail)
(16th c.).

Protestants typically believe that all sins are equally bad, and all Saints are equally good. For example, a Kansas middle school teacher is in hot water for writing, according to the Huffington Post, that “Being Gay Is 'The Same As Murder'.” Despite the quotation marks, the teacher didn't actually write that. Instead, he wrote:

All this talk in the news about gay marriage recently has finally driven me to write. Gay marriage is wrong because homosexuality is wrong. The Bible clearly states it is sin. Now I do not claim it to be a sin any worse than other sins. It ranks in God's eyes the same as murder, lying, stealing, or cheating. His standards are perfect and ALL have sinned and fallen short of His glory. Sin is sin and we all deserve hell. Only those who accept Christ as Lord and daily with the help of the Spirit do their best to turn from sin will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. There aren't multiple ways to get to Heaven. There is one. To many this may seem close minded and antagonistic, but it doesn't make it any less true. Folks I am willing to admit that my depravity is just as great as anyone else's,and without Christ I'd be destined for hell, if not for the undeserved grace of God. I'm not condemning gay marriage because I hate gay people. I am doing it because those who embrace it will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And I desire that for no one.

While he's not actually saying that being gay is the same as murder, he is saying that homosexuality “ranks in God's eyes the same” as everything from lying to murder. In other words, every sin, from the smallest lie to the largest massacre, is equally bad. But is that right?

Are All Sins Equally Bad?

The clearest Scriptural evidence as to the degrees of sin comes from 1 John 5:16-17,

If any one sees his brother committing what is not a mortal sin, he will ask, and God will give him life for those whose sin is not mortal.There is sin which is mortal; I do not say that one is to pray for that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal.

In other words, Scripture clearly distinguishes between two categories of sin: mortal (or deadly) sin, and venial sin, which John defines as “sin which is not mortal.” A Christian who knowingly and willingly commits a mortal sin cuts himself off from eternal life. That's what John means by “mortal” or “deadly.” It kills the soul. So a man who, on his deathbed, is mildly rude to a family member is not going to be treated the same way as a man who, on his deathbed, renounces his faith in Christ. A Just Judge doesn't treat those two cases the same, and God is a Just Judge.

Look at 1 Cor. 11:29-30, in which St. Paul says of the Eucharist that “any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” Just as mortal sin is mortal to the soul, here again, it's primarily their souls that are weak, or ill, or dead. But notice that we're beginning to see distinctions even within the two categories: that some sinners are objectively worse off than others. So even within the categories of venial and mortal sins, we can distinguish between the degree and gravity of sin.

Jesus refers to sinners as “the sick” in Mark 2:17, and Himself as the Doctor. But of course, there are different kinds and degrees of illness. Even if all of the sick need a doctor, and need healing, it's just not true that a headache and cancer are equally bad. We see this also in Luke 7:36-50, in which Jesus compares sins to different sized debts, in the house of Simon the Pharisee:

Jean Beraud, St. Mary Magdalene in the House of Simon the Pharisee (1891)

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house, and took his place at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.

Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner." And Jesus answering said to him, "Simon, I have something to say to you." And he answered, "What is it, Teacher?"

"A certain creditor had two debtors; one owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now which of them will love him more?" Simon answered, "The one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more." And he said to him, "You have judged rightly."

Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little." And he said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."

Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, "Who is this, who even forgives sins?" And he said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

So this captures two different points, each of which is very important. First, that some sins are actually worse than others, that some sinners have offended God's Justice more egregiously than others. But second, that everyone is in need of redemption, and everyone is offered redemption, regardless of how bad their sins are. Protestants generally grasp the second point, but in the process, they often deny the first one. It's a shame, because each teaching is clear from Scripture.

Are All Saints Equally Good?

The flip side to the claim that all sins are equally bad is the claim that all Saints are equally righteous in the eyes of God. But as with the first claim, this doesn't appear to be based on anything from Scripture. Because Scripture actually paints a rather different picture.

When God is planning to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, He doesn't talk to Lot, who lives there. He talks to his holier cousin, Abraham, instead, even though Abraham doesn't live in either of those cities (Gen. 18:16-33). And Abraham intercedes on behalf of his cousin, Lot, saving him and his family. Genesis 19:29 captures this succinctly: “So when God destroyed the cities of the plain, He remembered Abraham, and He brought Lot out of the catastrophe that overthrew the cities where Lot had lived.” So it's for the sake of Abraham that Lot is spared.

