CATHOLIC MYTH #4: THE CRUSADES WERE UNPROVOKED ATTACKS AGAINST PEACEFUL MUSLIMS

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Bryan Mercier

Just because something is repeated over and over again does not make it true. The same is true here with the Crusades. In reality, the Crusades were wars of self-defense against the Muslims. Here are the real facts:

Every historian knows that Muhammad was kicked out of Mecca for preaching his new religion. After raising an army in Medina, he returned and sacked Mecca razing it to the ground. Thereafter, his new army garnered much military strength and went on to conquer the entire surrounding area. By the time Muhammad died, his armies had conquered the whole area of land we know today as the “Fertile Crescent.”

After Muhammad’s death, Islam spread even more rapidly. In just 100 years (657 A.D. – 757 A.D.), the conquering armies of Islam decimated everything in their path from Afghanistan to North Africa. They then invaded Europe and seized many islands. They were going for full world conquest. In a short span of time, Islam conquered the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, and two-thirds of the Byzantine Empire, the last major empire on earth. Over a thousand years of war without batting an eye. One can begin to see why the Crusades were called.

During all of this time, while some Catholic kings may have defended their countries, the Catholic Church herself never retaliated at all but just prayed for peace and hoped the Muslim aggression would stop. However, around the year 1094 A.D, due to the devastation of the Byzantine Empire, Commodore Alexius the 1st called on the pope and the Catholic Church for help in complete desperation. The pope prayed about it for a long time and eventually decided to “come to the aid of our brothers in the East.” THAT was the reason the Crusades were started. An answer to the Emperor’s plea.

Occasionally, thousands of innocent and unarmed Christians were massacred by Muslims while processing on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In addition, more than half of all Christian lands had been seized by Islamic armies. So, the Church also sought to take back the Holy Land in order to create a safe passage for innocent pilgrims processing there. They also wanted to protect Christians around the world. For all of these reasons, the Crusades were called.

Unlike Islam, the Catholic Church had been a mostly peaceful religion and had done more good for the world than anyone else. I’m not saying that Christians were perfect or that abuses didn’t happen during the Crusades because they did, but they were started as wars of self-defense and as a response to the request of Emperor Alexius I. The Crusades had nothing to do with an “aggressive, power hungry church” who killed peaceful people of other religions or anyone who disagreed with the Catholic religion. That is huge myth which in not historical, not tenable, and not true.

Why the Crusades Were “Glorious” by CatholicSay

Source: CatholicSay.com

This post is the first in a series about the most prevalent modern myths about the Crusades and how to refute them.

The Crusades are one of the most misunderstood topics in Church history. Movies and TV present as established fact an outdated anti-Catholic narrative about them that stays alive by sheer repetition. Not only do secular critics of the Church use this narrative to attack Catholicism (and religion in general), but many Catholics uwittingly accept it as true.

The negative “spin" on the Crusades began in the sixteenth century with the Protestant revolutionary Martin Luther, who saw them as an outgrowth of papal authority and power. Later Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon shaped modernity’s negative view of the Crusades by portraying them as barbaric projects undertaken by greedy and savage warriors at the behest of a corrupt papacy. Modern-day Crusade historians, thankfully, eschew the anti-religious prejudices behind this view, and are bringing to light an authentic understanding of these Catholic events from the perspective of those who participated in them. But such scholarship has not eradicated the popular myths.

In order to properly understand the Crusades, we must recognize them as authentically Catholic events in an age of faith. This does not mean that everyone in the Middle Ages was a saint, or that society was perfect; but it was an era in which people made radical life decisions, such as going on Crusade, because of their faith in Jesus Christ and his Church. The modern secular-humanist world, lacking faith, struggles to understand the authentic religious worldview of the medieval period and so is handicapped when trying to understand the Crusades..

The Crusading movement was a Catholic movement. Popes called for Crusades, clerics (and saints) preached them, ecumenical councils planned and discussed them, and Catholic warriors fought them for spiritual benefits. The Crusades cannot be properly understood apart from this Catholic reality. The modern world’s historical amnesia on this point is curable, and the cure begins with Catholics learning the authentic history of their Church and the culture it created. Like the Benedictine monks of old, we modern Catholics can maintain the inheritance of Western Civilization, and correct the errors and biases of our age, through a commitment to learn our history and take pride (where appropriate) for the actions of the men and women who came before us in the Faith.

