Following the Self-Destructive
Path of the Byzantine Empire?
“Better the sultan’s turban
than the pope’s tiara!”
the people of Constantinople
1453
They once were the mightiest empire after the fall of pagan Rome.
Today, they are nothing!
Its demise can easily be traced back to its war with islam.
A war the Byzantine Empire ultimately lost.
It began with the schism of 1054 when the Eastern half of the Church split with the West, creating what today is in essence the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
It wasn’t long after on God’s time clock that the Eastern Church was stripped of its treasures.
In the “Crusade Against the Cross,” as the Fourth Crusade is known, European knights raided the city of Constantinople in 1204 and took its great wealth of treasures, including not only what we call today the Shroud of Turin, but Madonna Nicopeia.
Our Lady of Victory!
Until that time, this miraculous portrait of Madonna and Child — believed to be painted by St. Luke — was the protector of the great city Constantine had formed out of what once was Byzantium.
Justinian the Great had enhanced the empire and created the greatest cathedral ever known to mankind: Hagia Sophia, “Holy Wisdom,” dedicated to the Virgin Mother of God.
Inside, resided Madonna Nicopeia.
But the Great Schism of 1054 ended all that in the Lord’s eyes.
With no sign of recovery between what once was the Universal Church, the Lord used the evil of the Fourth Crusade and turned it into His Good: the world’s greatest relics were now in Europe for a very important reason.
God, as the Sovereign King of History, knew what would happen to the Byzantine Empire.
It would be lost to islam — a religion that hates images of any kind!
A religion in which the miraculous icon of Madonna Nicopeia would be endangered.
The Lord would allow the Byzantine Empire to be swallowed up by islam because the people of Constantinople refused to end the schism.
He would give them what they want!
They would not listen to their emperor who had secured a reconciliation with Rome in exchange for Europe’s help to fight off the encroaching islamic horde.
The city would become a footnote in history; no longer found on maps and now called “Istanbul,” a word which translates into the moslem war cry of 1453: “into the city!”
And into the city they came.
Overrunning Constantinople’s defenders by one of the most vile acts of history: using captured Christian children who had been turned into slaves and indoctrinated into the heresy and idolatry of islam.
Now, as grown warriors, they were turned against their very people, slaughtering them beneath their islamic scimitars!
The last emperor of Constantinople, ironically named Constantine, in despair when the city was taken, tore off his purple imperial insignia, plunging head first into these once-Christian and now robotic slaves of islam and, as one historian describes it: “amidst the tumult he fell by an unknown hand and his body was buried under a mountain of the slain.”
The great cathedral, Hagia Sophia, was thus turned into a mosque and blasphemous passages of the koran — such as “God has no son”! — were hung within its once holy walls.
It is said, according to tradition, that several priests, who were chastised by the Byzantine people for their acceptance of Rome’s “Act of Union,” were rescued by Angels just before they were to be captured when the walls of the cathedral mysteriously opened and swallowed them within — never to be seen again!
That history is now more than five centuries old.
In today’s secular republic of Turkey, Hagia Sophia is a museum, no longer the center of Christian worship; its beautiful icons of Jesus and Mary adorning its walls painstakingly restored after being whitewashed for 500 years by the iconoclastic moslems.
It is a lesson long forgotten.
Forgotten by a Roman Church that now seeks “accommodation” with the same fanatical militancy of islam that defeated the people of Constantinople.
We have often stated that we, as believers, must be careful, for many times our Lord is going to give us what we want!
Whether it is good or bad remains to be seen.
But in His Wisdom and permission to allow mankind to exercise its free will, He will not interfere in our desires even if it is NOT right for us!
The Lord gave the citizens of Constantinople what they wanted.
They refused the pope’s tiara and were given the sultan’s turban!
Today, the Vatican mimics the cry of the citizens of the once-mighty Constantinople as it seeks “dialogue” with a religion that religiously seeks its destruction!
From Turkey, once the very heartland of the Byzantine Empire, came Mehmet Ali Agca, the islamic terrorist, who, on behalf of the atheistic Soviet empire, will try to assassinate the pope on the 64th anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. While the Queen will protect the vicar, is it a “coincidence” that the name “Mehmet” is the Turkish equivalent of “Mohammed” and “Fatima” the name of Mohammed’s daughter?
In Her victory, Mary defeated “Mohammed” and has us revere Her under a title in which the world remembers Jesus’ Mother as our Queen — the Lady of the Rosary — and not Mohammed’s daughter!
A few years ago, armed islamic Palestinians will enter the Church of the Holy Nativity. Their desecration of the Bethlehem Sanctuary is well known; yet even that did not stop those who represent the Church in the Holy Land to continue seeking a “dialogue” with a religion that has proven it only understands force.
And now to the northwest, within the Eternal City, again the cry goes out.
Is the cry against the murderers of innocent people?
Against a militant religion that seeks “to submit” those it calls “infidels” and practices genocide?
No, within the sacred walls of the Vatican, the cry is not for the arrest and capture of those who would behead any “infidel” within their power.
It is not a cry against a religion that does not seek “accommodation.”
It is, instead, a cry against a nation, the U.S., that was attacked by islamic fundamentalists in the opening salvo of the 3rd Millennium — terrorists, who like those in the 15th Century did not find a “vassal’s tribute” from the Byzantine emperor to the sultan sufficient enough to keep the peace. (And has America’s tax $$$ cloaked in the term of “aid” not paid a “vassal’s tribute” to the warriors of the Middle East?)
A 15th-century sultan “coincidentally” named “Mohammed II”!