And Jesus rather frequently speaks about which of His followers are the greatest. For example, in Luke 9:48, He says, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is least among you all—he is the greatest.” And in Luke 22:26 says that, “the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.” And shortly after this, He says to His Apostles (Lk. 22:28-30):

You are those who have stood by Me in my trials. And I confer on you a kingdom, just as My Father conferred one on Me, so that you may eat and drink at my table in My Kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

Now, Jesus doesn't give all of us that authority in Heaven, but just the Apostles who were with Him in His trials. And indeed, the image of Heaven given in Scripture is much more hierarchical than anything Protestants tend to describe. There are various ranks of angelic beings (angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim) lists in Scripture, and rankings even among the Saints. For example, Revelation 14:3 refers to a song that can only be sung by the 144,000 redeemed, a subgroup of the saved who are honored in a special way (see Rev. 14:1-5).

So clearly, both in Heaven and on Earth, the Saints are not merely interchangeable parts. Some have more power and authority. This is one of the reasons why Scripture prescribes intercessory prayer (see 1 Tim. 2:1): because we want those holier than ourselves interceding for us.

Conclusion

This is admittedly a bit of an overview for what should be a basic point: some sins are worse than others, and some Saints are holier than others. This point strikes me as so basic and intuitive that the burden should really be on the one who denies it. Where in Scripture do we ever hear that murder is no worse than, say, lying?

Source: Shameless Popery

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Faith And Reason

This is a commentary on "Faith and Reason" by Fr. Barron.

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The Catholic Church: Builder Of Civilization

Hosted by Prof. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., this series exposes the fact that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Catholic Church has been responsible for the vast bulk of what we treasure in Western civilization: science, the university system, Western moral principles, law (domestic and international), economic thought, and much else besides.

1.	Introduction	cathbuildciv_01.mp3
	Debunking myths about the Catholic Church and its impact on Western Civilization.

2.	The Church and Science	cathbuildciv_02.mp3
	The scientific world owes much of its discoveries to knowledgeable Catholic monks and priests.

3.	Priests as Scientific Pioneers	cathbuildciv_03.mp3
	The leading pioneers of astronomy, geology and seismology were Catholic priests.

4.	The Galileo Files	cathbuildciv_04.mp3
	Reading between the lines of the Galileo case.

5.	The University System	cathbuildciv_05.mp3
	The Catholic church has long been the protector of knowledge and learning.

6.	Does God Exist?	cathbuildciv_06.mp3
	Church scholars propose the existence of God through arguments of reason and rationalism.

7.	The Monks	cathbuildciv_07.mp3
	The monks were the protectors of learning and knowledge during the barbarian invasions and the Middle Ages.

8.	Catholic Charity	cathbuildciv_08.mp3
	Even anti-catholic commentators have marveled at the selflessness acts of charity administered by Catholics.

9.	Western Morality	cathbuildciv_09.mp3
	Western standards of morality have been decisively shaped by the Catholic Church.

10.	The Concepts of Rights and Law	cathbuildciv_10.mp3
	Modern Western legal systems are a secular residue of religious attitudes historically found in the liturgy, rituals and doctrines of the Catholic Church.

11.	The Origins of International Law	cathbuildciv_11.mp3
	The circumstances arriving from the discovery of the New World gave impetus for theologians to study the general principles of rights and treatment of peoples that developed into a basis for international law.

12.	The Anti-Catholic Atrocities That History Forgot	cathbuildciv_12.mp3
	Catholic s throughout history have suffered for their faith, sometimes those instances, at the least, are not talked about much, others, at worst, are forgotten all together, like the drownings at Nantes or the Cristero War.

13.	Series Recap	cathbuildciv_13.mp3
	The foundational building blocks of Western civilization were laid by the Catholic Church.

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Related posts:

Catholicism: The Heart of History (audio)

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (video)

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Catholicism: The Heart of History

This EWTN audio series about Catholicism from the Birth of Christ in the Roman Empire to the 20th Century is hosted by Joanna & James Bogle.

