22 Mar Vatican-Sponsored Conference Attempts to Rehabilitate the Crusades
According to the Times (UK) Online, the Vatican sponsored a conference last weekend aimed at rehabilitating the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of reclaiming the Holy Land for Christianity:
At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were “a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places”.
“The debate has been reopened,” La Stampa said. Professor De Mattei noted that the desecration of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Muslim forces in 1009 had helped to provoke the First Crusade at the end of the 11th century, called by Pope Urban II.
He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”. He was backed by Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, who said that those who sought forgiveness for the Crusades “do not know their history”. Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”.
Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.
He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
The American writer Robert Spencer, author of A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, told the conference that the mistaken view had taken hold in the West as well as the Arab world that the Crusades were “an unprovoked attack by Europe on the Islamic world”. In reality, however, Christians had been persecuted after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.
Although I’m certainly not competent to weigh in on the merits of the debate, I fail to see what these revisionist scholars hope to accomplish by blaming Muslims for the Crusades now — other than to make relations between Muslims and Christians even worse than they already are. As the article notes,
The Crusades are seen by many Muslims as acts of violence that have underpinned Western aggression towards the Arab world ever since. Followers of Osama bin Laden claim to be taking part in a latter-day “jihad against the Jews and Crusaders”.
The Vatican’s sponsorship of the conference, it is worth pointing out, represents an unfortunate reversal of its attitude toward Islam. During the 2000 Millenium celebrations, the late Pope John Paul II tried to encourage Muslim-Christian reconciliation by asking “pardon” for the Crusades. According to the article, however, John Paul’s apologies for the past “errors of the Church” — which included the Inquisition and anti-Semitism — irritated some Vatican conservatives, most notably Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
Ratzinger’s true colors were bound to bleed through his papal garments sooner or later: one has only to recall his ideological inquisition against the more articulate exponents of liberation theology. I’m forever reminding my students that, yes, Catholics are Christians too (to counter the fundamentalist evangelical rhetoric they’ve internalized), and then the Church does something like not come clean on priests and pedophilia or…this! While the Catholic Church may not be the anti-Christ, the anti-Christ has burrowed itself deep into the Church. The ‘true church’ perseveres in the nooks and crannies of Catholicism: among the Catholic Worker movement for example. Meanwhile, the Vatican remains adept at taking one step forward, and two steps backward. What a shame.
Reference is made to Patrick S. O’Donnell’s comment. Sir, your assertion that “[w]hile the Catholic Church may not be the anti-Christ, the anti-Christ has burrowed itself deep into the Church” is fatuous, assumes facts not in evidence and reveals your extreme ignorance of the Church — both today and in history.
As a Catholic, I find Pope Benedict steadfast and his beliefs and convictions are no mystery to any, given his voluminous and prolific writings. In addition, I find this conference to rehabilitate the Crusades a sign that the Church is no longer backing down in the face of constant and often deadly pressure against Catholics around the world from those professing to be followers of Islam.
Further, I know not Mr. Heller’s faith, if any, but his declaration that this “represents an unfortunate reversal of its attitude toward Islam” on the part of the Catholic church is likewise nonsense. There are Mosques in Rome within a stone’s throw of the Vatican. How many Churches are there in Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina? Zero. I suggest that Islam needs a reversal of sorts more than the RC Church does..
Just for the record: I was raised a Catholic and had a Catholic education up to and through high school. I research, write and teach about religions as part of my profession, so if I’m extremely ignorant of the history of the Church, I shudder to imagine the ignorance that might afflict others. Who referred to the Jews as ‘Christ killers?’ Muslims? Who expelled the Jews from the Iberian peninsula? The Muslims? Who called the Jews ‘infidels’ during the Crusades? Why are Jewish philosophers found in anthologies of Islamic philosophy? Who instituted the notion of ‘blood libel?’ Who engaged in pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia (no, it was not Muslims). The Church’s silence during the Holocaust was deafening. Etc. Etc. I hardly feel compelled to defend the Saudi regime, but the fact that mosques are within walking distance of the Vatican speaks volumes for democracy, not against Islam. The irrational and vertiginous fear in the air is palpable…. And, should you be tempted, it won’t do to label me a ‘self-loathing Catholic.’
Mr. Tuttle,
Why is it “nonsense” to believe that, all other things being equal, the Vatican should promote Christian-Muslim reconciliation, instead of its opposite?
I’m Jewish, by the way.
