Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. John Paul II, on ‘Emigration in Search of Work’)

“[T]he person working away from his native land, whether as a permanent emigrant or as a seasonal worker, should not be placed at a disadvantage in comparison with the other workers in that society in the matter of working rights. Emigration in search of work must in no way become an opportunity for financial or social exploitation. As regards the work relationship, the same criteria should be applied to immigrant workers as to all other workers in the society concerned. The value of work should be measured by the same standard and not according to the difference in nationality, religion or race. For even greater reason the situation of constraint in which the emigrant may find himself should not be exploited. All these circumstances should categorically give way, after special qualifications have of course been taken into consideration, to the fundamental value of work, which is bound up with the dignity of the human person. Once more the fundamental principle must be repeated: the hierarchy of values and the profound meaning of work itself require that capital should be at the service of labor and not labor at the service of capital.”—Polish-born pope St. John Paul II (1920-2005), in the encyclical Laborem Exercens (“On Human Work”), issued Sept. 14, 1981

Quote of the Day (P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, on the ‘Sheer Variety’ of Popes Throughout History)

“Seventy-eight [popes] have been declared saints as well as, oddly enough, two antipopes; eight have been pronounced ‘Blessed.’ There have been seventy-seven Roman popes, one hundred Italian, fourteen French, eleven Greek, six German, six Syrian, two Sardinian, two Spanish, two African, one English, one Dutch, one Portuguese, and one Polish. Fifteen have been monks, four friars, two laymen, and one a hermit. Four have abdicated, five have been imprisoned, four murdered, one openly assassinated, one deposed, and one subjected to a public flogging. One died of wounds he received in the midst of battle, and another after a ceiling collapsed and fell on him. The sheet variety of the ways they began and ended is riveting in itself."— Scottish historian P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, Chronicle of the Popes: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Papacy Over 2000 Years (1997)

Well, there is some limit to the variety of pontiffs, which you can see immediately in the accompanying composite photo: all aging white men.

Still, Maxwell-Stuart’s overall point is well-taken. Here are some updates on the helpful statistics above, as of yesterday:

*five popes have abdicated;

*83 have been declared saints;

*seven were German;

*one was Argentine;

*one is American.

Like his predecessors, Pope Leo XIV—the former Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost—will face immense challenges preaching the Gospel in a world increasingly hostile to its message of brotherhood, preserving the unity of the Church, and reaching out to other religions. He deserves our prayers, even as he prays for us.

One thing is for sure: he is likely to confound expectations, just as his predecessors back to and including Pope John XXIII did.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Pope St. Leo the Great, on the Paramount Importance of Mercy to the Poor)

“Although a man be full of faith, and chaste, and sober, and adorned with other still greater decorations, yet if he is not merciful, he cannot deserve mercy: for the Lord says, blessed are the merciful, for God shall have mercy upon them [Matthew 5:7]. And when the Son of Man comes in His Majesty and is seated on His glorious throne, and all nations being gathered together, division is made between the good and the bad, for what shall they be praised who stand upon the fight except for works of benevolence and deeds of love which Jesus Christ shall reckon as done to Himself? For He who has made man's nature His own, has separated Himself in nothing from man's humility. And what objection shall be made to those on the left except for their neglect of love, their inhuman harshness, their refusal of mercy to the poor? As if those on the right had no other virtues those on the left no other faults. But at the great and final day of judgment large-hearted liberality and ungodly meanness will be counted of such importance as to outweigh all other virtues and all other shortcomings, so that for the one men shall gain entrance into the Kingdom, for the other they shall be sent into eternal fire.”— Pope St. Leo the Great (c.400-461), “Sermon 10,” translated by Charles Lett Feltoe from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 12, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace

This Day in Catholic History (Fiery Pope Urban Sermon Launches Crusades)

Nov. 27, 1095—Having already issued decrees over the prior eight days that sought to curb simony, corruption and other deviations from church practice, Pope Urban II electrified a crowd of thousands in a French marketplace with a sermon calling for a continental military mission to deliver Jerusalem from Moslem control.