1. The Roman Imperium and Christendom: Constantine, Justinian and Charlemagne
cathhh01.mp3

History of the spread of Christianity and Catholicism through the Roman Empire and it’s subsequent fall to the Franks – Charlemagne crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III.

2. The Roman Pontiff & Emperor: Keystones to the Commonwealth of Christ

cathhh02.mp3

In Pagan Rome the Emperor was also the head of the pagan church and had the title “Pontifax.” The Church changed the word from Pontifax to Pontiff. The Christian Holy Roman Emperor and the Pontiff were a support for one another – the Pope would approve and crown the Emperor and support the idea of the “Divine Right of Kings, while the Emperor would support and protect the Church.”

3. The Knights Templar and Hospitaller

cathhh03.mp3

Order of Knights created to serve the Church during the Crusades to protect pilgrims and Catholic Christian Churches in the Holy Land from Muslim invaders.

4. The Inquisition: Medieval, Spanish and Roman: What’s the Real Story?
cathhh04.mp3

The Roman inquisition was quite different from the Spanish and in fact was quite mild in comparison. The purpose was to root out heresy and protect the doctrines and deposit of Faith of the Church. In Spain, the State was experiencing cases where false converts, particularly from Islam, were trying to infiltrate and overthrow the Monarchy.

5. Spain, England & America: The Black Legend, True or False?

cathhh05.mp3

The Tears of the Indians, a book published in England, claimed that the Spanish explorers and settlers of the New World were exploiting and forcing the American natives to convert to Catholicism. This was propaganda aimed at denouncing the Catholic Church and the Spanish Monarchy as well.

6. Galileo: The Church and Science
cathhh06.mp3

Galileo was asked to refrain from speaking about his agreement with the Copernican view of the Universe. The Church and the Pope never said that Copernicus theory was wrong, rather the Church wanted to avoid confusion for those who would not understand the change from a Ptolemaic view to a Copernican view of the universe. Almost all of the scientific discoveries of the age were made possible through the Universities established by the Church.

7. The Protestant Reformation and How The People of England Opposed it

cathhh07.mp3

8. The English Civil War: What Really Happened?
cathhh08.mp3

9. The Enlightenment and the Suppression of the Jesuits

cathhh09.mp3

10. The French Revolution and the Destruction of Christendom

cathhh10.mp3

11. The Counter-revolution in France & Austria

cathhh11.mp3

12. 1848 to WWI: The Rise of Secularism, Nationalism & Totalitarianism
cathhh12.mp3

13. The Church in the 20th Century

cathhh13.mp3

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Related posts:

The Catholic Church: Builder Of Civilization (audio)

Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (video)

Please post your comments.

Do Catholics And Muslims Worship The Same God ?

It certainly seems as if we worship the same God. After all, we call God by the same name. Arabic-speaking Christians, including Eastern Catholics such as Maronites and Melkites, use the word “Allah” for the God of the Bible.

But are they the same God?

The question is not answered by simple linguistic identity, as evidenced by St. Paul’s complaint to the Corinthians: “For if some one comes and preaches another Jesus than the one we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough” (2 Corinthians 11:4). The “other Jesus” that was being preached among the Corinthians was not a different person of the same name, but a view of Jesus of Nazareth that was so radically different from Paul’s that he termed it “another Jesus” altogether.

In the same way, it is possible that the Qur’an and Islamic tradition present a picture of God so radically different from that of the Bible and Catholic tradition that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the proposition that they are the same Being in both traditions, apart from some minor creedal differences.

But wait a minute. Don’t Catholics have to believe that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, because the Second Vatican Council says so? The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church tells us that the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.” (Lumen Gentium 16)

It is almost more important to clarify what this text does not say than what it does. The first statement, that “the plan of salvation also includes” Muslims, has led some – mostly critics of the Church – to assert that the Council Fathers are saying that Muslims are saved, and thus need not be preached the Gospel, as they’ve already got just as much of a claim on Heaven as do Christians.

This is obviously false. This statement on Muslims comes as part of a larger passage that begins by speaking of “those who have not yet received the Gospel” and concludes by reaffirming “the command of the Lord, ‘Preach the Gospel to every creature.’” It speaks of the possibility of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do not know the Gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”

Clearly, then, Muslims figure in the “plan of salvation” not in the sense that they are saved as Muslims, that is, by means of Islamic observance, but insofar as they strive to be attentive to and to obey the authentic voice of the Creator whom they acknowledge and who speaks to them through the dictates of their conscience.

