The Crusades according to The Compact History of the Catholic Church
1. The Crusades
...all these political struggles were seen by the popes as necessary to maintain the freedom of the Church from the manipulation and domination of secular rulers.The use of armies and military alliances by the popes was justified as self defence-defending the papal territories and the right of the pope to govern the Church freely.
The crusades, though, were a different case, the crusades were military expeditions organized by the Church for the liberation of the Holy Land from Moslem control and for the defence of the Christian faith and protection of Christian pilgrims. St Augustine had developed the idea of “just war”, and the Church believed that the crusades were in this category. In fact, those who participated in the crusades, were granted by the Church full remission of all punishment due to their sins.
Urban II, who called for the First Crusade, forbade any unworthy motive for going on a crusade, such as for glory or temporal gain.
In theory, the crusades may have been justified, but due to man's fallen nature, the results of these wars were often tragic. The First Crusade was a military success, but the expulsion of the Greek patriarch in Antioch deepened the schism between the Eastern Church and Rome, and the crusaders indiscriminately murdered hundreds of innocent people when they captured Jerusalem.
Even though the saintly Bernard of Clairvaux preached in support of the Second Crusade in 1146, it was a military failure.
The Third Crusade in 1189 intended to recapture Jerusalem from Saladin the Turk, but all that was accomplished was a treaty guaranteeing the safety of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. Most would agree that these crusades fell far short of their intended goals and even weakened the relations between Eastern and Western Christianity as the leaders of the later crusades increasingly went crusading for unholy motives.
2. Crusades and Inquisition.
The dark side of this century came with the efforts of the Church to hold on to Christian territory in the East and to stamp out heresy by force.The Fourth Crusade was called by Innocent III in 1202, but without his permission it stopped in Constantinople to establish an emperor favourable to the West. The soldiers proceeded to plunder and ravage the beautiful city in 1204. “Even the Moslems,” commented an observer,“ would have been more merciful.”This created a tremendous bitterness in the hearts of Easterm Christians toward the Catholic Church, which is stilI not totally healed, and it discredited the whole crusading movement.
Innocent, was shocked by this, but called for another crusade at the Fourth Lateran Council to recover the city of Jerusalem.The Fifth Crusade(1218-21), was moderately successful but failed to recapture Jerusalem. Frederick II managed to do this in the Sixth Crusade (1228-29) by diplomacy, but this only lasted fifteen years. The Holy Land fell out of Western control with the final defeat of Christian forces at Acre in 1291. The lesson of these crusades to capture the Holy Land has remained with the Church until the present day.
Never again has the Catholic Church attempted to wage a war to capture territory, even the Holy Land, for the sake of Christ; nor has it condoned warfare among nations for this reason. The Catholic Church was waging an even more important battle on another front in the thirteenth century. Because of wealth and corruption in the Church, certain groups such as the Cathars and Waldensians were drawing many people away from the Catholic Church in Europe and teaching them to deny the humanity of Christ, to reject the sacraments, and to deny the spiritual authority of priests and of the Church.
In response to this, the Catholic Church established, in the twelfth century, legal procedure and tribunal to question those who were suspected of holding false, or heretical, teaching. This legal proceeding and tribunal was known as the Inquisition. It is hard for many of us to understand this age in which bardly anyone believed in religious freedom or toleration persaving the souls of heretics from certain damnation by encouraging them to repent and accept the/true faith. Even the use of torture by secular authorities came to be justified by the Church in the middle of the thirteenth century, on the principle that it was better for a person to suffer physical pain now for a brief time if it could save them from the eternal suffering of hell.
(Note that the Roman law, preserved in the West by the Roman emperor Justinian, sanctioned the use of torture to secure confessions). Contrary to popular belief, however, the goal of the Inquisition was to root out heresy by converting those holding false beliefs to the true faith. It is worthy of note that when Gregory IX established permanent inquisitors in 1233, he chose men from the new Mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans, to lead people to conversion through the Inquisition.
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