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Posted on 10/05/2001 9:49:34 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM

CRUSADE
By Patrick Lally

There was a time when the green flag of Islam came out of Arabia and swept across North Africa, destroying the diocese of Augustine and all of the great and vibrant Christian civilizations that had flourished there for centuries. Then the soldiers of the Prophet raged north into Spain, while in the east Islam invaded the Balkans, the heartland of the Slavic Church and surged toward the Holy Roman Empire itself. But the West arose and gave battle. It was a long and mighty struggle, for the two civilizations were equals in learning and the military arts. The outcome was in doubt as late as the High Middle Ages. In 1254 Constantinople fell and Orthodoxy was in peril. Indeed only a brief time ago as history is reckoned, Islam was at the gates of Vienna. The Empire, no longer holy or Roman turned them back because it was still suffused with the memory of its greatness and was sustained by a dogged and exhausted devotion to the Church which had shaped the West, had held up for the ages that Light which had first shone in the Judean hills, and which the West had claimed for its own.

It was war for the soul of man and threatened the very existence of the whole culture that bore the heritage of the Judaeo-Christian world. Islam was a great and fighting religion, breathtaking in its simplicity and compelling in its power. But Catholicism was greater still, and the West stood upon that rock, the Rock of Peter.

And Islam was held on the high Spanish plains and mountain passes, and Islam was turned back in the grim and gaunt fastness where the South Slavs stood and held. And Islam streamed back, a great religion defeated by a true one. And the West flourished and thrived and forgot, forgot the challenge of the Crescent and then, incredibly, began to cast away the Cross, began to destroy itself what Islam could not. Theological liberalism, technology, and "science" inexorably and triumphantly spread over Christendom, and the West became a desert of greed and ease and economics and realpolitik. Slowly but remorselessly the foundations built upon the Rock were leached away, and the Rock itself, the very Church which had given life to Paris and Cracow, to Milan and the North German Plain, and to the New World, whose light Columbus first saw upon the quarterdeck of the Santa Maria after Compline, that very Mother of us all, was scorned and rejected.

Islam did not forget. It endured the incompetence and corruption of the Ottoman centuries.It suffered the humiliation of the colonial years, and it watched the power of the West increase. And the green flag spread where the West did not go, from Timor to the Pillars of Hercules, and from Madagascar to Central Asia. The soldiers of the Prophet reached out and used the technology of the enemy, but never turned away from Mecca, never bowed down in worship to turbines and blast furnaces and mainframes.

Then once again Islam marched to the old drums of war, for the West had finally lost all of its strength. The new glass and steel ziggaurats where the men of the West communicated and analyzed and decided and wrought and planned with the speed of gods were empty husks before the force of the spirit. The mosques of Alexandria and Algiers and and Teheran were full, and the cathedrals and country churches of Belgium and Maryland and Pennsylvania and even Warsaw were emptying, crumbling. Islam struck. It was the cruelest blow in the long, sad history of crimes done in God's name. This time it was not an assault upon the passes of the Pyrenees or a dagger thrust toward the sweep of the Danube and Vienna. History changes things, but the old warriors of Arabia would have understood immediately. There was no longer any need to destroy the gates of Rome, to pull down Chartres, or to level St. Stephen's Cathedral of Vienna. The new center was elsewhere, in that New World which had assumed the leadership of the West, in that country which above all others had seemed to embrace the the new gods of finance and industry and fiberoptics, in that country, begun by humble men of God which had come to see itself as godlike. So horrid was this crime that the Muslim world should have instantly destroyed or delivered to justice the guilty. Islam did not. It ignored the very tenets of the Koran, and did not. It mouthed words of sympathy while the West reeled, while America staggered. History happens very quickly now, so rapid and instantaneous is the sweep and perception of events. The long centuries of the former struggle have been compressed into short minutes of blood and fire and smoke and death in the present war. At one time Spanish swords flashed and desperate men wondered if the enemy would burst through, into the heart of the West. And for an instant last week it was possible that the new onslaught would crumble defences weakened by years of unbelief and error.

But incredibly, the West held. Heroes arose in great numbers, a whole nation stood up. It seems that, like Arthur of England, the West was only sleeping. For decades, lonely, steadfast men have stood under the old ensigns, withstanding even the attacks of other, traitor Westerners. But now they have been joined by whole armies in battle array. It seems that the West, for all its power and overweening self-admiration has found its roots again. The West held. The West arose.

In the Cathedral Church of St Peter and Paul the West came together, gathering for the struggle. Those there were mostly heedless that the great church thrusts upward only because of the genius of the Middle Ages. But the National Cathedral rests as surely on the Rock of Peter as does the Sainte Chapelle and Notre Dame. They sang the heart wrenching lines of Isaac Watts, "O God our help in ages past." Watts was Anglican, but we know by faith that all truth rests ultimately on the Rock of the West. The West awakes, not knowing who has aroused it, but it rises. In that church was a splash of scarlet, where the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington knelt. The scarlet reminds us that cardinals must be prepared to shed their blood, and to the north a brother cardinal had knelt giving absolution to heroes, knowing that his own blood might be required of him. And from that battlefield, from the fire and death and smoke, heroes carried out the body of their slain chaplain priest and bore him throught the war-wracked streets and laid him upon the altar of a nearby Catholic church. Then these rough, tough firefighters, having made this great act of Faith, worthy of Joan of Arc or Louis IX, returned to the battle. Perhaps, just perhaps. Maybe, just maybe, the West has unconsciously discovered that it is impossible to forsake the Rock of the Church. That without Peter there would have been no West, there can be no West.

The Church is neither west or east or north or south. She views politics and states and the maelstrom of history with the same sharp and shrewd indifference as that Galilean countryman regarded Caesar and the coin of trubute. But Her love is not indifferent, and it has never slackened. And the engines of the coming crusade will be stoked by that fierce and inexhaustible love. Once again there is right and wrong upon the earth, and even MSNBC fears to object when God is named. And there is a quite unremarkable man who names Him, publicly, with neither pride or apology. He is a man who loves baseball and is not completely comfortable with English syntax. He is not a master of public speaking or oratory. He was never a candidate for a Rhodes scolarship. But slowly, we see emerging a will of iron and an enduring resolve, and most important, an assurance that all rests upon a Higher Power.

And it is to him that the sword of Arthur, and Roland, and El Cid and Louis IX has been passed, and in his own, ordinary American way, he has grasped it and holds it higher every day. The West has arisen and follows him. There will be more blood and iron and death, for we groan under the evil that has warred with man and the world always. But may this crusade be also a crusade to rediscover the treasures of our holy heritage, to find once more the true heart of the West, to rescue from the dust and debris of centuries of thoughtless error, the High Faith we so carelessly tossed aside.

Exsurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici eius

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