Hagia Sophia: Pope "Pained" as Instanbul Museum Reverts to Mosque

>> Crusade time? <<

They'd be MORE than justified to launch a new crusade in response to this outrageous action by Erdogan (hell, they should give him a taste of his own medicine and find some spot in Arabia that has "sacred" to Muslims for 1000+ years, seize and occupy it by force, and announce they are converting it into a Christian cathedral. Turnabout is fair play)

Sadly, it will never happen though.

Francis is no Urban II, but to be fair, only the first Crusade was successful, and he didn't live to see the conclusion of it. It was successful mainly because Muslims were caught off guard and never expected it. They prepared afterwards. The other dozen or so crusades (I think 9 more "official" and about 2 or 3 "unofficial) crusades over the next 200 years were miserable failures, so Christians didn't have much to show for it.

Ironically though, the Catholic Church's ONLY claim to the Hagia Sophia was the result of ONE of the crusades going off the rails and deciding to "convert" eastern Orthodox catherdrals to Catholicism instead of the original goal (liberate the holy lands from Muslims), which resulted in the Hagia Sophia briefly becoming a Roman Catholic catherdral from 1204-1261.

But, regardless of the denomination, the fact the church has been there since the 600s, was a MAJOR landmark site in early Christianity, and is one of the greatest achievements of all Christendom SHOULD result in universal condemnation of this power grab from ALL Christian denominations. Their leaders should be out there issuing bold public statements immediately decrying this action.

But that won't happen either, and I personally blame it on around 90% of modern-day Christians knowing nothing about Christian history and would probably respond "Hagia what?" if you told them the Hagia Sophia is being converted to a mosque. And that is ESPECIALLY true of most AMERICAN Christians, sadly.

Finally, where's the worthless UN on all of this? If those hypocrites had any standards at all, they'd be issuing resolution after resolution blasting the "illegal occupation" of Constantinople by Muslims, and demanding a "right of return" for the Christians that originally lived there. But nope, apparently its ONLY bad to "occupy other people's land" if Jews do it. Funny how that works!

A “sacred” site for Muslims that is comparable to the Hagia Sophia for Christianity is The Great Mosque of Kairouan in Tunisia. It was build by Muslims in the 600s and has never been anything but a mosque, and is considered one of the most impressive and largest Islamic monuments in the world. It is now World Heritage Site, but has declined in importance over the many centuries of wear and tear.

I say we swoop in with a MASSIVE “Shock and Awe” campaign with SWAT teams of heavily armed Christian militia groups that quickly surround and overwhelm the mosque.

After occupying the Great Mosque of Kairouan, kick out all the Muslims, install big crucifixes, baptismal fonts, etc., etc. all over the grounds, and rename it Our Lady of the Mediterranean.

To the victor goes the spoils. I’m sure they’ll understand.

;-)

Constantinople was conquered largely because the Roman Catholic Pope refused to rally a defense to save the city. Constantinople was lost because the Roman church wanted the eastern church to be destroyed once and for all

This is true. Islam was able to spread like wildfire through the Near East because the various Christian sects often feared and opposed one another more than they opposed any non-Christian faith. It's the old attitude of a heretic being worse than an unbeliever, and the Roman Catholic Church regarded the Eastern Churches as heretics. In what's now the Arab world the situation was even more confused than in Byzantium - you had at least a half dozen competing Christian sects, many of which predated Council of Chalcedon, all easily conquered and displaced by Muslims.

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