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Where was Secular Humanism at Lepanto? The moral of this story, this afterword, is "Never bring a knife to a gunfight." Keep that in mind as you read. In any case, religious fanatics? Us? We don't think so. We're not going to sit here and lecture you on the value and validity of atheism versus faith. We'll leave that to Hitchens and Dawkins or D'Souza or the pope or anyone else who cares to make the leap. One way or the other. Hearty shrugs, all around. A defense of the existence of God was never the purpose of the book,...

For months leading up to the Battle of Lepanto, fought on this day 443 years ago, Pope Pius V urged the faithful to pray for military victory against Muslim forces aiming to storm Italy from its Adriatic coast. Specifically, he enjoined Catholics in Europe to pray daily the most holy rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Christian navy prevailed, and on the Roman calendar October 7 was dedicated to Our Lady of Victory. Victory—what a golden word. Christians in earlier times appreciated its value. ICXC NIKA, they wrote. Christus vincit. Christ is victorious. Or, in English more colloquial: Christ...

For those who know little history, today’s battle with ISIS in the Middle East may seem new and unprecedented. It is not. In a.d. 622, Mohammed set out from Medina to conquer the whole Christian world for Allah by force of arms. Within a hundred years, his successors had occupied and pillaged every Christian capital of the Middle East, from Antioch through North Africa (home of Saint Augustine) and Spain. All that remained outside Allah’s reign was the northern arc from Southern France to Constantinople. What we are seeing in 2014 has a history of more than 1,300 years —...

The almost imperceptible lapping of the tide against the hull of the flagship, the stillness of the night, the breathing of the slaves slumped over their oars, and the spirited but hushed murmurs of the small assembly betrayed the fury of the battle that was just hours away. Tension and quiet.

In 1565, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent dominated the Mediterranean, with intentions of not only taking Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, and southern Spain, but Rome itself. The only thing standing in his way was the small rocky island of Malta just south of Sicily, defended by the Knights of Malta. In March of 1565, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent sent Algerian Admiral Dragut to Malta with 200 ships and 40,000 Muslim soldiers, including 6,500 elite Janissary troops. .... Queen Elizabeth I of England is said to have remarked: "If the Turks should prevail against the Isle of Malta, it is uncertain what further...

Go search on the internet about the Battle of Lepanto. Read what happened in this historical naval conflict. The Muslim fleet commander was killed and BEHEADED and his head stuck up on a pike for all to see. Upon seeing their commander's head on a stick, the other Muslims lost heart and retreated...ending the battle. This is because they do NOT put their faith in a real god, but in men, their leaders, who are at one time powerful and vicious. When the leader is cut down, they run. The man who puts his faith in God will not run...

On September 11th, Americans remember a scene of gore, the Twin Towers being hit by planes and then crumbling down with countless human beings being crushed and ripped to pieces alongside the debris, and people jumping off buildings. On the same month of September — September 8th to be exact — the people of the small island of Malta celebrate how their country, in 1565, fought under the knight Jean Parisot de Valette and the religious Order of the Knights of St. John, and defeated the Muslims and their leader Sulaiman who were trying to conquer the Christians and reduce...

Featured Term (selected at random):HELP OF CHRISTIANS Title of the Blessed Virgin Mary, established as a feast by Pope Pius VII in 1814, in gratitude for his safe return to Rome after five years of captivity in Savona. Though not in the universal calendar, it is the patronal feast of Australia. The original invocation "Auxilium Christianorum" was inserted in the Litany of Our Lady by Pope St. Pius V in thanksgiving for the Christian victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal...

Today, 7 October 2005, is the 434th anniversary of the Naval Battle of Lepanto -- the defeat of the invasion fleet of the Ottoman Empire by the Holy League fleet under command of Don John of Austria. They were an ad hoc fleet thrown together at the last moment from a rabble of squabbling principalities. England's ships did not join the defense -- their Protestant queen looked the other way. The French fleet, by orders of her Catholic king, were similarly absent. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting with their backs to the wall. But they had one weapon the...

