The Martyrs of Otranto

Please forgive, but Sandro's latest article has personal meaning for me.

Summer Reading: How the Eight Hundred Men of Otranto Saved Rome

They were martyred five centuries ago in the easternmost region of Italy, the spot most exposed to attack from the Muslims. The objective of the caliph Mohammed II was to conquer Rome, after having already taken Constantinople. But he was stopped by Christians who were ready to defend the faith with their blood

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, August 14, 2007 – The Roman Martyrology, the liturgical calendar of saints and blesseds updated according to the decrees of Vatican Council II and promulgated by John Paul II, shows that today the Church remembers and venerates...

“... the approximately eight hundred martyrs of Otranto, in Puglia, pressured to renounce the faith after the crushing assault of the Ottoman soldiers. They were exhorted by blessed Antonio Primaldo, an elderly tailor, to persevere in Christ, and thus through decapitation they obtained the crown of martyrdom.”

The martyrdom of these eight hundred men took place in 1480, on August 14, the day of their liturgical commemoration.

It was because of them that five centuries later, in 1980, John Paul II visited Otranto, the Italian city in which they were martyred.

And this year, on July 6, Benedict XVI definitively authenticated their martyrdom, with a decree promulgated by the congregation for the causes of the saints.

But who were the eight hundred men of Otranto? And why were they killed? Their story is of extraordinary relevance – just like the conflict between Islam and Christianity, in the midst of which they sacrificed their lives.

This is presented in the account that follows – it appeared last July 14 in “il Foglio” – written by Alfredo Mantovano, a Catholic jurist, senator, and a son of the same land that produced those martyrs, born in southern Puglia, the region of Otranto.


“Ready to die a thousand times for Him...”

by Alfredo Mantovano


On July 6, 2007, Benedict XVI received a visit from the prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints, cardinal José Saraiva Martins, and authorized the publication of the decree of authentication for the martyrdom of blessed Antonio Primaldo and his lay companions, “killed out of hatred for the faith” in Otranto on August 14, 1480.

Antonio Primaldo’s is the only name that has come down to us. His companions in martyrdom were eight hundred unknown fishermen, craftsmen, shepherds, and farmers from a small town, whose blood, five centuries ago, was shed solely because they were Christian.

Eight hundred men, who five centuries ago suffered the treatment reserved in 2004 for the American antenna repairman Nick Berg, captured by Islamic terrorists in Iraq and killed to the cry of “Allah is great!” His executioner, after cutting his jugular, drew the blade around his neck until his head was detached, and then held this up as a trophy. Exactly as the Ottoman executioner did in 1480 to each of the eight hundred men from Otranto.


* * *

There is a prologue to this mass execution. In the early morning hours of July 29, 1480, from the walls of Otranto there could be seen on the horizon an approaching fleet composed of 90 galleys, 15 galleasses, and 48 galliots, with 18,000 soldiers on board. The armada was led by the pasha Ahmed, under the orders of Mohammed II, called Fatih, the Conqueror, the sultan who in 1451, at just 21 years of age, had become head of the Ottoman tribe, which had replaced the mosaic of Islamic emirates a century and a half earlier.

In 1453, at the head of an army of 260,000 Turks, Mohammed II had conquered Byzantium, the “second Rome,” and from that moment he developed the plan of wiping out the “first Rome,” Rome true and proper, and of turning Saint Peter’s basilica into a stall for his horses.

In June of 1480, he judged the time was right to go into action: he lifted the siege from Rhodes, which was defended courageously by its knights, and directed his fleet toward the Adriatic Sea. His intention was to land at Brindisi, which had an excellent, spacious harbor: from Brindisi, he planned to move northward up Italy until he reached the see of the papacy. But a strong contrary wind forced the ships to touch ground fifty miles to the south, and to disembark in a place called Roca, a few kilometers from Otranto.


