The crusades are remembered today wherever there is ideological conflict, and the images and language associated with them or their counter the jihad are regularly called to mind in violence which involves Christians and Muslims in the Balkans or the Near East. Indeed the Maronites in Lebanon, whose Church was united to Rome in 1181, have always retained a nostalgic attachment to the centuries of western settlement, an era their historians came to see as a golden age. In Europe the rhetoric has been largely the product of sentiment and, in spite of the parallels often perceived, is no closer to the original idea than were the effusions described in the previous chapter. In a surprising development, however, the theology of force that underpinned crusading has been revived, especially in Latin America, by a militant wing of Christian Liberation.
All Christian justifications of positive violence are based partly on the belief that a particular religious or political system or course of political events is one in which Christ is intimately involved. His intentions for mankind are therefore bound up with its success or failure. To the modern apologists for Christian violence Christ’s wishes are associated with a course of political events which they call liberation. He is really present in this process, in the historical manifestations of man’s path forward. He is the Liberator, the fullest expression of liberation, which he offers to mankind as a gift. If the only way to preserve the integrity of his intentions from those who stand in their way is to use force, then this is in accordance with his desires in the historical process and participation in Christ’s own violence is demanded of those qualified as a moral duty. This is why some members of a sub-committee of the World Council of Churches which reported in 1973 maintained that in certain circumstances participation in force of arms was a moral imperative, and why Camilo Torres, the most tragic figure of the Liberation movement, a Colombian priest and sociologist who resigned his orders, joined the guerrillas and was killed in February 1966, was reported saying that ‘The catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin.’ That this really was his view is confirmed by his written statement in August 1965 that ‘the revolution is not only permissible but obligatory for those Christians who see it as the only effective and far-reaching way of making the love of all people a reality.’
The commitment to revolution that love enjoins was a prominent theme in Torres’s writings and there can be little doubt that he was motivated by genuine and deeply felt charity. In June 1965, when he issued a statement on his resignation from the priesthood and must have been already contemplating taking part in violence, he wrote: ‘Only by revolution, by changing the concrete conditions of our country, can we enable men to practise love for each other . . . I have resolved to join the revolution myself, thus carrying out part of my work by teaching men to love God by loving each other. I consider this action essential as a Christian, as a priest, and as a Colombian.’ His violent death struck those who were in sympathy with his ideals as witnessing to the power of his love. To a guerrilla leader, ‘He united the scientific conception of the revolutionary war, considering it the only effective way to develop the fight for freedom, with a profound Christianity, which he extended and practised as a limitless love for the poor, the exploited and the oppressed and as a complete dedication to the battle for their liberation.’ An Argentinian priest was quoted saying, ‘Christ is love and I wanted to be a man of love; yet love cannot exist in a master-slave relationship. What Camilo’s death meant to me was that I had to dedicate myself to smash the master-slave relationship in Argentina. I had to fight with the slaves, the people, as they fought, not as an elitist teacher . . . but as a genuine participant, with them not for them, in their misery, their failings, their violence. If I could not do this, I was not a man of the people, that is, a man of God, that is, a believer in brotherhood, which is the meaning of love.’ And echoing crusading martyrdom, a Catholic theologian placed Camilo Torres among ‘the purest, the most noble, the most authentic exponents and martyrs of the new Christianity’. It has even been argued, in a way reminiscent of the traditional justification of severe measures against heretics, that in revolution, although not necessarily a violent one, love is shown not only to the oppressed, but also to the oppressors, since the aim is to release these oppressors from their sinful condition.
But if holy violence, in this case armed rebellion, has returned to the Christian scene, those institutions which date from the crusades and have survived have long since rejected it. Of course the association with crusading of the Maronite and Armenian uniate Churches, many of the titular bishoprics of the Catholic Church, and some of twenty-six chivalric and religious orders, such as the Order of Preachers (the order of the Dominicans) is indirect, while others, like the Spanish military orders, have changed their functions so much that they are scarcely recognizable. But two orders are what they always were and the line to them from the crusades is clear, even if as living institutes they have developed in different ways. The first of these is the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta (the Order of Malta). This is the same order of Knights Hospitallers which in Palestine and Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Malta, played so important a part in the crusading movement’s history.
After the loss of Malta to Napoleon in 1798, the demoralized and impoverished order fragmented, with its provinces, or what was left of them, functioning with little regard to the central government, which was anyway thrown into chaos by the election by a group of brothers of Tsar Paul I of Russia—not professed, Catholic, or celibate—as grand master. Paul’s mastership, which was tacitly recognized by the papacy, did not last long. After his assassination the order endured three decades of unsettled existence before establishing its head-quarters in Rome in 1834. It then gradually rebuilt itself, abandoned its ambition to re-establish itself as a military power on independent territory—a Greek island to be won from the Turks in the 1820s; Algeria, which was being suggested as an order-state in the 1830s—and reverted to its original and primary role, the care of the sick poor, at first in the Papal State and then throughout the world. Although the number of fully professed knights is relatively small, over 10,000 Catholics are associated with them as lay members of the order.
Also associated, although less directly, are four other orders of St John which, being predominantly or solely Protestant confraternities, are not orders of the Church but orders of chivalry under the patronage of, or legitimized by, recognized founts of honours, the federal German parliament and the crowns of Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Three of them, Die Balley Brandenburg des Ritterlichen Ordens Sankt Johannis vom Spital zu Jerusalem (generally known as Der Johanniterorden), Johanniterorden i Sverige and Johanniter Orde in Nederland, are descended from the Bailiwick of Brandenburg, a Hospitaller province which became a Protestant confraternity and broke away from the rest of the order at the time of the Reformation, although it maintained a distant relationship with the government on Malta. The fourth, The Grand Priory of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, originated in an attempt by the French langues in 1827 to raise money on the London market and to equip a small naval expedition to sail from England to the assistance of the Greeks who were fighting for independence from the Turks. In return the langues had been promised an island in the Aegean which would serve as a stepping stone for a reconquest of Rhodes. All investors in the enterprise and all officers in the mercenary force were to become knights of Malta. The English order of St John that resulted was not recognized by the grand magistry in Rome, but the good work it undertook, which bore fruit in the St John Ambulance service, brought recognition from Queen Victoria, who took it over as an order of the British crown in 1888.
The second surviving crusading institute is Der Deutsche
Orden (The Teutonic Order), which has its headquarters in Vienna, although since 1923 it has been an order of priests. Teutonic knights are still to be found only in another interesting survival, Ridderlijke Duitse Orde Balije van Utrecht (The Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order). Like the Hospitaller Bailiwick of Brandenburg, this commandery turned itself into a noble Protestant confraternity at the time of the Reformation.
These survivals are active Christian charitable institutes engaged in pastoral work or the care of the sick or the elderly. They had always combined fighting the infidel with ministering to the sick, showing how closely related in medieval thinking were war and nursing, and it was this tradition that enabled them to withdraw from their military functions while remaining true to their roots. In their present activities can be heard a distant echo of the medieval conviction that crusading was an act of love.