NY RESOLUTION: RESIGN FROM EMHC SACRILEGE

To comment please open your gmail account or use my email address, FB Messenger or X (Twitter). Protestant rants not published on this page. Thank you,

 

It beggars belief that 'Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion' (EMHCs) are still at it, doling out the Most Precious Body and Blood of Christ with unconsecrated hands, in the Novus Ordo Church of Antipope Francis. Literally, it beggars belief. In more ways than one. Because this noxious practice has helped beggar the belief - the faith - of millions of Catholics worldwide who've left the Church since Vatican II.

But it has also caused conversion in numberless Catholics who, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, realise the sacrilege committed in treating their Lord and Saviour with such contumely and have fled the NO to the faith of their fathers, in the Traditional Latin Mass.

In the early '50s the former Communist Bella Dodd said: “In the 1930s we put 1100 men into the priesthood to destroy the Church from within.” 12 years before Vatican II, she said, “Right now they are in the highest places in the Church.” The Catholic Church was  feared by communists; the focus their attack was the Holy Eucharist. The putative memoir of communist agent AA 1025 stated that "The Host will be laid in the hand in order that all notion of the Sacred be erased."

Slowing reception of the Eucharist by offering Communion under two kinds, in the hand and in queues, seems a cunning ploy to necessitate EMHCs. By the millennial, efficient practice of Communion at altar rails, kneeling and on the tongue, they'd be made redundant. 

It's New Year's Eve. What better moment for a resolution to resign as Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. Forthwith. 

From the inimitable Ann Barnhardt:

 

If any of you readers out there are “Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion” in the Novus Ordo, you really, really need to stop. Immediately.

 

In my first year after being received into the Church (Novus Ordo), I did prison ministry at the Arapahoe County Jail. It was all laypeople. Not even the “permanent” deacons went. And, to my abject horror in retrospect, we were enjoined to perform “Catholic Communion Services” using a script authored by the not-very-conservative “conservative” Archbishop Charles Chaput.

 

The “team leader” for the day would pass out, completely casually in the locker room of the jail, The Blessed Sacrament to each team going to one of the six cellblocks. “How many do you want? Six? Okay. Here.” I think back on that and cringe. More than once I was handed a pyx filled with Hosts, which I then PUT IN MY POCKET and carried down to the cellblock.

 

The only thing I can say in my own defense is that as I was walking down to the cellblock, I would “talk” to Our Lord, generally remarking to Him that He was the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, Infinite Love and Power Himself, and… He was in my pocket.

 

At least I acknowledged Him, and the situation, which is more than could be said for most. But it was still so totally, horrifically wrong.

horrifically WRONG

 

 

Since I could speak a little Spanish, I was almost always sent to the Spanish-speaking cellblock, and most of the men who came to the “Communion Service” were either maximum security or super-max, that is, wearing either orange or red jumpsuits. Was I ever scared? No way.

 

I was safe as a kitten. I had 15 or more exceptionally capable bodyguards at all times. The men were mostly Mexican, with some Central Americans. And I learned two very important lessons about Eucharistic piety from those men.

 

First, many of them did not receive Holy Communion. Why? Because they had, in their words, “two wives”. That is, they were divorced and civilly “re-married”, or divorced and shacking up with another woman. They KNEW this meant that they could not receive – but they still came.

 

The other thing I learned from the Latino felons in the jail was pre-conciliar Eucharistic piety. When they walked into the room, and saw the pyx containing the Blessed Sacrament on the table, they would immediately fall to their knees and reverence Our Lord. They believed in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Far, far more than the upper-middle class American Novus Ordoists.

 

The Fruit of the First Sorrowful Mystery, Our Lord’s Agony in the Garden, is SORROW FOR SIN. Oftentimes poorly formed priests tell people that once they have confessed a sin, they should never think about it again. This is wrong.

 

 

 

As one progresses and tries to advance in sanctity, one of the graces that follows is realizing not only what sins one has committed in the past, but realizing WHY those sins were sins, and just how awful they were. So, not only did I confess my participation in these “Catholic Communion Services” and the intrinsic sacrilege of them and of my physical handling of the Blessed Sacrament, but I also always mention these sins when I make a General Confession. Thank God!

 

Thank God that now I not only know, but that the horror of it gets continually stronger. Let this process of realizing the kind and gravity of my sins never cease!