This suggests that a Muslim who refrains from suicide bombing because he understands that it is cold-blooded murder has a better chance to be saved, and is more clearly attuned to the promptings of the Creator within whose plan of salvation he finds himself, than does a Muslim who blows himself up in a crowd of infidels because the Qur’an promises a place in Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111).

The Conciliar statement also wisely adds the caveat, all too often ignored by the Church’s critics, that “Mohammedans” (Musulmanos) are “professing” to hold the faith of Abraham. Whether or not they actually hold it is arguable, but the Vatican Council is only noting that they claim for their faith that it is that of Abraham, without discussing whether or not Islam actually is an authentically Abrahamic faith.

Likewise widely misinterpreted, or at least given a weight that it was clearly never meant to bear, is the subsequent affirmation that Muslims “along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.” Many see in this also an assertion that the Gospel need not be preached to Muslims, or that they are already saved, for they adore the one and merciful God. Many Catholics, including writers of some prominence, have asserted that Vatican II, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church that quotes it, teach that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, and then proceed as if this establishes more than it actually does, or as if it were obvious that the Council was thus forbidding a critical stance toward Islam or concern about Islamic supremacist advances in Europe and the U.S.

In this vein the great Catholic writer and apologist Peter Kreeft writes disapprovingly that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam (for example, in Vatican II and the new Catechism): that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God.” He leaves unexplained, however, what he thinks that means exactly, or what responsibilities or courses of action it sets out for Catholics.

The Council document is actually saying perhaps less than Kreeft and others of like mind would wish it to be saying. In the first place it is clearly affirming that Muslims, like Christians, are monotheists, which is a rather commonplace observation that has been noted numerous times over the fourteen centuries of Islam’s existence. As far back as 1076, Pope St. Gregory VII wrote to Anzir, the king of Mauritania, that “we believe and confess one God, although in different ways.”

What it is asserting beyond that bare fact, if anything, can best be ascertained by considering the passage in light of those “different ways” to which Pope Gregory alluded. It is noteworthy that Pope Gregory doesn’t say that the one God that he and King Anzir both worship is the same God. All he says is that both he and Anzir worship one God; in other words, they’re both monotheists. And the Second Vatican Council is not actually making a definitive statement on that issue. It is saying that both Catholics and Muslims adore the one and merciful God, and while that clearly does indicate a certain commonality, there can be no doubt about one thing it certainly doesn’t mean: that Muslims and Catholics adore the same God in every particular, for Catholics do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet or the Qur’an is God’s Word, and Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God or the Savior of the world, or that God is Triune.

The same may be said of Jews, of course: they, along with Muslims, reject the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the divinity of Christ, and yet clearly Catholics and Jews worship the same God. This, however, is because Christianity began as a form of Judaism and is in a certain sense an extension of it, affirming faith in the same Old Testament Scriptures, the same prophets, and many points of belief.

These things cannot be said about Islam, which considers itself to be less an extension of Christianity than a rejection and correction of it, such that Muslims even reject the Old and New Testament Scriptures as corruptions.

In declaring that both Muslims and Catholics adore the one and merciful God, the Council obviously did not mean that Muslims and Catholics regard that God in exactly the same way, or that the differences were insignificant. The Council is silent on the question of whether or not the Muslims’ adoration is blind or informed. So what, then, is the Council actually saying?

Vatican II was a large-scale attempt to restore relationships that had been broken for centuries and build new bridges of trust where groups had been divided from the Church by centuries of mistrust, suspicion and outright conflict. Consequently it emphasized common ground rather than differences, unlike every ecumenical council that preceded it. No case, however, can be made that its statement about the shared adoration of the one and merciful God in any way mitigated the Church’s truth claim or sense of its own responsibility to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, any more than shared monotheism removes that responsibility in regard to Protestants or anyone else, for that responsibility is reiterated in the same passage.

