why matamoros, crusades

[claudia castellani]

I sincerely admire your courage for sustaining such non politically-correct
views!

In Otranto cathedral, Salento (South of Italy), there is one altar built
with the bones of 800 innocent people slaughtered by muslim pirates during
their very frequent pillages of Italian coast cities. Men, women and
children were regularly kidnapped and sold in the Middle-East slave-markets,
thousand of people were slaughtered every year, and commerce in the
Mediterranean rapidly diminished, causing economic recession. It is not by
chance that Columbus discovered America after the Crusades and immediately
after the Spanish Reconquista. In 1492 the last city hold by Muslims -
Granada - was re-conquered by the Spanish and in that same year America was
discovered.
A Bulgarian friend of mine told me that after the continuous attacks by
Muslims and Turks - who used to impale "the unfaithful" - the Bulgarian
authorities were obliged to call immigrants from nearby countries to
re-populate entire regions of Bulgaria, as people there had been
.....completely destroyed.

I have often tried to remind these "uncomfortable" and "politically
uncorrect" historical truths when talking to my friends or acquaintances,
but when I realized the extent to which historical truth has been distorted
in our Western minds during the last 200 years, I stopped even trying to
convince them. I may seem too pessimistic, but I think it is useless trying
to awake the West (I am talking about Europe which I know very well. I
cannot speak for other Western countries) if the West refuses to see the
truth!

The problem is that this lack of memory of our past has created a new "false
truth" which has now become the Official Politically-Correct History of the
West. Basing itself on this invented history, the West (Europe) has started
feeling superior to the non-European Western countries and cultures but
utterly inferior and guilty towards the rest of the world.

This newly created world history prevents us from deeply understanding the
mentality of a Medieval Christian pilgrim (to Santiago, to Rome or to
Jerusalem) who had no doubts about the basic truths of his life and, in
particular, firmly believed Christianism to be the true faith. To avoid
quarrels, I am only describing their mentality and not giving my own
opinion. The Medieval history of the three rings, for example, shows
candidly what they believed (three knights have three identical silver
rings, which represent the three monotheistic religions, but one of them is
a golden ring.....).
Trying to soften history (by censoring some parts of it because it can be
too painful or too politically uncorrect) and cultural and artistic
expressions in order to modernize them and make them more acceptable for us,
means we didn't grasp the history and - going back to our topic - the true
historical meaning of the Camino.

Claudia




>From: m j anderson <mjayceeaWORLDNET.ATT.NET>
>Reply-To: Road to Santiago Pilgrimage <GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU>
>To: GOCAMINOaPETE.URI.EDU
>Subject: Re: why matamoros, crudades
>Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 07:18:54 -0400
>
>Karen Willmus wrote:
>
> > I'm a little surprised in this "Matamoros" discussion on a "Christian"
>list
> > that no one has brought up the obvious:
> >
> > Historical references such as the Matamoros, the Crusades, ... you name
> > it...are things that we as Christians should point out as examples of
>how we
> > sin --
>
>Some have pointed out that this is not a "Christian list" but isn't the
>full
>resonance of the Camino is missed if its Christian context is ignored,
>reduced
>to sentiment (rather than doctrine & action) or if its history is rewritten
>for
>the comfort of modern seekers of all stripes?
>
>Below is a commentary on the crusades that I think is worth thinking about.
>The
>Crusades were not wrong, though some individual crusaders were
>dispicable---this
>is the condition of humanity--in every grouping, there are good and bad
>examples. But let us remember that the context of the crusades cannot be
>discarded if one has a genuine desire to understand Camino history.
>
>Ultreya!
>MJ Anderson
>* *
................................

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