Which brings us to the whole question of physically touching the Blessed Sacrament. It is all in John 20. Our Lord tells Mary Magdalene that SHE MAY NOT TOUCH HIM (verse 17), but just a few verses later specifically tells St. Thomas to stick his finger in Our Lord’s side (verse 27). What is the difference?

 

St. Thomas, having been present at The Last Supper which was not only about the institution of the Mass and the Eucharist, but also about the INSTITUTION OF THE PRIESTHOOD (Do this in memory of Me), was already an ordained priest. The Sacramentally Ordained may touch the Blessed Sacrament (Deacons, Priests, Bishops). Anyone else, male or female, may NOT. Period. https://www.barnhardt.biz/2022/04/14/only-priests-may-touch-the-lord/

And also, for people on holiday who are not reading-impaired, a slightly longer piece: https://onepeterfive.com/lay-eucharistic-ministers-a-communist-connection/

Christ Appearing to Magdalen ("Noli Me Tangere") by Rembrandt

"Do not touch Me!"

- Jn 20,17 

 

TATTS: OK, OR PORTAL TO THE DEMONIC?

To comment please open your gmail account. Or use my email address or FB Messenger or  (Twitter). Protestant rants are not posted on this page.

TPM's Rawiri Waititi, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer   

Tatts! Tattoos are rife in Western culture. Is there a single Kiwi family that's tatt-free? The dark art of inking the body - in living memory done only by side-show freaks and low-lifes - is now so embedded (pun intended) that even devout Catholics, even priests, are showing them off, usually as the Jerusalem cross.

A current, slightly hysterical FB post (below) rather overstates the case against tattooing by calling it a portal to the demonic - a theory supported by facial evidence in Te Paati Maori's Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (above), influencers whose racism could be described as demonic. The 'mental stress' of Labour's fallen Kiri Allan, whose backside tattoo is repulsive and the Greens' Chloe Swarbrick, a lesbian and rabid Hamas supporter, likewise. With the eclipse of the Catholic Church now led by the pretender pope, Francis, a case could easily be made for tattoos as symbols of a resurgence of paganism, and a New World Order. 

"You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh"(Lev 19,28.) You could argue that in going beyond the Natural Law (e.g. prohibiting certain foods), this Old Testament law is no longer in force. But it is fulfilled in Christ, Who came to perfect the Law. Tattooing is certainly an offence against the Fifth Commandment and opposes the first  inclination of the Natural Law, which is to preserve our being as it is (Fr Chad Ripperger, exorcist). 

And as a wise old Jesuit priest has said, “No one changes externals without having changed internals.”  As an antidote to the FB post below, please read Morality of Tattoos and Body Piercing by Father Peter Joseph.http://www.latinmassmagazine.com/articles/articles_2002_SU_Joseph.html

Chloe Swarbrick's predatory wasp tattoo

A few decades ago, there would have been no need to debate tattoo morality. Previously, they were common among rebellious, low-conditioned or mentally unstable people and were generally considered a sign of moral degeneration. Behind every tattoo is Satan.

 

Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and author of the Satanic Bible, called tattoos a “declaration against Christianity” and, as early as 1990, stated that Satanism is behind every tattoo, whether it is a rose or a dragon. This alone provides reason enough to condemn tattoos in opposition to the census catholicus (sic).

 

 

Pagan tatts worn by Balkan Slavs to avoid forced conversion to Islam, 1930-1940.

 

However, as with many other controversial issues, progressives have claimed that the Church has no official stance on this issue. Some have falsely hinted that rare exceptions (such as tattoos received by Eastern Catholics during times of persecution) rule the rule.

 

 

Despite this confusion, the teaching of the Church is clear and unchanging. The matter is drawn out by the Scriptures, which say: "YOU SHALL NOT MAKE STRUGGLES ON YOUR FLESH BECAUSE OF A DEAD; NOR PRINT TATTOOS ON YOURSELF. I AM JAVHE” (Leviticus. XIX:28) Monsignor Straubinger, The Holy Bible. "You shall not make any cuttings in your flesh, for the dead, neither shall you make in yourselves any figures or marks: I am the Lord" (Douay- Rheims).