* * *

Otranto was – and is – the easternmost city in Italy. It has a rich history: the immediate vicinity was probably inhabited in the Paleolithic period, and certainly from the Neolithic age. It was then populated by the Messapi, a race prior to the Greeks that was conquered by them, migrated to Magna Graecia, and fell into the hands of the Romans, becoming a Roman town.

The importance of its harbor had given it the role of a bridge between East and West, a role consolidated on the cultural and political level by the presence of an important monastery of Basilian monks, the monastery of San Nicola in Casole, of which a couple of columns remain on the road that leads to Leuca.

In 1095, in its splendid cathedral church built between 1080 and 1088, the blessing was imparted to the twelve thousand crusaders who, under the command of prince Boemondo I d’Altavilla, were leaving to liberate and protect the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. And on his return from the Holy Land, it was in Otranto that saint Francis of Assisi landed in 1219, and was received with great honor.

For the rest of this beautiful article, click here.

Christian Persecution in Egypt

Egypt arrests Christian activists

Cairo, Aug. 10, 2007 (CWNews.com) - Egyptian state security agents have arrested 2 Christian community leaders in Cairo, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) reports, saying that the arrests "are part of Egypt's alarming and growing trend of state-sponsored persecution of Christians."

Adel Fawzy Faltas and Peter Ezzat Mounir-- members of the Canadian-based Middle East Christian Association (MECA)-- were being held at police headquarters in Cairo, CSI reported. Lawyers have been unable to contact them, and their supporters fear that they will be tortured.

Although no charges have yet been brought against the two Christians, they are reportedly accused of insulting Islam. They were arrested shortly after MECA filed a lawsuit against Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and other members of the Egyptian government on behalf of victims of the anti-Christian al-Kosheh riots of 2000.

Other information about MECA and their experience may be found here, and here, and here,and here, and at their current web site here,

Secular Relativism in Spain (and at the IHT)

The International Herald Tribune weighs in on the Spanish Zapatero government's actions to take over the moral training of its citizenry's children. The the article seems to view the Church's opposition as somehow anti-pluralistic.

A new secular civics class riling Catholic Church
By Victoria Burnett

Tuesday, August 7, 2007
MADRID: As Spanish children sun themselves on the beach this month, classrooms and curricula will be far from their thoughts. But a dispute over a new civics education class that awaits them in September is adding to the heat of the summer.

The government says the new class, "education for citizenship," aims to teach values consistent with a modern, diverse democracy. It will be introduced in five of Spain's 17 regions next month, and in the rest by the end of 2008. Starting around age 11, students will be required to take the course an hour or two a week at four stages in their school career.

According to Victorino Mayoral, a Socialist lawmaker and president of the CIVES Foundation, which was involved in crafting the course, students will receive a mix of ethics, civics and study of human rights. Based on the values enshrined in Spain's 1978 Constitution, the course will cover issues ranging from domestic violence to dangerous driving, which claims thousands of Spanish lives every year.

But the course will also deal with issues like gender, sexuality and the family, and the church is up in arms.

Catholic bishops say the new course usurps the family's freedom to shape a child's morality and will impart values that in some instances diverge radically from their own. The Episcopal Conference has called on parents to protest the new syllabus by any legitimate means, and several bishops have called for a boycott.

In an open letter to his parishioners in July, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares, archbishop of Toledo, said the course would force society to accept "a particular vision of man that diverges from the reality of man and from the Christian vision."

Cardinal María Rouco Varela, archbishop of Madrid, called the course a "serious problem" because it aims to "shape the individual, which is not the remit of the state."

The course "clashes with the fundamental principles of the Constitution and with the right of parents to choose their children's moral instruction," Varela declared at a seminar on religion organized by King Juan Carlos University in Madrid last month.

Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero countered last month by warning the bishops that "no faith is above the law" and said it was society's job to "teach citizens the values of respect" and harmony.

"Spain is a lay country, and its lay principles guarantee pluralism and tolerance," Zapatero said at a Socialist youth conference on July 22.

Prominent members of the conservative opposition Popular Party also oppose the syllabus, as do some teachers and parents.