Urban’s fervent summons to his listeners, a motley group of priests, knights and peasants, spurred the Crusades, a series of expeditions that not only lasted beyond the remaining four years of his reign but into the 13^th century.

The goal of reducing the geographic reach of Islam in the Middle East was not achieved by all the subsequent massive expenditure of blood and treasure. Nevertheless, as with the great majority of wars, it produced unexpected consequences before the clash of arms faded.

A Hot Historical Debate

For centuries, the Western and Muslim worlds viewed the Crusades through sharply different lenses, a result of each sphere’s ethnocentricity. Increased contacts, rather than uniformly leading to greater tolerance and understanding, often only highlighted these profound differences.

From the Western side, the origin of “Crusade” bears witness to the religious fervor evoked by Pope Urban. The word blends the Middle French croisade and the Spanish cruzada, with both ultimately derived from the Latin cruc- or crux—i.e., “cross.” It was the symbol of a faith encircled and under siege.

With the rise of multicultural studies, the term began to take on more complicated overtones. Virtually nobody in the West blinked an eye, for instance, when Dwight D. Eisenhower titled his 1948 memoir on delivering Europe from Fascist tyranny Crusade in Europe.

But 53 years later—five days after 9/11—George W. Bush’s statement at a press conference referring to the war on terrorism as “this crusade” was assailed by many progressives as an ignorant gaffe certain to trigger the anger of an Islamic world with a long memory for ancient wrongs.

All of this has also, in the past 50 years, taken place within the context of constant Mideast tensions and terror, an era in which the much-discussed “clash of civilizations” has been accompanied by a clash of historians. This historiographical debate has “long remained a dialogue of the distinctly hard of hearing,” wrote historian Francis Robinson in an essay on “Islam and the West” in the May 1986 issue of History Today Magazine.

Karen Armstrong, a former Roman Catholic nun and commentator on comparative religion, epitomized the greater sympathy for Islam among scholars with Islam: A Short History, a revisionist history which argues that “it was Christians who had instigated a series of brutal holy wars against the Muslim world.” In this and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World, she traced many ills of the 20^th century—including the Holocaust and the Arab-Israeli conflict—back to the Crusades.

Revisionists such as Armstrong have been countered by the late Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith, who argued that “the original justification for crusading was Muslim aggression.” More important, Riley-Smith and the school of historians who followed in his wake reappraised the scope and longevity of the Crusades and the motives of the men who inspired and waged it.

The Council of Clermont: The Background and Fallout

The latter took their cue from Pope Urban, who delivered his sermon--perhaps the most crucial of the Middle Ages--at the Council of Clermont in central France. 

A reforming pope in the tradition of his mentor, Pope Gregory VII, he had convened this meeting in keeping with his longstanding vision of a church that would be “catholic, chaste and free: catholic in faith and the communion of saints, chaste from all contagion of evil, and free from all secular power.”

You will notice one word missing from this sentence: “collegial.” For all his idealism, Urban was not particularly interested in hearing the views of the 200 bishops present. He expected them to listen to and obey his new strictures against clerical misconduct and amassing of power. When finished with them, he turned to the princes of Europe, pointedly using the word “anathema” to warn them against interfering with church affairs.

But then he called for the great military mission in the Holy Land, and the conference took a different turn altogether.

Urban spoke against a backdrop of spreading Islamic military conquests and fractured Christian unity. The Byzantine Empire, sundered politically and even religiously from the West, increasingly shrank in the face of Muslim armies. Altogether, Islam held sway from the coast of modern Portugal to the Hindu Kush. Even in Italy, Rome had been attacked twice and the Emirate of Sicily had been established.

Then, early in 1095, Byzantine Emperor Alexius I made a special appeal to Urban for help, citing Muslim atrocities and the reduction of Christians to slavery and dhimmi (i.e., legal protection in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of taxes).