 

 

This prohibition cannot be dismissed as a mere ceremonial law, as it belongs to the Fifth Commandment. Tattoos entail self mutation (sic), which can never be tolerated. Furthermore, according to the Catholic tradition, it is not permissible to artificially alter one's own appearance in a significant way, as it is a sign of vanity. It implies that permanently coloring the skin with drawings and figures of ink falls into this category.

 

Even more worrying is that tattoos violate the First Commandment because they are inseparable from pagan spirituality. Just as yoga or witchcraft cannot be Christianized, neither can modern tattoos. Regardless of the intention, they serve as a conduit to the false gods.

Steve Gilbert's book, A Tattoo History: A Source Book, notes that in ancient times, the actual process of tattooing, which involved complex rituals and taboos, could only be performed by priests and was associated with beliefs that were secrets only known to members of the priestly caste...

 

 

Fr Dwight Longenecker's Jerusalem Cross

The tattoos originated in connection with ancient rituals of scarification and bloodshed that were associated with religious practices intended to bring the human soul into harmony with supernatural forces and ensure continuity between this life and the next. ” (p. 158)

Ancient Egypt, sadly famous for its hidden practices, placed heavy emphasis on tattoos. Historians have noted tattoos on some mummies. They often contained symbols related to particular gods or rituals. Tattoos were considered a “amule” that could provide protection. Furthermore, certain tattoos were thought to have the spiritual power to alleviate pain.

Since the practices of Ancient Egypt have provided the basis for secret societies and false religions that endure to this day, it is almost certain that these tattooing practices have also continued with a hidden meaning.

Contemporary tribal cultures still openly use tattoos for spiritual purposes. Among them, the Maori tribe (sic) uses them as good luck charms. Each symbol contains its own spiritual meaning which is not evident to the casual observer. Could the designs offered at western tattoo parlors contain similar symbols? Seems like it.

Although some tattoos may lack explicit pagan symbols, they are nonetheless a portal into the demonic.

 

 

For this reason, the Church systematically banned tattoos whenever it was established in a region. Emperor Constantine set this precedent after his conversion, banning tattoos throughout the Roman Empire. For many centuries, Western European rulers maintained restrictions on tattoos.

 

She loved Harry Potter so much she inked her whole arm; when JK Rowling called out men in dresses she inked it all out again

In addition, missionaries in foreign lands made efforts to end the practice when they found it. That's why, until recently, we didn't see Catholic tattoos even in areas that were previously tribal, such as some uncivilized parts of Latin America.

Exorcists have expressed concern about the spiritual dangers of tattoos, and there are no shortage of scary stories about them. Exorcist Father Stephen Rosetti admitted they can cause demonic infestations. On one occasion, a deacon poured holy water on a woman's tattoo. She screamed it was burning him (sic), even though the water was cold. This is remarkable because the tattoo was simply of a rose, not a devil or any other hidden image.

Long-serving Vatican exorcist, Father Gabriele Amorth, also criticized the tattoos. Once, during an exorcism, a demon confessed to him that tattoos are imbued with evil symbolism and are a powerful tool for his use.

And what about "Catholic" tattoos? According to Father Chad Ripperger, they are the worst of all. Far from providing spiritual protection, they invite demons. In an interview, he said: "The worst tattoo I've ever had to remove... "It was a tattoo of St. Michael the Archangel."

These tattoos are a form of sacrilege that offends saints and angels rather than honoring them. In a sense, it’s understandable that some may think that “Catholic” tattoos could be a way of remembering God. However, it is a cheap substitute for engraving His memory in our hearts, which is much more necessary.

 

He raped 2 women in Scotland, then said he was a woman and is now in a women's prison.

Those who wish to honor Our Lord through physical symbols can do so by wearing escapulars (sic), blessed medals, cords of saints (such as the cord of Saint Philomena or the cord of Saint Joseph) and, most importantly in our days, modest and counter-revolutionary clothing.

We can also consecrate ourselves, in body and soul, to our Blessed Mother, so that our own being becomes a reminder of the God to whom we belong. All of this is a more effective way to get closer to God.

