Posted on 10/07/2015 3:17:58 PM PDT by markomalley
On this date 444 years ago, the Holy League defeated the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, a Greek town in the Gulf of Corinth, halting the Muslim incursion into Christian Europe from the eastern Mediterranean, at least for a while. The defeat of the Ottomans by the Holy Roman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 put a full stop to that sentence about Muslim designs on that region of Christendom. But the paragraph continues. Europeans today, with no Holy League or Holy Roman Empire or any secular equivalent to defend them, watch in consternation as the migrant crisis crashes on their shores and promises to advance the Islamization of post-Christian Europe by other means.
Secularism and Islam can coexist, at least for a while, as regimes in Turkey, Egypt, and other Muslim-majority nations have demonstrated over the years, but the tension between the two worldviews is constant and may be inevitable. In 2015 the challenge that secularism in Europe faces from Islam is far more immediate and serious than the one it faces from Christianity, and yet Europeans focus their nervous negative energy on the latter, out of habit but also self-hatred.
Pope Benedict XVI back in 2006 diagnosed the illness with his signature lucidity. Hailing the virtue of “respect for that which another group holds sacred, especially respect for the sacred in the highest sense, for God, which one can reasonably expect to find even among those who are not willing to believe in God,” he observed the following about post-Christian Europe:
When this respect is violated in a society, something essential is lost. In European society today, thank goodness, anyone who dishonors the faith of Israel, its image of God, or its great figures must pay a fine. The same holds true for anyone who dishonors the Koran and the convictions of Islam. But when it comes to Jesus Christ and that which is sacred to Christians, freedom of speech becomes the supreme good.
This case illustrates a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. . . .
Multiculturalism teaches us to approach the sacred things of others with respect, but we can do this only if we ourselves are not estranged from the sacred, from God.
The West values its secular values. Does it value them enough to fight for them? It’s being tested.
Obviously it no longer values Christianity enough to fight for that. The faith is being extirpated from the Middle East as Western powers look on and then look away. Churches have been demolished, Christians crucified. Most Christians either have fled or are trying to. God bless the lonely Christian militia in northern Iraq, but the consensus among Christians on the ground and among their advocates here in the West is that “forting up,” as Walter Russell Meade called it in his talk at a Hudson Institute event earlier this year, is a losing strategy.
The sole alternative for Middle Eastern Christians is to flee, but neither the United States nor the United Kingdom will give them refuge. Both nations have committed to receiving a limited number of refugees exclusively from U.N.-sponosred camps, which Christians will no longer enter because they get attacked there. In the larger migrant crisis facing the West, they have been shoved to “the bottom of the heap,” as George Carey, the former archbishop of Canterbury, notes in the Telegraph.
Churchill rallied his people to fight for “the survival of Christian civilization” not a century ago. Times have changed. “We don’t do God,” Tony Blair’s communications director blurted out at a press conference in 2003, intercepting a question addressed to the prime minister about his Christian faith.
Pope Pius V organized the Holy League, a coalition of navies from Christian maritime powers, not half a millennium ago. At Lepanto, the Christians were outnumbered in sailors, soldiers, and vessels but had more guns.
Times have changed. Pope Francis in June, in what Reuters described as a “long, rambling talk” in Turin, said that Christians who were weapons manufacturers or invested in the weapons industry were hypocrites. In the next breath he criticized the Allies for not bombing the train tracks to Auschwitz in World War II. The common thread tying together the two apparently contradictory statements was not that hard to discern: Our grandparents were war criminals, we have no right to defend ourselves.
Pius V called on Catholic Europe to pray the rosary for the victory of the Christian navies in the Balkans and led that effort personally. The resolve and focus of a holy man in a position of power stopped the forefathers of the Islamic State from narrowing the distance between themselves and Rome. Would that Pius’s current successor followed his lead.
Instead, Francis has called bishops to the Eternal City for what by all indications is the purpose of creating an appearance of consensus on a series of propitiatory gestures that he already determined he would make, in the name of the Catholic Church, toward the secular West’s preoccupation with issues relating to sex and sexual identity; you would have to stretch a great deal to explain how the debate over whether women should be ordained to the diaconate is germane to a synod on the family. The Church today faces war on several fronts. The bishop of Rome is tied up negotiating terms of surrender on one of them.
Churchill rallied his people to fight for “the survival of Christian civilization” not a century ago.
Times have changed.
“We don’t do God,” Tony Blair’s communications director blurted out at a press conference in 2003, intercepting a question addressed to the prime minister about his Christian faith.
As I recall, Lepanto was like a land battle on water. The Turkish soldiers were mostly archers. They hammered the Christian fleet at first, but once the Christian galleys closed and boarded the Turkish light infantry was cut to pieces by the heavily armored Christians. They also freed thousands of Christian galley slaves.
