St. Catherine of Siena, The Crusader

The young woman from Siena is the most spectacular of the many magnificent saints Catherine: mystic, doctor of the Church, corrector of popes and monarchs...and she was a vigorous Crusader. Current events verify how right she was to so forcefully advocate the crusades. History alerts us that (with the singular exception of Spain), Islam violently takes control of a place and never loses that control. The entire world of early Christianity (Middle East, North Africa, Turkey, etc) is now completely Muslim and the very few Christians still there are now being ruthlessly and systematically persecuted and killed. With current trends, there will soon be really NO Christian presence in the very world that gave birth to our faith...and that includes even the Holy Land. Were it not for the crusades, each of my five daughters and six sisters would now likely be one of some man's many wives, they would be kidnapped or tortured if they aspired to an education, they would be stoned to death if they fell in love with a Christian man and executed if they converted to Christianity. There is a profound misogynist streak in that religion. Islam will not honor women as doctors or exalt one as Queen of heaven and earth! We know that the founder was a pedophile and an inflamed polygamist. The power of Islam is rooted in its merge of two forces, one very good the other evil: monotheism and the 10 commandments on the one hand, and violence and polygamy on the other. It is at once a noble monotheistic religion and at the same time an explosion of the primitive pagan energies of violence and sex. But the Crusades rescued Europe from this violent and oppressive religion. Today, Europe has lost its faith, drifts in a spineless nihilism, and is again vulnerable to becoming "Eurabia" within a few generations. But we need to be grateful for the Crusades. The myth of the Crusades as an evil, aggressive movement of the Church is, like so many Dark Legends (the Inquisition, Pius XII and the Jews, etc.) not entirely without some historic basis...the Church is, after all, made up of sinners. But the exaggeration is a product of powerful, and often unrecognized cultural forces, both fiercely anti-Catholic: our Anglo-Calvinist past (Puritans, Pilgrims and so forth) and a secular world that despises the Church. Like our fathers and uncles who fought the Nazi and Japanese empires in WWII, the Crusaders did wrong and made mistakes. We know that they had their own disgraces as we did with Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But we are grateful to that Great Generation that we are not living under Nazi law; and we are grateful to the great generations that we are not living under Sharia. And we need to alert our children to the pervasive, often invisible contempt for the Church which controls so much of our cultural narrative.