It is not even certain that the Council is saying that Muslims and Catholics adore the same “one and merciful God.” Muslims certainly believe that their one and merciful God is the same One whom Christians (and Jews) worship, for the Qur’an tells them so (29:46). And whether they know it or not, the only God actually available to receive their adoration and hear their prayers is the Christian one. However, the differences in how Muslims and Catholics conceive of the one and merciful God lead to the possibility that while Muslims believe that they are worshiping the same God that Catholic worship, the teachings of Islam itself, despite the Qur’an’s insistence that Muslims worship the same God as do Christians and Jews, actually paints a picture of a God who is substantially different from the God of the Bible and the Catholic Faith.

It is noteworthy in this connection that the Council speaks of “Muslims” (Musulmanos), not “Islam,” adoring with Catholics the one and merciful God. It is a manifest fact that Muslim people believe that their God and the Christians’ God is the same. It is by no means as clear that the teachings of Islam itself about God offer a picture of the same Being who is delineated in orthodox Catholic theology. Although Arabic-speaking Christians generally use the word “Allah” for the God of the Bible – the same Arabic word used for the God of the Qur’an – this identity of name does not require that the two Beings referred to in each book are one and the same. It may be so, but it is not established on the basis of the Qur’an’s declaration, or of the identity in nomenclature.

In any case, this short passage from Lumen Gentium is burdened down by a weight of assumptions. When Kreeft says that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam (for example, in Vatican II and the new Catechism): that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God,” he apparently assumes that to affirm that Muslims and Christians worship the same God establishes an important kinship between the two groups, and may even indicate that Islam in itself is a fundamentally good thing, such that Catholics should encourage Islamic faith and Muslim piety. Kreeft, in fact, espoused such a view in a debate with me.

These assumptions, however, do not proceed as a matter of necessity or inevitability from the Conciliar text. It would do no outrage to that text if the differences between the Islamic and Catholic views of the one and merciful God, and between Islam and Catholicism in general, were such that Catholics would not wish to encourage Muslim faith or fervor. One may therefore take a jaundiced view of the prospects for Catholic/Muslim cooperation and dialogue without dissenting from the Council’s teaching.

At the same time, even if the Council Fathers did mean to affirm that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, this would have little significance for the contemporary ecclesiastical or political situation, in which Muslims are oppressing and killing Christian believers in several countries without regard for the Qur’an’s insistence that “our Allah and your Allah is one.” And as for the assumption that the Council meant to speak of a special kinship between Catholics and Muslims, Catholics have a moral obligation to be charitable to all people, regardless of whether or not they believe in the same God we do. Genuine charity includes a concern for justice.

The second Vatican II reference to Islam comes in the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions,Nostra Aetate:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

While this is a bit more descriptive about Muslim belief than was Lumen Gentium, as it includes the Islamic classification of Jesus as a non-divine prophet and Islam’s respect for the Virgin Mary, it adds nothing in terms of substance to the Dogmatic Constitution’s statements about Muslims. Here again we see that the Muslim linkage of Islam to Abraham is presented not as fact, but as something Muslims affirm, or “take pleasure” in affirming. Here again we see that they adore the one, merciful God; in other words, that they’re monotheists.

That is all that Vatican II is really saying about Muslims: they’re monotheists, they say they belong to the religion of Abraham, and they revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God, and His Blessed Mother.

The tone is very different, but not much in terms of substance is added in earlier Church statements on Muslims and Islam. And as Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us, Vatican II is not a super-council that supersedes all previous Church teaching; rather, its teachings must be understood in light of tradition. When it comes to Islam, the consistent focus in earlier statements about Islam is generally not on what Muslims believe, but on Islam as a heresy, and on the hostility of Muslims to Christians and Christianity. In that vein, Pope Benedict XIV in 1754 reaffirmed an earlier prohibition on Albanian Catholics giving their children “Turkish or Mohammedan names” in baptism by pointing out that not even Protestants or Orthodox were stooping so low: “none of the schismatics and heretics has been rash enough to take a Mohammedan name, and unless your justice abounds more than theirs, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.”

Pope Callixtus III, in a somewhat similar spirit, in 1455 vowed to “exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.” Neither this statement nor that of Lumen Gentium rise to the level of a dogmatic definition, but is it possible for Islam to be a “diabolical sect” that at the same time adores the “one and merciful God”? Certainly, for it is always possible that their adoration of the one and merciful God may be wrongly directed, marred by wrong emphases and outright falsehoods.

