One of the very best books I have ever read. Western Christians didn’t care about Eastern Christians when it was written anymore than they do now. Some of us have been convinced for decades that you all simply want us gone.
BTW, the Spiritual Meadow is, or was, available on Amazon. Many of St. John Moschos’ stories were my bedtime stories as a child.
As a Roman Catholic that has Hungarian and Italian roots that go back to the Cross, I agree with you. I repost this occasionally to remind us of the threat and need to work as brothers in Christ. I for one, care:
Two excerpts from Roger Crowley’s “1453” book on the fall of Constantinople:
May 27th, 1453: “Late in the afternoon the people of the city, seeking religious solace, converged for the first time in five months on the mother church of St. Sophia. The dark church which had been so conspicuously boycotted by the Orthodox faithful was filled with people, anxious, penitent, and fervent, and in the first time since the summer of 1064, in the ultimate moment of need, it seems that Catholic and Orthodox worshipped together in the city, and the 400 year old schism and the bitterness of the Crusades were put aside in a final service of intercession.”
Pope Pius, Mantua, 1459:
“We ourselves allowed Constantinople, the capital of the east, to be conquered by the Turks. And while we sit at home in ease and idleness, the arms of these barbarians are advancing to the Danube and the Sava. In the Eastern imperial city they have massacred the successor of Constantine along with his people, desecrated the temples of the Lord, sullied the noble edifice of Justinian with the hideous cult of Muhammad. They have destroyed the images of the mother of God and other saints, overturned their altars, cast the relics of the martyrs to the swine, killed the priests, dishonored women and young girls, even the virgins dedicated to the Lord, slaughtered the nobles of the city at the sultan’s banquet, carried off the image of our crucified Saviour to their camp with scorn and mockery amid cries of “That is the God of the Christians” and befouled it with mud and spittle. All this happened beneath our very eyes, but we lie in a deep sleep….Mehmer will never lay down arms except in victory or total defeat. Every victory for him a stepping-stone to another, until, after subjecting all the princes of the West, he has destroyed the Gospel of the Christ and imposed the law of his false prophet upon the whole world.
The dead US Marines of Lebanon beg to disagree with you; when we were still a “Christian” country we supported them.
Without Western intervention, Constantinople would have fallen hundreds of years earlier.