There was neither audiovisual equipment nor a stenographer on hand to record Urban's exact words. But five eyewitness accounts passed down through the years mention the kind of abuses cited by Alexius, including the following from Balderic, archbishop of Dol:

“Our Christian brothers, members in Christ, are scourged, oppressed, and injured in Jerusalem, in Antioch, and the other cities of the East. Your own blood brothers, your companions, your associates (for you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church) are either subjected in their inherited homes to other masters, or are driven from them, or they come as beggars among us; or, which is far worse, they are flogged and exiled as slaves for sale in their own land. Christian blood, redeemed by the blood of Christ, has been shed, and Christian flesh, akin to the flesh of Christ, has been subjected to unspeakable degradation and servitude. Everywhere in those cities there is sorrow, everywhere misery, everywhere groaning (I say it with a sigh). The churches in which divine mysteries were celebrated in olden times are now, to our sorrow, used as stables for the animals of these people!”

The varying accounts agree that at the conclusion of Urban’s address, the multitude of listeners took up the cry, “God wills it!”

Those who heeded Urban's call took the movement in directions he could not halt. He had anticipated that knights would provide the military force needed for the reconquest, but had not foreseen the extent to which the entire populace would be called on to sustain it through provisioning or, more actively, through taking up arms. (Eventually, an army of between 60,000 and 100,000 was raised.)

Moreover, Urban regarded this mission as so all-consuming that he extended a plenary indulgence (the remission of all penance for sin) to those who aided Christians in the East. He never foresaw how these indulgences would undermine his objective of ridding the Church of abuses, furnishing a major cause for the Protestant Reformation.

The army Urban called into being was big enough to eventually take Jerusalem on the first crusade, but with so many undisciplined recruits, it seized lands and wantonly killed on the way to the Holy Land. Urban died in 1099, before the news of the military success and abuse of power could make its way back to him.

The Crusades, however, survived him, because those initial gains were lost. It took centuries before weariness and disillusion finally wore down the will to sustain the struggle, prompting bitter laments like this from Renaissance scholar-philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam in his Consultatio (1530):

“Every time that this farce has been acted out by the popes, the result has been ridiculous. Either nothing came of it, or the cause actually deteriorated. The money, people say, stays stuck to the hands of the popes, cardinals, monks, dukes, and princes. Instead of the wages, the ordinary soldier is given license to pillage. So many times we have heard the announcement of a crusade, of the recovery of the Holy Land; so many times we have seen the red cross surmounted on the papal tiara, and the red chest; so many times we have attended solemn gatherings and heard lavish promises, splendid deeds, the most sweeping expectations. And yet the only winner has been money. We are informed by the proverb that it is shameful to hit yourself on the same stone twice; so how can we trust such  promises, however splendid, when we have been tricked more than thirty times, misled so often and so openly?”

Many Far-Ranging Consequences

Nevertheless, no different than other movements of such widespread and long-lasting influence, the Crusades produced multiple, diverse consequences, including:

*A redrawn map of Europe. Riley-Smith and the historians he influenced encouraged seeing the Crusades as more than the merely eight (or, by some counts, nine) that had been traditionally counted. A chronology in a work he edited, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, also used the word “crusade” in places like Spain, Germany, Estonia, Finland, and Poland—where Muslim armies threatened. The Christian reconquest of Spain in 1492 may have been the most important, as it allowed King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to use money formerly allocated for military purposes to Christopher Columbus’ transformative first voyage to the New World later that year.

*The formation of a broader European identity. The creation of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne in the year 800 attempted to provide a unity on the continent that had been missing since the fall of the Roman Empire. But the threat of a common enemy fostered cooperation, however inconsistent and faltering, among quarreling princes.

*Stronger papal leadership. Gregory VII’s conflict with Emperor Henry IV represented a watershed moment in church-state relations on the continent. Urban’s assumption of moral leadership expanded on the perilous foothold his predecessor had maintained. Subsequent popes continued to leverage their moral authority and expanded their diplomatic and even military influence.