Nonetheless, many Catholics would argue that the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III (and others like them from other popes) reflect a very different age from our own, and that Vatican II’s statements reflect a more mature spirit, as well as the charity toward others that Christians should properly exhibit. And that may well be so, although it must be noted that even though they are only fifty years old, the statements of Vatican II on Islam reflect the outlook of a vanished age no less than do those of the earlier popes. For in the 1960s, secularism and Westernization were very much the order of the day in many areas of the Islamic world. It was, for example, unusual in Cairo in the 1960s to see a woman wearing a hijab, an Islamic headscarf mandated by Muhammad’s command that a woman when appearing in public should cover everything except her face and hands. Now, on the other hand, one may walk down the streets of the same city and be surprised to see a woman who is not so attired.

This change has not been solely external. The hijabs in Cairo are but one visible sign of a revolution that has swept the Islamic world, or more properly, a revival. Islamic values have been revived, including not only rigor in dress codes but also a hostility toward Western ideas and principles. The “Arab Spring” uprisings have led to a reassertion of the political aspects of Islam, as opposed to Western political models, all across the Middle East. Western ideas of democracy and pluralism that were fashionable in elite circles all over the Islamic world in the first half of the twentieth century have fallen into disrepute.

One consequence of all this is that the Islamic world that the Fathers of Vatican II had in mind is rapidly disappearing. The words of Vatican II on Muslims must be accorded the respect that all Church teaching merits, and obeyed to the degree that obedience is owed to all magisterial statements. These statements must be evaluated, however, within the context of their times. The documents of Vatican II are no less a product of their age than the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III are a product of theirs. Just as the age of crusading knights has vanished, so also the age of a dominant secular West striding confidently into what it terms the “modern” age is rapidly vanishing. This is not to devalue or denigrate the Council in any way, but simply to see it as what it is, no more, no less: an enunciation of certain eternal truths, to be sure, but within the context of a number of unexamined and yet decisively influential core beliefs and assumptions about the nature of the world and of mankind.

Ultimately, while it may always be the Christian’s responsibility to reach out with respect and esteem to Muslims, the hostility that the Islamic world had always displayed toward Christendom was never less in evidence than it was in the 1960s, and so a statement of friendship was never more appropriate, either before or since. That situation does not prevail today, a fact that has a great many implications for the prospects for dialogue as well: Western-minded Muslims who have a favorable attitude toward the Catholic Church no longer have nearly the influence among their coreligionists that they once had, at least in the Islamic world.

That is not to say, however, that we have returned to the world of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III, when Catholics understood that Mohammedanism, as it was then popularly styled (to the indignation of Muslims themselves) was a heresy, steeped in falsehood and perhaps even diabolical, and dedicated to the destruction of the Church and the conversion or subjugation of Christians. We are centuries away, and separated by chasms of cultural assumptions, from the world in which it was even possible to think of one’s faith as having enemies and needing to be defended. Catholics of the modern age have long assumed that that world was gone forever, and there is some reason to believe that it is indeed.

But with Muslim persecution of Christians escalating worldwide, there is also considerable evidence that that rough old world is returning, and may never have been as far away as it seemed to be.

Source: Crisis Magazine

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Is Catholicism Superior ?

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Chartres Cathedral: Sacred Geometry

This extraordinary documentary film explores one of the most beautiful and mysterious cathedrals in the world, the famous Chartres Cathedral in Chartres, France.

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Catholic Vs Protestant Debate

Watch these videos. It summarises the ongoing differences between Catholics and Protestants.

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The Case For Christ

This documentary The Case for Christ follows reporter Lee Strobel as he interviews a number of religious and historical scholars in order to find out if there is any proof of the resurrection, and to discover the historical veracity of the New Testament. In trying the case for Christ, Strobel cross-examined a number of experts and recognized authorities in their own fields of study. He conducted his examination with no religious bias, other than his predisposition to atheism.

Remarkably, after compiling and critically examining the evidence for himself, Strobel became a Christian. Stunned by his findings, he organized the evidence into a book he entitled, The Case for Christ, which has won the Gold Medallion Book Award for excellence. Strobel asks one thing of each reader – remain unbiased in your examination of the evidence.