Many Catholics cringe at the mention of the Crusades, either because they know an anti-Catholic attack is coming, or because they feel embarrassed. But I propose that rather than trying to change the subject or dodge the criticism, we should recognize the “glory" of the Crusades.

What does that mean?

After Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, they sinned against God by worshipping the golden calf. God wanted to destroy the Israelites for their idolatry, but Moses interceded for the people and the Lord relented. Moses’ special relationship with God included the gift of being in the presence of the Lord in the meeting tent, where he spoke to God face to face. Moses pleaded with God for his presence to remain with the Israelites on their journey to the Promised Land so that the other nations would see their uniqueness.

Moses also begged the Lord to show him his glory (Ex. 33:18). The Hebrew word for glory used most often in the Old Testament is kabod, which means “heavy in weight" or something of great importance. In this sense, the Crusading movement—which occupied 600 years of Catholic history—cannot be seen as anything but glorious. That does not mean we whitewash or ignore their bad parts, but simply that we give due attention to their import in the life of the Church.

We live in a time ripe for a reinvigorated sense of Catholic identity, and a thorough knowledge of the Crusades helps us build it. Catholics need to know the authentic history of the Church in order to defend it from its many critics in the modern world; however, for a truly vibrant Catholic identity to take root and flourish, defending the Church is not enough. We must go on the attack, and present the story of our Catholic family with vigor, courage, and resolve.

In the words of Walter Cardinal Brandmüller, president emeritus of the Pontifical Committee for the Historical Sciences:

[W]e should finally stop being like the frightened rabbit that stares at the snake before it is swallowed by it. This defeatist attitude, this whining self-pity that has gained so much ground… in Catholic circles, is an insult to God. What is needed is a new, forceful consciousness of being Catholic.

Recognizing the “glory" of the Crusades is one way that we can take pride in our Catholic identity and contribute to a forceful and positive resurgence of the Faith in the Western world.

Calculating Christmas Not Based on Pagan Festivals

Posted Date: December 18, 2012
By William J. Tighe –
Source: Orthodoxy Today

Many Christians think that Christians celebrate Christ’s birth on December 25th because the church fathers appropriated the date of a pagan festival. Almost no one minds, except for a few groups on the fringes of American Evangelicalism, who seem to think that this makes Christmas itself a pagan festival. But it is perhaps interesting to know that the choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals.

Rather, the pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

A Mistake

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him.

There were two temples of the sun in Rome, one of which (maintained by the clan into which Aurelian was born or adopted) celebrated its dedication festival on August 9th, the other of which celebrated its dedication festival on August 28th. But both of these cults fell into neglect in the second century, when eastern cults of the sun, such as Mithraism, began to win a following in Rome. And in any case, none of these cults, old or new, had festivals associated with solstices or equinoxes.

As things actually happened, Aurelian, who ruled from 270 until his assassination in 275, was hostile to Christianity and appears to have promoted the establishment of the festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun” as a device to unify the various pagan cults of the Roman Empire around a commemoration of the annual “rebirth” of the sun. He led an empire that appeared to be collapsing in the face of internal unrest, rebellions in the provinces, economic decay, and repeated attacks from German tribes to the north and the Persian Empire to the east.

In creating the new feast, he intended the beginning of the lengthening of the daylight, and the arresting of the lengthening of darkness, on December 25th to be a symbol of the hoped-for “rebirth,” or perpetual rejuvenation, of the Roman Empire, resulting from the maintenance of the worship of the gods whose tutelage (the Romans thought) had brought Rome to greatness and world-rule. If it co-opted the Christian celebration, so much the better.

"the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection."

A By-Product

It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December 25th as the date of the Lord’s nativity comes from Rome some years after Aurelian, in A.D. 336, but there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection.

How did this happen? There is a seeming contradiction between the date of the Lord’s death as given in the synoptic Gospels and in John’s Gospel. The synoptics would appear to place it on Passover Day (after the Lord had celebrated the Passover Meal on the preceding evening), and John on the Eve of Passover, just when the Passover lambs were being slaughtered in the Jerusalem Temple for the feast that was to ensue after sunset on that day.

Solving this problem involves answering the question of whether the Lord’s Last Supper was a Passover Meal, or a meal celebrated a day earlier, which we cannot enter into here. Suffice it to say that the early Church followed John rather than the synoptics, and thus believed that Christ’s death would have taken place on 14 Nisan, according to the Jewish lunar calendar. (Modern scholars agree, by the way, that the death of Christ could have taken place only in A.D. 30 or 33, as those two are the only years of that time when the eve of Passover could have fallen on a Friday, the possibilities being either 7 April 30 or 3 April 33.)