Kevin
I have read the quotes (and the full article in the Times) and, quite frankly, I don’t see that the Vatican is trying to “rehabilitate” the Crusades or “blame” the Muslims. While the article notes that some in the Church’s hierarchy were against John Paul II’s apologies for various wrongs of the Catholic Church, the actual quotes you point to seem to be less an attempt at rescuing the Crusades than simply saying there was wrong on both sides as in “all ideological wars.” There was recently an interesting dialogue on the Crusades between Thomas Madden (author of The New Concise History of the Crusades and chair of the history department at St. Louis University) and Carole Hillenbrand (author of The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, professor of Islamic culture at the University of Edinburgh, and winner of the King Faisal Foundation prize for Islamic studies). The full conversation can be found on the website of the National Catholic Reporter. I excerpt the discussion here because I think it is possible to have a reasonable conversation about the Crusades without being a “revisionist” or an “apologist” or any other “~ist.” I also think that, given the lack of trust at the moment… Read more »
One prerequisite to dialogue might be the acknowldgment or recognition that ‘we are heirs,’ in the words of Richard Bulliet, ‘to a Christian construction of history that is deliberately exclusive. Western Christendom has regarded Islam as a malevolent Other for many centuries and has invented any number of reasons for holding this view. However, the reasons have come second to the malevolence. Shifting Western portrayals of Islam over the centuries make it clear that reasons for disliking Islam have been constructed as rationales for a preexisting and ongoing aminosity and not vice versa. This pattern persists to the present day.’ With Bulliet, therefore, we might examine historical narratives of ‘cultural borrowing’ rather than simply narratives of ‘violent conflict.’ Again, Bulliet: ‘Looked at as a whole, and in historical perspective, the Islamo-Christian world has much more binding it together than forcing it apart. The past and future of the West cannot be fully comprehended without appreciation of the twinned relationship it has had with with Islam over some fourteen centuries. The same is true of the Islamic world. The case for Islamo-[Judeo-?]Christian civilization as an organizing principle of contemporary thought is rooted in the historical reality of those centuries.’ [From his… Read more »
Mr Heller queries: “Why is it ‘nonsense’ to believe that, all other things being equal, the Vatican should promote Christian-Muslim reconciliation, instead of its opposite?”
You misinterpret my post. It’s not nonsense to believe the Vatican should promote ecumenical dialogue and reconciliation with the Islamic world. That’s not what my statement said. Rather I opined that your conclusion that this “represents an unfortunate reversal of [the Church’s] attitude toward Islam” is nonsense. This conference and the Church’s statement mark no such reversal.
The truth will out. Mr. O’Donnell reveals himself to be a Catholic in the mold of Garry Wills with statements such as “[t]he Church’s silence during the Holocaust was deafening.” This repeated canard continues to widely circulate, having attained a life of its own, but is demonstrably untrue.
Further while Mr. O’Donnell notes, correctly in part, that “the fact that mosques are within walking distance of the Vatican speaks volumes for democracy, not against Islam” I wonder what the current case in Afghanistan of the potential death penalty for conversion to Christianity speaks to if not the nature of Islam.
Mr. Tuttle:
Two things. First, if the Church’s silence during the holocaust is “demonstrably untrue,” perhaps you could provide the evidence you believe supports that claim. I agree with Patrick on this one — after all, John Paul himself apologized for the Church’s failure to speak out about what happened to the Jews during WWII. See this BBC article.
Second, let’s be precise about the Afghanistan situation: the death penalty is imposed not for converting to Christianity, but for leaving Islam. An indefensible law, to be sure, but not an anti-Christian one (and I’m not suggesting that you’re implying as much).
H. Tuttle:
There is no ‘essence’ (‘nature of’) to Islam, as there is no ‘essence’ to Catholicism. I do indeed admire the work of Garry Wills…and the late Penny Lernoux, Phllip Berryman, Leonardo Boff, Dorothy Day: nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about here. We might distinguish between the Vatican as an institutional source of religious and dogmatic authority and the voices of individual Catholics and Catholic groups, tendiencies, theologies, and so forth (hence the differences, say, between a Boff and a Ratzinger, Ratzinger and Rahner, Kung and Ratzinger, Opus Dei and communidades de base, etc.). Penny Lernoux’s People of God: The Struggle for World Catholicism (1989) well captures my own perspective on the Church. I certainly don’t expect individual Catholics to answer for the historical sins of Catholicism, that is, unless they’ve set out to defend them.
And, again for the record, I am not a Catholic (although raised as one).
Any further correspondence we might conduct in private.