And the teeth have fallen out of his bite.
In his excellent book “What Went Wrong”, Bernard Lewis talked about the differences in the way Islam approached issues of peace (and in this example below, war) and how they hamstrung themselves in the process.
There was an account in the written archives of the Ottoman Empire of a conversation between two Islamic military experts examining the hulk of one of the Christian vessels that had run aground on the shore.
The Christian vessels were clearly superior in every way, but instead of mining them for intelligence and incorporating the features into their own vessels, they had to discuss and get approval (fatwa?) to use any improvements, because they had been created by infidels.
Could they use infidel inventions and technology without damning themselves?
It was related to the reason they fell so far behind in many things because of this self-imposed handicap. For a period of 200 years, while the Europeans were madly translating things from every single language they could encounter into their own languages, Islam had one (yes, a single book) translated from a European language, and it was a medical tome on venereal diseases.
Their rationale was that it was fine to do this because they viewed venereal diseases as Frankish diseases, so that made it okay in Islam to engage Frankish cures.
Crazy.
The Venetians also had several Gallasses and Friggata in their fleet which were the forerunners of galleons and frigatges. While still having oars they were mainly propelled by sail and carried full broadsides of cannon rather than only 2 or three in the bow.
They were able to sink several of the larger Ottoman galleys before they could engage the Papal/Venetian/Austrian forces which changed the flow of the battle. It was the first time ships using broadsides were used to defeat galleys
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This is a breathtakingly simplistic piece. The author talks about Lepanto and ignores the fact that forces allied with the pope helped the Mohammedan Turks finally take The City in 1453. My ancestor died on the walls at the side of the God Ordained Emperor Constantine XI Paleologus fighting them on the night of May 28, 1453! Roughly 200 years earlier crusaders allied with the Pope sacked The City and set up the so called Latin Patriarchate...and enthroned a whore on the altar of Agia Sophia! The City never recovered. Such good Latins! Aren’t you all proud?!
In the meantime, today Greece, whose own people are starving while the Germans strut across her shores and mountains, provide succor to the Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war and rampant Islam. They do it because they are Orthodox Christians not just because the grandparents of those refugees gave shelter to their grandparents when the Turks embarked on a massacre of the Greeks and Armenians on the Ionian coast in 1922. And the so-called Christians in America and Western Europe did NOTHING!
None of this is simple. Don’t fall for the nonsense being posted here.
Russia will step up and defend Western Civilization, as they did against Hitler and Napoleon.
Putin is a dictator in the way that the czars were dictators. So it’s both a good and bad sign.
In the meanwhile, Obama is pushing same sex marriage, gay rights and abortion on third world countries via linking the policies with money, or by funding NGO’s to tout the line and spread the message as if they were popular locally.
Sigh.
We figure that Obama will let China take over the Philippines as long as we keep abortion and easy divorce illegal.
This article is a good antidote to the historical illiteracy that tends to prevail on the Left. Islam has been intent on world domination from its inception, and that goal persists in a significant portion of the Muslim population today. Religious belief, mainly Christianity and Judaism in the West, has been a major ingredient of the cement that holds together families, communities, nations, and the psyches of many individuals. Multicultural, postmodernist, and relativistic imperatives to political correctness have undermined this cohesiveness in many western countries, which have been set adrift in a sea of meaninglessness, alienation and uncertainty that threatens the continuation of the United States as the great power and world leader that it has been in the past. What we need a strong leader, a warrior-king, who is at least willing to talk about restoring American greatness rather than continuing to acquiesce (or contribute, like Obama) to its decline. The closer this warrior-king comes to the archetypal Christian Soldiers of Lepanto, Vienna, and numerous other engagements with militant and expansionist invaders, the more likely we are to succeed. As is pointed out in the article, clerics have also sometimes played a pivotal role in the military defense of Christendom. In today’s world, we could certainly use a Pope like Urban II (who called for the First Crusade in 1095).
“As I recall, Lepanto was like a land battle on water. ....”
Quite true. As was true of most naval engagements of the day. It was the traditional (as in “since ancient times”) approach, and a feasible one. Also, pretty much the only way to do it.
The 16th century was a period of change in land and naval warfare, as the production, deployment, and use of firearms spread more fully.
The English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 - 17 years after Lepanto - was helped along by the English use of the (then-revolutionary) tactic of firing directly at enemy vessels with heavy guns, mounted on smaller (more maneuverable) vessels in larger numbers, in better-standardized bore dimensions. Short range by modern standards, but it enabled the English to stand off safely from the Spanish vessels, which contained large numbers of land troops - to swarm enemy vessels, not merely invade England.
Set the pattern for some three centuries of naval combat.
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