Today, the 2nd-millennium islamic conquerors of Jerusalem — the cause of the Crusades, lest we forget the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher — are the heroes of the 3rd-millennium’s terrorist brigades.
Yet, what do we hear from Rome?
The very concepts that the powerful Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc warned us against: concepts embodied in the words “pacifism” and “anti-militarism.”
Words Belloc characterized as an “intellectual disease”!
At the turn of the 2nd Millennium, there was also a pope.
He was not a “pacifist” nor did he believe in “anti-militarism.”
His name was Blessed Urban II.
How long have we, as believers, forgotten that the pope of the First Crusades has the title of “Blessed” bestowed before his name?
Along with the Saints of his time, and succeeding generations, “the world’s debate,” as the masonic historian Edward Gibbon refers to it, continued between islam and Christianity.
Never once was islam defeated through “pacifism” or “anti-militarism.”
On the other side, every victory of islam was achieved through its aggressive militarism and hatred of the “infidel” that resulted in the death of those who refuse “to submit.”
Today, as Belloc predicted, “our religion is in peril.”
Yet, there are not a million religious who will fight for the Church against islam as there were Christian soldiers in the First Crusade.
Instead, we have in the Vatican the “intellectual disease” of “pacifism” and “anti-militarism.”
It is, unfortunately, a proven failed policy when dealing with islam.
We do not need, from the very city in which Blessed Urban called for the First Crusade, the unnecessary and obvious admonition that Catholic women should not marry moslem men.
We do not need from the very city which inherited many of the relics of Constantinople, anti-American statements in regard to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal; remarks by the Vatican rightfully called an “absolute embarrassment” and “insulting” by the president of the Catholic League.
We do not need the further hypocrisy and loss of its moral compass in the very City of Peter which continues to do nothing to resolve the scandal of abuse by cleaning its own house before it can decry the speck of abuse in the eye of its American brother.
And with the flagrant beheading of innocent people, we certainly do not need the pope to encourage the enemy by chastising the president in his upcoming visit.
What we all need — especially every cardinal, bishop and priest — is to invoke the aid of the one who has proven their ability to defeat islam where a million men ultimately failed.
The one, who under a title of mercy, ransomed, in the 13th Century, so many Christian slaves from those who, in the name of a false god, call— as Saladin did just before he beheaded (sound familiar?) King Guy — their captured prey, “swine.”
The one who, in the 15th Century, turned back the islamic horde before it could overrun Europe.
The one who, in the 16th Century, defeated the islamic navy.
The one who is known as Mary!
Despite the fact that our Queen stopped islam from becoming the dominant force in Europe in 1571 when, for the first time, Her Image as Our Lady of Guadalupe was invoked for protection by Captain Andrea Doria, this war has not ended in the minds of “islamo terrorists.”
For as Belloc warned in regard to the threat of their return: “islam has in the main preserved its soul.”
The soul, as he states, of “that undying ‘antichrist’ which desires to kill Christendom.”
And so, in this renewed war, our Church is facing a serious choice: to be slaves of the Immaculata or slaves to the religion of submission.
Which one will the Church ultimately choose?
In its politics of “pacifism” and “anti-militarism,” is the Vatican today not betraying the millennium-old victories against Christ’s enemies — the very ones who dragged the True Cross behind a horse’s ass after defeating the Crusaders?!
In its desire for “accommodation,” is it not betraying the thousands of lives sacrificed over the 2nd Millennium to defeat the encroachment of islam?
In its seemingly endless “dialogue,” is it not betraying the historical and proven leadership of the Immaculata?
A leadership She treasures under Her title as Madonna Nicopeia, the golden icon of which rests today in Venice’s great Basilica of St. Mark.
But the Church does not parade this icon of Mary against its enemies as the people of Constantinople once did.
A procession of honor impossible for the people of Constantinople in 1453 as the icon no longer resided in the city.
Instead, today, the Church chooses to ignore Mary leading the Saints to victory over islam, as if it might prove an embarrassment in today’s politically correct world of “cultural diversity”!
And it chooses to degrade America, to snipe at her, its best temporal ally in the war against islam!
We can only pray that soon the very same one who defeated our enemy throughout the 2nd Millennium — Our Lady of Victory! — will, for Her own honor and that of Her Son’s sake, take up Her hand in our cause again in the 3rd Millennium.
For if one waits for the Church, it appears one will be in the same position as the Byzantines of 1453 who cried out against the alliance their emperor made with the West with these words:
“Alas, we have made a new faith;
we have exchanged piety for impiety;
we have betrayed the Immaculate Sacrifice!”
Words of heresy against Rome which led to the loss of their empire.
The very same words that may soon echo through the halls of the Vatican as it refuses to remember the past of an ally long forgotten who today submits in fear of the islamic enemy now deeply embedded within its once-Christian walls.
A dangerous history of self-destruction in the face of an unrelenting enemy.
An “intellectual disease” we can ill-afford in the 3rd Millennium’s “Crusade Against the Cross” — “a new faith” now in the Church in which “we have exchanged piety for impiety” and “betrayed the Immaculate Sacrifice” — by those pacifists and anti-militarists within who refuse to fight “that undying ‘antichrist’ which desires to kill Christendom.”
© 2004 Agnus Dei Presents!
Hagia Sophia stripped
of its jewels and relics.
a 1st-millennium Church; 2nd-millennium mosque,
and 3rd-millennium museum. A lesson for us all as minarets now dominate and surround the imposing structure, once the greatest Cathedral in Christendom.