A Blog for Dallas Area Catholics

More reasons why Obama’s comparison of islam to medieval Christianity was ludicrous February 9, 2015

When I briefly rebutted the muslim in chief’s conflation of Christianity with islam last week, I knew I was leaving out some important points.  The Crusades have been vilified as part of a deliberate strategy going back to the endarkenment, part of a broader process of painting the entire Middle Ages – and thus the Church – as a period of benighted ignorance, violence, and Catholic-fueled superstition.  To a very great degree, that vilification has succeeded: the Crusades are generally presented, and accepted, as being a very dark time when evil Christians attacked peaceful muslims for no other reason than to spread the Faith by the sword.  But as I pointed out last week, and as Professor Thomas Madden elaborates below, the Crusades were always a defensive reaction against a grave threat to the Faith, and were only called after decades (in the case of Albigensianism) or even centuries of attacks and provocations.

Very good points below, something handy to learn and be able to respond with:

……..people commit terrible deeds in the name of everything. The question isn’t whether humans can be evil, but whether those acts are consistent with their religious beliefs.…..[This is the crucial point.  There were many reasons for the Crusades, some of which we will see below, but the point of fact is that Christianity has never been a religion spread by the sword. But as Christians have lamented for centuries, and as Pope Benedict pointed out in his Regensburg address, islam has always been unique among the major world religions in being spread primarily by military conquest.  Even more, when Catholicism has been long established in an area, peace and the development of all the intellectual and artistic virtues almost invariably increase dramatically, whereas the muslim “ummah” has been, and remains, a vast locality where slavery, subjugation, the darkening of the intellect, and all manner of violence predominate.  This is painting with an enormous brush, there are many exceptions, but I don’t think the description off in those broad terms]

In any case, the Crusades and the Inquisition were in no way a distortion of medieval Christianity. Indeed, they were mainstream ideas with virtually no detractors. Both were initiated by popes, the unquestioned leaders of Western Christianity. Both were supported by generations of religious scholars and a complex infrastructure of canon law. The greatest kings of the Middle Ages, men like Richard the Lionheart of England and St. Louis IX of France, were ardent Crusaders and as a result were hailed as heroes.

Part of the problem here is that the president knows little, perhaps nothing, about the Crusades or the Inquisition. He is not alone in that, of course. Medieval historians have long lamented the gulf between fact and popular perceptions when it comes to these events. The Crusades were not brutal wars of colonial oppression or zealous attempts to spread Christianity by the sword. The First Crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to desperate appeals from the Christians of the Middle East, who had lately been conquered and continued to be persecuted by the Turks. And these were only the latest in more than four centuries of attacks on Christian peoples by Muslim powers. At some point Christianity as a faith and as a culture had to defend itself or else be subsumed by Islam. The work of the Crusader, who put his life at risk and underwent enormous expense, was to save Christian people and restore Christian lands. This was no perversion of Christianity. Christ had commanded his followers to be like the Good Samaritan, hurrying to bind up the wounds of their brother who had been robbed and beaten. This was the same Christ who said, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” That is how Crusaders honestly saw themselves following their Christian faith. [Because that is how they were]

……..Of course, many Christians, like the president, may still consider the Crusades and the Inquisition to be a distortion of their faith. Yet they should at least accept that others can honestly disagree. Protestants and Catholics follow different versions of Christianity, but we would strongly reject a president who tried to tell us which was right. By the same token, the president has even less authority to discern true from distorted Islam. ISIS is barbaric, but there is no denying that its adherents believe they are true followers of Islam. And they can point to medieval Muslim rulers who were just as bloody. The Egyptian leader Baybars, for example, captured the Christian city of Antioch in 1268 and massacred its entire population. Even Saladin, who is generally well regarded today, estimated that he had killed or executed 40,000 European Christians after the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Were these men, who were universally hailed as champions of Islam, perverters of the faith? And, if so, is it the president’s job to decide that?

———End Quote———

That’s just a couple of examples.  Others include the constant pirate raids along the entire Mediterranean coast, which resulted in the deaths of thousands and the carting away of thousands more to spend their lives in slavery.  Why did the great orders of the Mercidarians and others have to come into being?  To find a way, some way, to buy back – whether with money or the lives of the religious – the millions of Christians taken into islamic slavery over centuries.  Note, the muslims did not have to have a similar order to bring back muslim slaves from Christian conquest.  Did you know that muslim pirate raids were attacking as far north as the British Isles well into the 1600s?  Bristol and other western ports were sacked by muslims in the 1630s!  And the second siege of Vienna was fought in 1683.  The Christian nations – heretical or not – then began a rapid ascendancy as the Ottoman Empire just as quickly decayed, but all through its rise, from Malta to Rhodes to Constantinople, islam did not advance by making converts, but by military conquest.

And of course this tendency continues to our very day.  ISIS daily commits atrocities that would shock Atilla the Hun, Boko Haram just recently killed tens of thousands in very well coordinated attacks on Christians in Nigeria, Christians in South Sudan continue to be attacked, islamists wage a guerrilla war in the Catholic (nominally) Philippines…….it never seems to end.

Madden also refutes the notion of the Inquisition as some barbaric form of enforcing doctrinal uniformity by the Church. He points out that, in reality, the Inquisition was instituted to insure the accused had some rights against STATE authority, and that the worst excesses of witch-hunting and heretic-burning were in the protestant-dominated areas of 16th and 17th century Europe, where there was no Inquisition.  Not that there were not errors made – perhaps – nor that the Inquisition could not be infiltrated by worldly men seeking to gain riches and influence through placating the secular power, which may have occurred to some degree in Spain, but even there, the Inquisition was incredibly gentle and benign in comparison to the nightmare faced by English “recusant” Catholics not just under Queen Elizabeth, but for three hundred years.  And yet that vile persecution, possibly the longest and most sustained in the Church’s history, is utterly forgotten, while the Inquisition is made out to be like the Schutzstaffel of early modern Spain.

Yet that is the incredible power of the false narrative of the “englightenment” and the liberal-progressive party it spawned.  They have literally rewritten history to such an extent that only a few academics and a handful of others are even remotely able to see through the mighty fabrications they have weaved.