However, as the early Church was forcibly separated from Judaism, it entered into a world with different calendars, and had to devise its own time to celebrate the Lord’s Passion, not least so as to be independent of the rabbinic calculations of the date of Passover. Also, since the Jewish calendar was a lunar calendar consisting of twelve months of thirty days each, every few years a thirteenth month had to be added by a decree of the Sanhedrin to keep the calendar in synchronization with the equinoxes and solstices, as well as to prevent the seasons from “straying” into inappropriate months.

Apart from the difficulty Christians would have had in following—or perhaps even being accurately informed about—the dating of Passover in any given year, to follow a lunar calendar of their own devising would have set them at odds with both Jews and pagans, and very likely embroiled them in endless disputes among themselves. (The second century saw severe disputes about whether Pascha had always to fall on a Sunday or on whatever weekday followed two days after 14 Artemision/Nisan, but to have followed a lunar calendar would have made such problems much worse.)

These difficulties played out in different ways among the Greek Christians in the eastern part of the empire and the Latin Christians in the western part of it. Greek Christians seem to have wanted to find a date equivalent to 14 Nisan in their own solar calendar, and since Nisan was the month in which the spring equinox occurred, they chose the 14th day of Artemision, the month in which the spring equinox invariably fell in their own calendar. Around A.D. 300, the Greek calendar was superseded by the Roman calendar, and since the dates of the beginnings and endings of the months in these two systems did not coincide, 14 Artemision became April 6th.

In contrast, second-century Latin Christians in Rome and North Africa appear to have desired to establish the historical date on which the Lord Jesus died. By the time of Tertullian they had concluded that he died on Friday, 25 March 29. (As an aside, I will note that this is impossible: 25 March 29 was not a Friday, and Passover Eve in A.D. 29 did not fall on a Friday and was not on March 25th, or in March at all.)

"From a sermon of St. John Chrysostom, at the time a renowned ascetic and preacher in his native Antioch, it appears that the feast was first celebrated there on 25 December 386."

Integral Age

So in the East we have April 6th, in the West, March 25th. At this point, we have to introduce a belief that seems to have been widespread in Judaism at the time of Christ, but which, as it is nowhere taught in the Bible, has completely fallen from the awareness of Christians. The idea is that of the “integral age” of the great Jewish prophets: the idea that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception.

This notion is a key factor in understanding how some early Christians came to believe that December 25th is the date of Christ’s birth. The early Christians applied this idea to Jesus, so that March 25th and April 6th were not only the supposed dates of Christ’s death, but of his conception or birth as well. There is some fleeting evidence that at least some first- and second-century Christians thought of March 25th or April 6th as the date of Christ’s birth, but rather quickly the assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ’s conception prevailed.

It is to this day, commemorated almost universally among Christians as the Feast of the Annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel brought the good tidings of a savior to the Virgin Mary, upon whose acquiescence the Eternal Word of God (“Light of Light, True God of True God, begotten of the Father before all ages”) forthwith became incarnate in her womb. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months. Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and January 6th is Epiphany.

Christmas (December 25th) is a feast of Western Christian origin. In Constantinople it appears to have been introduced in 379 or 380. From a sermon of St. John Chrysostom, at the time a renowned ascetic and preacher in his native Antioch, it appears that the feast was first celebrated there on 25 December 386. From these centers it spread throughout the Christian East, being adopted in Alexandria around 432 and in Jerusalem a century or more later. The Armenians, alone among ancient Christian churches, have never adopted it, and to this day celebrate Christ’s birth, manifestation to the magi, and baptism on January 6th.

Western churches, in turn, gradually adopted the January 6th Epiphany feast from the East, Rome doing so sometime between 366 and 394. But in the West, the feast was generally presented as the commemoration of the visit of the magi to the infant Christ, and as such, it was an important feast, but not one of the most important ones—a striking contrast to its position in the East, where it remains the second most important festival of the church year, second only to Pascha (Easter).

In the East, Epiphany far outstrips Christmas. The reason is that the feast celebrates Christ’s baptism in the Jordan and the occasion on which the Voice of the Father and the Descent of the Spirit both manifested for the first time to mortal men the divinity of the Incarnate Christ and the Trinity of the Persons in the One Godhead.

"December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church"

A Christian Feast

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ’s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date re-appropriate the pagan “Birth of the Unconquered Sun” to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the “Sun of Salvation” or the “Sun of Justice.”