Americans know that in 1492 Christopher Columbus "sailed the ocean blue," but how many know that in the same year the heroic Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the Moors in Grenada? Americans would also probably recognize 1588 as the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Francis Drake and the rest of Queen Elizabeth’s pirates. It was a tragedy for the Catholic kingdom of Spain and a triumph for the Protestant British Empire, and the defeat determined the kind of history that would one day be taught in American schools: Protestant British history. As a result, 1571,...

Ada Scheidler [3rd generation Scheidler working for prolife] holds a protest sign at a rally outside Planned Parenthood Aurora [photo by Sam Scheidler].Today at Mass, I was praying for our nation, and what came to mind were the relatively few people (with prominent power!) "going to bat" for us doing the "extraordinary" (while putting their lives on the line) to help save our nation and the world at large. Of course, there are others, but as the following continue on their journeys attempting to "knock [another] one out of the park," know that there is a way that we can...

Autumn had come to the Mediterranean, and more than a hint of the blustery winter to come was in the air, as two formidable armadas gathered for battle near Corinth. By far the larger force was the fleet commanded by Ali Pasha, servant of Ottoman Turkey’s Sultan Selim II.   From the deck of his fearsome flagship Sultana, Ali directed 270 war galleys and a massive collection of lighter craft. The fleet, appropriately, was deployed in a huge crescent stretching from the rocky shores of Albania in the north to the coast of Peloponnesus in the south.From the Sultana’s mast flew...

On October 7, 1571 off the coast of Greece, near the Gulf of Lepanto, the greatest sea battle in history took place between the fleets of the Holy League and the Ottoman Turks. With the blessing of Pope Pius V the Christian armada under the command of Don John of Austria dealt a terrible blow to the massive Turkish flotilla preparing to invade the Italian peninsula. The armada consisted of ships from Spain (which, at the time included the viceroyalty of Naples and Sicily), the Papal States, Venice, Genoa, and the Knights of Malta. Since the conquest of Constantinople in...

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim. A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little...

The history you are about to read is a miraculous event authenticated and recorded at the Vatican over 400 years ago. Sacred archives recall the miracle with the title, 'The Battle of Lepanto." Firstly, its historical background must be told. The Ottoman Empire was a Turkish state in the Middle East from the 14th to 20th centuries. As their 'Jihads' or aggressions increased, it became one of the world's most powerful entities during the 16th century. The Empire then became commonly known as the 'Khalifah,' or 'Islamic State.'On May 29, 1453, the Islamic State conquered the holy Christian lands of...

By Fjordman September 30 2008 The following essay is an amalgam of my previous online essays, among them Who Are We, Who Are Our Enemies — The Cost of Historical Amnesia, Why We Should Oppose an Independent Kosovo, Refuting God’s Crucible and The Truth About Islam in Europe. The Jihad, the Islamic so-called Holy War, has been a fact of life in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East for more than 1300 years, but this is the first history of the Muslim wars in Europe ever to be published. Hundreds of books, however, have appeared on its...

Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe.

Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph compared the upcoming presidential election to the Battle of Lepanto, in which Christian forces against overwhelming odds defeated Ottoman Turkish invaders bent on the conquest of Europe.

This October was the 437th anniversary of a forgotten yet crucial battle in the defense of western civilization called the battle of Lepanto. It is the victory of this battle that is the reason we are living in a free nation rather than an Islamic style dictatorship. It is why we are still Christian and not Muslim. It is the reason for the existence of America as it is as a free nation. (Though now and days it is not that free.) In 1571, The Turkish Ottoman empire was the superpower of the day. On land, the armies of...

In 1571, the future of Christian Europe was very precarious. Once united in faith, “Christendom” had become splintered with heresy, dissent and a rising nationalism that placed country over religious duty. Luther’s seed had produced countless weeds sprouting up uncontrollably. Nothing was certain anymore, as everything — all the achievements of previous generations, from Thucydides to Heraclitus, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas — seemed ready to slip away into oblivion. What had changed? A people, a civilization, that carried the pride and tradition of the Roman Empire, a culture long since purified by the Gospel message, now faced annihilation at the hands...