*Absentee leadership at the national level. Campaigns involving leading armies across vast areas, laying siege to Muslim strongholds, and negotiating peace terms meant that European monarchs were out of their country for long stretches of time. In the meantime, they had to deputize others to act in their stead, sometimes with deleterious results. Prince John, for instance, schemed against Chancellor William Longchamp while John’s older brother Richard the Lionheart was fighting the Third Crusade.

*A heavier taxation burden to finance expeditions. Then as now, long wars were exorbitant. The Crusades not only involved the normal provisioning of a mass army but dealing with the unexpected fortunes of war. (The capture of Louis IX of France while on his first crusade in 1250 brings new meaning to the term “king’s ransom.” In the end, historian Simon Lloyd estimates, expenses for Louis’s crusades amounted to roughly 12 times the monarch’s budgetable annual income.) Although exploitation of material rights and possessions may have helped, greater secular and ecclesial taxes were required to fill the gap—engendering natural resentment.

*The mass involvement of all segments of society in the war effort. It wasn’t simply the soldiers who sustained the war, but financiers, preachers, cooks, and wives.

*Poisoned Christian-Jewish relations. The first pogrom in Western European history occurred from December 1095 to July 1096, with Crusaders attacking Jewish communities in Germany and France. Over time, such outbreaks became more frequent and worrisome.

*Heavy casualties. Andrew Holt, a historian out of Florida State College, is certainly correct in using the word “futility” to describe any attempt to pinpoint the number of casualties in the Crusades when the estimates range wildly, from one to nine million. But there is a larger point that can be fairly made: the loss in life (and, for the wounded, diminished subsequent lives) was enormous for Christians, Muslims and Jews alike.

*Improved medical practices. Western medics brought back with them what they learned about trauma during the Crusades. In addition, subsequent hospital practices were heavily influenced by what was learned in dealing with the wounded.

*Greater trade. Merchants passed often between Damascus and the Christian port of acre. Mamluk sultans eventually traded with Venice and Genoa.

*First-hand knowledge of lands beyond one’s community. One of the interesting aspects of American history is the way in which service personnel who had never been outside their towns or cities were exposed through the Civil War and World Wars I and II into areas thousands of miles away. They never forgot what they saw there. Documentation is far sparser for the Crusades than these latter conflicts. But it is hard to believe that the soldiers in the Crusades, who were considerably more isolated than later soldiers, were not similarly transformed by their experiences.

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis, on Our ‘Shared Responsibility for Others and the World’)

“We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it.” —Pope Francis, Laudato Si (“On Care for Our Common Home”), May 24, 2015

Quote of the Day (Pope St. Leo the Great, on the Eucharist)

“We are to celebrate the Lord's paschal sacrifice with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The leaven of our former malice is thrown out, and a new creature is filled and inebriated with the Lord himself. For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive. As we have died with him, and had been buried and raised to life with him, so we bear him within us, both in body and in spirit in everything we do.” —From a sermon by Pope St. Leo the Great (c. 400-461), Sermo 12 de Passione, 3, 6-7: PL 54, 355-357

Quote of the Day (Fr. Thomas Reese, on the Pope’s Challenge to Clericalism)

“The pope has called for a new style of being church, a style that is pastoral and open.… But the church is not the pope. Unless bishops, priests and laity follow his example and embrace his priorities, there will not be permanent change in the church. The temptations to clericalism and self-centeredness are too strong. We have to stop admiring the pope and start imitating him.”— Fr. Thomas Reese, “The Francis Revolution,” National Catholic Reporter, March 6, 2015

Quote of the Day (Pope Francis I, on Christmas as ‘A Mystery of Consolation’)

“Christmas is God’s meeting with his people. It is also a consolation, a mystery of consolation. After the midnight mass I have often spent an hour or so alone in the chapel before celebrating the dawn mass. I felt a profound feeling of consolation and peace.”—Pope Francis I quoted in Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, “Pope Francis: 'Marxist Ideology Is Wrong, But I Know Many Marxist Who Are Good People,'” Huffington Post, December 14, 2013