CRUSADES

Crusades

Were the crusades motivated mainly by devout factors?

Introduction

Modern history's judgment on the Crusades has been severe and myopic, set as it is on portraying this glorious episode of Christian history as morally evil. When I applaud the Middle Ages, I occasionally have young Catholics defiantly reply, “All right, all right. But how do you support the Crusades?”Indoctrinated by revisionist annals books and inter-religious study techniques, they have acknowledged the untrue decision that the Crusades were nothing more than a condemnable act of intolerance in the name of God.

Further, numerous of these youth have been adversely influenced by innumerable apologies for the Crusades from so numerous high-placed Catholic Prelates, devout, and educators of the post-Vatican II progressivist Church. Let me give only a couple of examples:

During a visit to Syria this year (2001), Pope John Paul II himself travelled to a mosque and inquired forgiveness of the Muslims “for Christian infringements and aggression of the past” (1)

On July 15, 1999, the 900th anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem to the Crusaders, a party of Christians, claiming to be portraying in the title of Christ and as presumed descendents of Crusaders, paraded round the wall of the vintage town to publicize a individual apology to Muslims for the Crusades (2). This small incident says a lot: A new church member high school in San Juan Capistrano (CA) chose the group name Crusaders, only to have the title vetoed by the board because “it would be attack to Muslims, who were targets of the bloody crusades of the Middle Ages” (3).

Unease lives within the place of worship itself over the unchanging apologies of the Pope for the Church. In its article on the papal apology, The Christian Science supervise accounts, “Commentator Vittorio Messori wrote in yesterday's prestigious Corriere della Sera every day, that there is a part of the Roman Curia that states, 'John Paul II is altering the past of the place of worship, is endangering exposing it to humiliations, is paying his values to its persecutors, is understanding ecumenism as syncretism, in which one belief appears to be good as any other.” RichardL. Wentworth, “Pope on a operation of contrition,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 2001.

An Apology, 900 years in the making,” Christianity Today, September 6, 1999.

“Crusaders misplace before Joining Battle,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 2001, B6.

To accept blame when one is at obvious error is, or course, good. But in the overhead cases, the apologizers and reconciliators only display that they have misinterpreted history.

First, they do not realise what inspired the West to a just conflict: The Crusades were conducted to recover the Holy Sepulchre, which had become the goal of unchanging profanation by the Muslims, for the defense of Christian pilgrims, and for the recovery of Christian territory. They constituted a defensive answer against the Islamic threat.

Second, they do not understand the hard-hitting nature and fanaticism of Islam (founded by Mohammed, who lived from about 570 to 632 AD), ...