Spanish Inquisition was 99% Myth. (BBC)

Ano kaya ang magiging reaksyon ng mga Manalistas (Iglesia Ni Cristo® members) sa video na ito?

Watch: Simple Math Destroys Obama’s Claim That “Islam Teaches Peace.”

"The myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that – it’s a myth."

[Source: Western Journalism] In a new video, Truth Revolt’s Ben Shapiro took on the popular leftist talking point that radicals make up a tiny fraction of the overall Islamic population. Citing recent comments by Barack Obama and “horrifyingly mediocre actor” Ben Affleck, Shapiro used surveys from many of the nations with a large Muslim population to debunk such claims.

He conceded that other faiths, including Judaism and Christianity, hold certain violent texts sacred, though he made one unavoidable distinction.

“Believers in those particular texts are not currently ramming airlines into towers or beheading journalists or mutilating female genitalia,” he explained.

While actively violent jihadists are clearly a minority within the faith, Shapiro noted that far too many support such radical ideals.

“Almost 50 percent of Indonesians actually support strict sharia law, not just in Indonesia but in a lot of countries,” he said of the predominantly Muslim nation, “and 70 percent blame the United States, Israel, or somebody else for 9/11.”

Using those statistics, he estimated 143 million radical Muslims live within that country.

By determining how many Muslims in other nations hold a similar ideology, including a belief in honor killings or terror attacks, Shapiro concluded more than 800 million practitioners of the faith would qualify as extremists. That number includes nearly 500,000 living within the U.S.

“That’s not a minority,” he said, “that’s now a majority. The myth of the tiny radical Muslim minority is just that – it’s a myth. And unfortunately it’s a myth that’s going to get a lot of civilized people killed.”

7 Myths About the Catholic Church

January 5, 2013 (Romereports.com) Late American Bishop, Fulton Sheen once said “There are no more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church.”

That quote is actually the introduction of 'The Seven Big Myths About the Catholic Church.' The book authored by Christopher Kaczor deals with modern day misconceptions many people, including Catholics, have about the Church.

These misconceptions include: 'The Church Hates Women,' 'The Church Hates Gays.' Also on the list is 'The Church Opposes Science.' The author explains in detail, how the Church welcomes everyone. In addition, it runs several universities worldwide, with full science departments. The Vatican also has its own observatories in Italy and U.S, not to mention the discoveries of Catholic scientists.

CHRISTOPHER KACZOR

The Seven Big Myths About the Catholic Church

“For instance, Gregor Mendel, who is the founder of modern genetics, Georges Lemaitre, who is the founder of the Big Bang theory or Louis Pasteur, who created the first vaccine for rabies.”

Another is that priestly celibacy caused the sexual abuse of minors. Others listed are 'The Church Oppresses Freedom,' 'The Church, Indifferent to Love, Banned Contraception,' and The Church Opposes Same Sex Marriage Because of Bigotry.'

The author says he wrote the book thinking about his own friends who have left the Church, precisely because of these popular misconceptions. So now thorough his book, he hopes to dispel some of those myths by giving readers some insight into the true reasoning behind the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Jimmy Akin: 7 Top MYTHS about Christmas

It is unfortunate that Christmas--the commemoration of our Savior's birth--is marred by so much misinformation and misunderstanding. Too often our ideas about Christmas are influenced more by images from Christmas cards or even from sources hostile to Christianity. Here are seven ideas about Christmas which range from the unsubstantiated to the flat out false.

#1

Jesus Was Born in a Barn

People often infer this from the fact that Luke 2:7 says that Mary laid the baby Jesus in a manger. In our culture we find mangers in stables or barns, and people make the inference from that.

But at the time animals were often sheltered in caves, and there is a very strong tradition that dates at least to the 100s, that Jesus was born in a cave. Today the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is built over such a cave, which is next to the one that the biblical scholar St. Jerome dwelt in during the 300s. In his writings, Jerome points to evidence that the cave under the Church of the Nativity was, in fact, where Jesus was born.

#2

We Know There Were Three Wise Men

The account of the wise men, or magi (who were not kings, by the way), is recorded in Matthew 2, but it does not say anywhere that there were three wise men.

This number is probably inferred from the fact that three gifts are mentioned: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But we really don't know much about the size or composition of the magi's caravan. The odds are that, for such rich and visiting dignitaries, the caravan was more than three people and, in addition to the magi, included quite a number of other people, including servants and guards.