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The Real History Of The Crusades

The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history. Most of what passes for public knowledge about it is either misleading or just plain wrong

Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression -- an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity -- and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion -- has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt -- once the most heavily Christian areas in the world -- quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:

How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? ...Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?

At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love" -- in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, ‘Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors...unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? ...And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood...condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?

The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God. Medieval men knew, of course, that God had the power to restore Jerusalem Himself -- indeed, He had the power to restore the whole world to His rule. Yet as St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached, His refusal to do so was a blessing to His people:

Again I say, consider the Almighty's goodness and pay heed to His plans of mercy. He puts Himself under obligation to you, or rather feigns to do so, that He can help you to satisfy your obligations toward Himself.... I call blessed the generation that can seize an opportunity of such rich indulgence as this.

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.

The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes. These are usually well-remembered today. During the early days of the First Crusade in 1095, a ragtag band of Crusaders led by Count Emicho of Leiningen made its way down the Rhine, robbing and murdering all the Jews they could find. Without success, the local bishops attempted to stop the carnage. In the eyes of these warriors, the Jews, like the Muslims, were the enemies of Christ. Plundering and killing them, then, was no vice. Indeed, they believed it was a righteous deed, since the Jews' money could be used to fund the Crusade to Jerusalem. But they were wrong, and the Church strongly condemned the anti-Jewish attacks.

Fifty years later, when the Second Crusade was gearing up, St. Bernard frequently preached that the Jews were not to be persecuted:

Ask anyone who knows the Sacred Scriptures what he finds foretold of the Jews in the Psalm. "Not for their destruction do I pray," it says. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered.... Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity, but "they only wait for the time of their deliverance."

Nevertheless, a fellow Cistercian monk named Radulf stirred up people against the Rhineland Jews, despite numerous letters from Bernard demanding that he stop. At last Bernard was forced to travel to Germany himself, where he caught up with Radulf, sent him back to his convent, and ended the massacres.

It is often said that the roots of the Holocaust can be seen in these medieval pogroms. That may be. But if so, those roots are far deeper and more widespread than the Crusades. Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested. In a modern war, we call tragic deaths like these "collateral damage." Even with smart technologies, the United States has killed far more innocents in our wars than the Crusaders ever could. But no one would seriously argue that the purpose of American wars is to kill women and children.

By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts.

When the Crusader County of Edessa fell to the Turks and Kurds in 1144, there was an enormous groundswell of support for a new Crusade in Europe. It was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard himself. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed along the way. Those who made it to Jerusalem only made things worse by attacking Muslim Damascus, which formerly had been a strong ally of the Christians. In the wake of such a disaster, Christians across Europe were forced to accept not only the continued growth of Muslim power but the certainty that God was punishing the West for its sins. Lay piety movements sprouted up throughout Europe, all rooted in the desire to purify Christian society so that it might be worthy of victory in the East.

Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. Only a tiny handful of ports held out.

The response was the Third Crusade. It was led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. By any measure it was a grand affair, although not quite as grand as the Christians had hoped. The aged Frederick drowned while crossing a river on horseback, so his army returned home before reaching the Holy Land. Philip and Richard came by boat, but their incessant bickering only added to an already divisive situation on the ground in Palestine. After recapturing Acre, the king of France went home, where he busied himself carving up Richard's French holdings. The Crusade, therefore, fell into Richard's lap. A skilled warrior, gifted leader, and superb tactician, Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. But Jerusalem was not on the coast, and after two abortive attempts to secure supply lines to the Holy City, Richard at last gave up. Promising to return one day, he struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. But it was a bitter pill to swallow. The desire to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule and regain the True Cross remained intense throughout Europe.

The Crusades of the 13th century were larger, better funded, and better organized. But they too failed. The Fourth Crusade (1201-1204) ran aground when it was seduced into a web of Byzantine politics, which the Westerners never fully understood. They had made a detour to Constantinople to support an imperial claimant who promised great rewards and support for the Holy Land. Yet once he was on the throne of the Caesars, their benefactor found that he could not pay what he had promised. Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further -- and perhaps irrevocably -- apart.

The remainder of the 13th century's Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis's death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant's The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled "Of the Decline of the Faith":

Our faith was strong in th' Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
'Twould even grieve the hardest stone....
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They're of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they've been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up.

Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.

Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe -- something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic -- no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.

End note: Regarding the modern day reference to the crusades as a supposed grievance by Islamic militants still upset over them, Madden notes: "If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn't they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europe's first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They haven't been the same since." He adds, "The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy." "The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances," Madden observes.

Commenting on the recent scholarship of Oxford historian Christopher Tyerman in his recent, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford, 2005), Professor Steven Ozment of Harvard writes how Tyerman: "maintains that the four centuries of holy war known as the Crusades are both the best recognized and most distorted part of the Christian Middle Ages. He faults scholars, pundits, and laymen on both sides of the East-West divide for allowing the memory of the Crusades to be 'woven into intractable modern political problems,' where it 'blurs fantasy and scholarship' and exacerbates present-day hatreds." Ozment notes how Tyerman also views "the Crusades as neither an attempt at Western hegemony, nor a betrayal of Western Christian teaching and practice." As Tyerman explains, the warriors who answered the pope's call to aid Christendom in the Holy Land were known as crucesignati, "those signed with the cross." Professor Tyerman considers the Crusades to have largely been "warfare decked out in moral and religious terms" and describes them as "the ultimate manifestation of conviction politics." He points out the Crusades were indeed "butchery" with massacres of Muslims and Jews, and that even among their contemporaries, crusaders had mixed reputations as "chivalric heroes and gilded thugs." However, as Ozment observes, Tyerman adds that rather "than simple realpolitik and self-aggrandizement, the guiding ideology of crusading was that of religious self-sacrifice and revival, and directly modeled on the Sacrament of Penance." See: Steven Ozment's "Fighting the Infidel: the East-West holy wars are not just history".

Whereas as support for the crusades was far from universal within Christendom, in contrast Medieval Muslim expansion through the military conquest of jihad as dictated by the Koran was directly supported by Islamic scholars, who provided a spiritual imperative for violence. For example, Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), who wrote: "Since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God's entirely and God's word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought." And by Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), who declared, "In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and [the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." (See: Robert Conquest's, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, reviewed at: http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton100406.html).

Classical scholar, historian, and commentator, Victor David Hanson, reviewing Christopher Tyerman's recent 1,000-page history of the Crusades, God's War (Belknap Press 2006), notes how Tyerman is careful beforehand to declare the political neutrality of his work: "This study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgment…not a confessional apologia or a witness statement in some cosmic law suit." Tyerman's history then points out, as Hanson then succinctly summarizes, that "it was not merely glory or money or excitement that drove Westerners of all classes and nationalities to risk their lives in a deadly journey to an inhospitable east, but rather a real belief in a living God and their own desire to please him through preserving and honoring the birth and death places of his son." For the crusaders, religious "belief governed almost every aspect of their lives and decision-making. The Crusades arose when the Church, in the absence of strong secular governments, had the moral authority to ignite the religious sense of thousands of Europeans -- and they ceased when at last it lost such stature." Noting the widespread ignorance of the true history this subject among most modern Westerners, Hanson comments on how absent "is any historical reminder that an ascendant Islam of the Middle Ages was concurrently occupying the Iberian peninsula -- only after failing at Poitiers in the eighth century to take France. Greek-speaking Byzantium was under constant Islamic assault that would culminate in the Muslim occupation of much of the European Balkans and later Islamic armies at the gates of Vienna. Few remember that the Eastern Mediterranean coastal lands had been originally Phoenician and Jewish, then Persian, then Macedonian, then Roman, then Byzantine -- and not until the seventh-century Islamic. Instead, whether intentionally or not, post-Enlightenment Westerners have accepted [Osama] bin Laden's frame of reference that religiously intolerant Crusaders had gratuitously started a war to take something that was not theirs." (See: http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson032107.html)


ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thomas F. Madden. "The Real History of the Crusades." Crisis 20, no. 4 (April 2002).

This article is reprinted with permission from the Morley Institute a non-profit education organization. To subscribe to Crisis magazine call 1-800-852-9962.


THE AUTHOR

Thomas F. Madden is associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the author of Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice, A Concise History of the Crusades, The Crusades: The Essential Readings, and coauthor of The Fourth Crusade.

Source: Catholic Education Resource Centre

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