Tattoos should always be avoided. Instead of joining the Cultural Revolution, Catholics should fight it and cling to the good customs of bygone eras.https://www.facebook.com/CatholicTraditionEvangelization/posts/tattoos-always-open-the-door-of-the-soul-to-the-devil-rita-a-stewarta-few-decade/1041193831380667/

The Martyrdom of St Thomas Becket (Albert-Pierre Dawant)

St Thomas Becket, please pray for us

UK'S WOKE KING, LEFTY PM LET ISLAM IN TO RUN RIOT

To comment please open your gmail account or use my email address, FB Messenger or X (Twitter). Protestant rants are not posted on this page. Thank you.

 "Allah Akbar!" Small boats crossed the English Channel on D-Day 1944, loaded with patriots intent on defending Great Britain from Nazi invaders. On Christmas Day 2024, the boats on the Channel went the other way, loaded with illegal Muslim 'asylum seekers'. A mass invasion, mostly males of fighting age, it amounts to 20,000 illegal immigrants since Labour's Keir Starmer became Prime Minister.

Another 604 illegal migrants entered the country on small boats yesterday. Almost none of them is fleeing war or repression, and once landed in Britain they're treated to benefits, housing and nothing but Halal meat to feed their many children in British schools. At an expense to Brits of 30 million POUNDS per year.

'English roses' - white British girls - are raped by Muslim grooming gangs while a complaint about Islam on social media earned a middle-aged woman a jail sentence. King Charles III, 'Defender of the Faith' professed by the Church of England (which is not the true faith), who proudly claims that "Britain is a diverse and multicultural success story" and calls his subjects to "celebrate diverse faiths at Christmas" is, according a BBC News broadcast & Burke’s Peerage, a direct descendant of Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam. And a globalist. Charles and Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum go a long way back.

self-explanatory 

Charles and his Prime Minister, Labour's Keir Starmer, come across as traitors to the British nation rather than defenders of its faith or heritage. Starmer's government is advertising a 6-year contract worth £521m to manage 2 sites in Kent for processing migrants arriving in the UK on small boats, with an option to extend for a further 4 years.

It's a cautionary tale for New Zealand, which amassed a staggering net migration of 128,900 people to New Zealand in 2023. 245,600 (up 165%) migrants arrived and 116,700 (up 26%) departed. In Prime Minister Luxon, New Zealand also has a globalist, woke leader of indeterminate political principle.

 This country is ripe for take-over, whether by Marxism or Islam. Take your pick. New Zealand desperately needs the faith and courage of the Crusaders, whose centuries-long  battle against Islam is told below. Only penitential love and  the restoration of the Kingship of Christ can restore this country, and the world.

Now                                       Then

And so now to the facts of the Crusades, rather than the fiction peddled by Protestants:

  

The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics; as the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the Catholic Church and Western civilization. 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 History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.

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 11th 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.

 

 

Angela Rayner, UK's  Deputy Prime Minister 

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.

 

Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt — once the most heavily Christian areas in the world — quickly succumbed. By the 8th century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the 11th 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.

 

UK pollies knew the danger of Islam 20 years ago. 1 in 100 in UK is now an illegal immigrant 

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 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. But the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

 

The UK Home Office - its makeup explains a great deal 

 

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?

“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. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:

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. 

 

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 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. 

 

The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions.There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes, well-remembered today. 

 

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

Jews perished during the Crusades, but the purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. 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.” 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 died, in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign 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 colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. 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, 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, the new Crusade in Europe was led by two kings, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, and preached by St. Bernard. It failed miserably. Most of the Crusaders were killed; 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 Christian cities began surrendering, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem on October 2. 

 

The response was the Third Crusade, led by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa of the German Empire, King Philip II Augustus of France, and King Richard I Lionheart of England. It was a grand affair, but 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's incessant bickering 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.  

 

Richard led the Christian forces to victory after victory, eventually reconquering the entire coast. Richard at last struck a truce with Saladin that ensured peace in the region and free access to Jerusalem for unarmed pilgrims. 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. 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 that even 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. Ruthless Muslim leaders 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. Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

 

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. 

 

In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated yet the sultan died shortly thereafter In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna.

 

The Renaissance 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.

 

 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.

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. 

 

self-explanatory

 

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.”

 

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”.

 

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.  Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328), 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 (sic).” 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 of 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.” (Redacted. (https://catholiceducation.org/en/controversy/the-real-history-of-the-crusades.html

 

The Massacre of the Innocents (Nicolas Poussin)

"A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not"(Mt 2,18)