#3

The Wise Men Arrived the Same Night

Again, the images on Christmas cards haunt us by depicting the magi arriving on the night of Jesus' birth.

We know that they associated the rising of the star of Bethlehem with Jesus' birth, and the trip from their distant homeland would have been too long to make in a single night. Matthew 2:10 records that by this point the holy family was living in a house (although it could have been a house combined with the grotto of the Nativity, for homes were often combined with caves).

Most fundamentally, Matthew 2:16 indicates that Herod sought to kill all the boys two years old and under, based on the time he learned from the magi, so they may have showed up as much as two years later (although Herod may also have padded the figure just to be "safe").

#4

December 25th Can't Be the Birth of Christ Because Sheep Aren't Pastured in the Winter

It is often argued that Jesus couldn't have been born December 25th because Luke 2:8 records that there were shepherds pasturing their flocks, and this doesn't happen in the area in winter.

But it does.

Bethlehem is below the snow line, sheep have fleece to keep them warm, and even today sheep are pastured in the Shepherds' Field near Bethlehem at this very time of year.

#5

Christmas Trees Are Forbidden by the Old Testament

Some Fundamentalists argue that Jeremiah 10 condemns having Christmas trees as a pagan practice.

This would be odd, since Jeremiah wrote centuries before the birth of Christ and thus before the celebration of Christmas.

A careful reading of the passage, though, shows that Jeremiah isn't talking about ornamented holiday trees at all. He's talking about idols. That's why he points out that after a tree is cut down and a workman goes to work on it that it cannot speak, that it cannot move on its own and must be carried, that we should not be afraid of it, and that it has power to do neither evil or good to us. Jeremiah is pointing out the limitations of dead idols, not Christmas trees.

#6

Christmas Is Based on a Pagan Holiday

Sometimes Fundamentalists, secularists, and pagans argue that Christmas is just a pagan holiday that has been "baptized" by the Church. Accounts differ as to which one. Sometimes it is claimed that Christmas is based on Saturnalia or the birth of Sol Invictus ("the unconquerable sun").

But Saturnalia wasn't celebrated on December 25th. It ran from December 17th to the 23rd. It was over and done with before the 25th.

We do have records that suggest some pagans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus on December 25th, but the first such record dates from the year A.D. 354 (on what is known as the Calendar of Filocalus or the Chronology of 354). The trouble is, even this source isn't fully explicit. It just says that December 25 was celebrated as the Natalis Invicti or the "Birthday of the Unconquerable One," without saying who that is.

We also know that some Christians had been identifying December 25th as Jesus' birthday at least a century and a half before this time. Around A.D. 206, St. Hippolytus of Rome wrote in his Commentary on Daniel that:

"The first coming of our Lord, that in the flesh, in which he was born at Bethlehem, took place eight days before the kalends of January."

In ancient Roman time reckoning, the kalends was the first day of the month, and if you count back eight days from January 1, you arrive at December 25.

It's true that we don't know for sure when Jesus was born, and early Christian writers proposed a variety of dates for his birth, including December 25th. But what is remarkable, in light of modern claims, is that when they write about Christ's birth they never say things like, "Let's schedule his birthday here so that we can convert a bunch of pagans" or "Let's put it here so that we can subvert this pagan holiday."

When they propose dates for his birth, they use arguments to support their view, and they honestly believe that he was born on the dates they propose.

#7

It Would Matter If Christmas Were Connected with a Pagan Holiday

Even if early Christians had scheduled the commemoration of Christ's birth to subvert a pagan holiday, so what?

How does that taint the celebration of Christmas today--by people who have never even heard of these pagan holidays? Aren't they honestly celebrating Christ's birth, regardless of the precise day on which it happened?

Further, isn't subverting a pagan holiday a good thing? Don't many Protestant groups celebrate October 31 not as Halloween (which they wrongly perceive as pagan) but as "Reformation Day" or "Harvest Festival"?

Helping people wean themselves off of pagan practices by providing a wholesome, alternative celebration would seem to be a good thing rather than a bad thing.

Still, there's no evidence that this is what early Christians were doing with Christmas, and in fact the evidence is against it.

- - -

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I hope you'll take advantage of this offer, perhaps as a Christmas gift for someone you know--or as one for yourself. It can help you get more out of your study of God's word--at Christmas and all year 'round.

Coming Soon: A Christmas "Interview" with Pope Benedict

Your pal,

Jimmy Akin, Secret Info Club