From the desk of the pastor for Aug. 31, 2024

The Lord be with you! Of all the things that the Church engaged in, the Crusades are the most controversial. They were also perhaps the most complex. This article will give some general points and note the areas and times of crusades.

First, the Church did not develop the idea of a holy war of conquest. The bloody takeover of the Middle East, North Africa, and Iberia by the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates for Islam redefined warfare in the seventh and eighth centuries. The Church certainly supported the defensive call to arms at the Battle of Tours that stopped the Umayyads from entering France in AD 732. From this point forward religion (Catholic and non) was a motivation to go to war.

Second, the original call to reconquer the Holy Land came not from the Pope but from the Byzantine Emperor in 1095. Emperor Alexius I Comnenus wanted help from the West in reclaiming lands in Turkey and Syria. He petitioned Pope Urban II for aid, and he agreed. At the end of the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban gave his famous speech calling for a crusade to retake the Holy Land. It is reasonable to assume that Pope Urban saw his cooperation with the Byzantine Emperor as a way of reuniting the Eastern and Western Churches, which had drifted into schism. Nevertheless, Pope Urban had argued that going on crusade would be a way of doing penance for their sins. Throughout the following centuries, most men who went on crusade did so to gain access to the Holy Land or to show God their sorrow for their sins.

Third, going on crusade could be ruinously expensive. Unlike today where travel is quick and relatively inexpensive, at the time of the crusades most people never left the town they were born in. A lord who went on crusade would have to pay for the transport, food, and wages of the knights he took. The levies - peasants forced to come along - would also have to be fed, and any ships carrying them would be paid for. The best example of this was King Louis IX, who spent an amount equal to six years of his government's taxes taking his armies to Egypt only to be captured himself.

Fourth, the crusades for the Holy Land were the least worthwhile. The Reconquista of Iberia can be seen as the most successful in terms of freeing Christians. The crusades in the Baltic went so well that the Teutonic Order got their own state: the Duchy of Prussia. The crusades against Catharism, also known as Albegensians, did remove the gnostic cult but at great cost in terms of lives.

As we have run out of space, next time we will address the morality of the Crusades in particular and war more generally. Even though the crusaders themselves were often motivated by the Gospel, they often conducted grossly unjust wars. Let us always remember to pray for peace.

In His Sacred Heart,

Fr. John