Posted on 09/17/2006 8:20:38 PM PDT by Petrosius
Ouch! But it's true.
I didn't know you speak Italian. ;-)
Not to mention that they stirred the pot to begin with. I despise the (ene)media.
BTTT
When is the rest of the world going to demand civilized behavior from muslims?
Thank God. The right man at the right time.
We didn't really get the 9/11 message.....but we soon will. The reaction to the Pope's words should awaken everyone to the deep hostility to Christianity which is running through the Islamic nether world. Like a shark which has tasted blood, the Muslims are in no mood for peace and dialogue. They want violence and lots of it.
If Benedict XVI had any doubts about this, they will have disappeared. John Paul II had his "May 13, 1981" moment when he survived the asassin's bullet and which re-shaped his papacy and outlook. It lead to his confrontation with and eventual victory over atheistic communism. This may be an equivalent moment for Benedict XVI. At least I hope so.
I pray that we do not have another pope/martyr in my lifetime, though I can't escape the thought that what happened to JPII prefigured what will happen, though with more severe consequences, to his successsor.
Santiago Matamoros (Saint James the Moor Slayer)
Alas, in the new Dhimminitude of Spain, I believe this statue was removed from the church in Compostela.
The new Crusade will be a two front war. The Islamic Jihadist for sure. But also with those who would willingly submit themselves to Islamic conquerors and only cry after it was too late.
FYI - ping!
Marking
I remember when there was a push to remove the statue. Were the complainers successful?
Isambard Wilkinson, Telegraph (UK), Jul. 22
St James the Moor Slayer, Spain’s patron saint, has notched up another victory.
Church officials have been forced to overturn a decision to remove a statue of the saint from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain.
The statue, an 18th-century work by Jose Gambino which depicts St James on a white charger hacking off the heads of Moors beneath his rampant mount’s hooves, was deemed to be offensive to Muslims.
However a spokesman for the church, which is Christendom’s third holiest site after Rome and Jerusalem and attracts half a million pilgrims each year, said yesterday that, due to public anger over the proposed move, the statue will now remain in place.
“It is still here on the same spot. It is not going anywhere,” a spokesman for Alejandro Barral, the president of the cathedral’s art commission, said. “We have decided that the statue of St James will stay in the cathedral. There is no reason why it should be removed in the near future. For the moment the debate over its future has been suspended.”
The Spanish press reported that terrorist bomb attacks on Madrid trains in March had precipitated the withdrawal of the statue.
The Spanish national newspaper, El Mundo, said: “According to our sources the authorities fear that the image could attract the anger of the Arab world in a period of high tension.”
The plan was to put the statue in a museum and replace it with a less provocative effigy, one of St James the Pilgrim.
The decision outraged Roman Catholics. One newspaper commentator dubbed it “political correctness gone mad”. People gathered in strength to place flowers at the foot of the statue and newspapers published letters of complaint condemning the “intolerable heresy”.
The announcement of the withdrawal was welcomed by the Muslim community as a “step towards peace” according to Houssam El Mahmoudi, the president of the Association of Moroccan Students in Santiago.
St James, who was described by Cervantes’ Don Quixote as “the most valiant”, still exerts a strong hold on the Spanish popular imagination.
Spanish troops deployed to Iraq were issued with a special badge depicting the Moor Slayer’s red cross. Santiago Matamoros, as he is known in Spanish, was the brother of St John the evangelist. He was beheaded in AD44 in Palestine after the King of Judea, Herod Agrippa, sentenced him to death, making him the first apostle to be martyred.
According to tradition his body floated in its sarcophagus to the lands where he had been a missionary and was buried in the westernmost part of the peninsula near Santiago de Compostela.
St James, of whom bloodthirsty statues abound throughout Spain, has been a figure of veneration since he appeared on a white cloud at the battle of Clavijo in 844 and spurred Spanish soldiers on to victory against the Moors.
On Sunday, in a ceremony that will resound with ancient symbolism, King Juan Carlos will pay homage to the Moor Slayer on his saint day by making the annual National Offering at Santiago.
The dictator Gen Francisco Franco once sent his only Moroccan general, Mohamed ben Miziam del Qasim, to make the offering. Sensitive officials covered the base of the statue with cloth to hide the decapitated heads of his compatriots.
"When is the rest of the world going to demand civilized behavior from muslims?"
**Quote of the Day!***
I looked it up and sure enough, that's the head of a Moor alright. Further, the scallop shell from Compostela!
Wow! We might be in for quite the ride.
http://www.ewtn.com/pope/life/arms.asp
Caput Aethiopum. According to the website of his former Archdiocese:
"The shield, which is divided into three sections, displays the “Moor of Freising." The Moor’s head, facing left and typically crowned, appeared on the coat of arms of the old principality of Freising as early as 1316, during the reign of the Bishop of Freising, Prince Konrad III, and it remained almost unchanged until the “secularization” of the Church’s estates in that region in 1802-1803. Ever since that time the archbishops of Munich and Freising have included the Caput Aethiopum, the head of an Ethiopian, in their episcopal coat of arms."
Bear of Corbinian. Also present on the coat of arms is a bear with a pack-saddle, the so-called “Bear of Corbinian." The saintly Bishop Corbinian preached the Christian faith in the Duchy of Bavaria in the 8th century and is considered the spiritual father and patron of the archdiocese. A legend states that he traveled to Rome with a bear as his pack-animal, after having commanded it to do so. Once he arrived, he released the bear from his service, and it returned to Bavaria. The implication is that "Christianity tamed and domesticated the ferocity of paganism and thus laid the foundations for a great civilization in the Duchy of Bavaria." At the same time, Corbinian’s Bear, as God’s beast of burden, symbolizes the burden of office.
Scallop Shell. The symbolism of the shell is multiple. St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church (354-430 AD), was once walking along the seashore, meditating on the unfathomable mystery of the Holy Trinity. A boy was using a shell to pour seawater into a little hole. When Augustine asked him what he was doing, he replied, “I am emptying the sea into this hole.” Thus did Augustine understand that man would never penetrate to the depths of the mystery of God. Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, in 1953, wrote his doctoral dissertation on “The People of God and the House of God in Augustine’s Teaching about the Church," and therefore has a personal connection with the thought of this great Doctor of the Church.
The shell also stands for pilgrimage, for “Jacob’s staff,” a pilgrim’s staff topped with a scallop shell. In Church art it is a symbol of the apostle James the Great, and his sanctuary at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, perhaps the principal place of pilgrimage during the middle ages. This symbol alludes, as well, to “the pilgrim people of God,” a title for the Church which Joseph Ratzinger championed at the Second Vatican Council as peritus (theological adviser) to Cardinals Frings of Köln (Cologne). When he became Archbishop he took the shell in his coat of arms. It is also found in the insignia of the Schottenkloster in Regensburg, where the major seminary of that diocese is located, a place where Benedict XVI taught as a professor of theology.
With God there are no coincidences. We live in interesting times.
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