Alfonso Aguiló, a Catholic headmaster and head of the Madrid Association of Private Education Companies, said that 2,500 parents of the 40,000 students the association represents do not want their children to take the course. In an interview by telephone, he said he was worried about textbooks that put heterosexuality on an equal footing with homosexuality, bisexuality or transsexuality.

"There are a lot of people who don't want their children to think there are five types of sexuality, five types of family," he said.

Aguiló argues that individual morality is being supplanted by secular dogma. He and other critics say the course smacks of classes in "formation of the national spirit" that were obligatory school fodder under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

"The government cannot say, 'There is no religion, the only religion is my religion: secularism,' " he said.

Mayoral says the course is not intended to promote one social model at the expense of another, but rather to inform students, for example, of the fact that same-sex marriages are now legal in Spain.

"The reality of the classroom reflects every kind of family - single parents, gays, divorced parents," he said by telephone. "We want the course to reflect what is real and what is legal."

While the Catholic Church sees a conflict between its morality and Zapatero's liberal social model, data indicate that the general population does not. About three-quarters of parents opt to have their children take Catholic studies in school, while two-thirds support gay marriage.

Raquel Mallavibarrena, spokeswoman for Christian Networks, a Spanish umbrella group of progressive Christian associations, said, "There is a plurality in the Catholic community that the bishops don't reflect."

"It's a shame there isn't more dialogue, more flexibility," she added.

People like Mallavibarrena say that this intransigeance is the reason the church is losing its struggle to retain influence in a society where it once enjoyed uncommon privilege. In a July survey by the Center for Sociological Research in Madrid, 77 percent of respondents described themselves as Catholics, but only 16 percent of those said they went to church every week - and 55 percent said they almost never went. Spain is now home to an estimated million Muslims and more than a million Evangelicals and Protestants.

The church hierarchy also seems to view the course as a challenge to its influence in the education system, an area where it still wields tremendous power. About a quarter of the country's children are educated in Catholic schools that get about half their funding from the state and the other half from nongovernment sources.

The church retains the power to hire and fire teachers of religious education in the public school system and scrutinize their private behavior. However, the extent of that power has come into question as a result of a recent court ruling on unfair dismissal in the Canary Islands. The court in July awarded €16,000, or $22,000, in damages to a teacher who was fired by the church in 2000 because she lived with a man to whom she was not married, the newspaper El País reported.

Critics say the dispute has been stirred up by a conservative minority to mobilize opposition to Zapatero and has eclipsed what could have been a healthy debate about how to educate Spain's youth.

"In a plural society like Spain's, which is changing so quickly, it's important for students to reflect, to learn to think and to consider different options," Mallavibarrena said.

But instead of debating how best to implement the new course, she said, the bishops and politicians "just throw stones at each other."

What Price Peace?

Peace is God's gift that requires human cooperation, pope says

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Prayers for peace demonstrate a recognition that peace is a gift of God that requires human cooperation, Pope Benedict XVI said in a message to a summit of religious leaders meeting on Mount Hiei in Japan.

"Peace is both a gift from God and an obligation for every individual," the pope said in the message to the Aug. 3-4 summit organized by the leader of the Tendai Buddhist community.

Members of the community consider Mount Hiei to be the holiest site in Japan; the Tendai school of Buddhism was founded on the mountain in the 9th century.

When Pope John Paul II invited religious leaders from around the world to gather in Assisi, Italy, in 1986 to pray for peace, the leader of the Tendai Buddhists accepted the invitation. The next year, the community began hosting Japanese religious leaders for an annual prayer for peace service on Mount Hiei.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the head of Tendai Buddhism began inviting international representatives of Christianity, Islam and Judaism to join Japanese religious leaders for the prayer service.

In his message to the 2007 summit, Pope Benedict said, "The world's cry for peace, echoed by families and communities throughout the globe, is at once both a prayer to God and an appeal to every brother and sister of our human family."

The pope expressed his hope that the religious leaders gathered for the summit would be filled with God's peace and strengthened in their resolve to give witness to the logic of peace, which surpasses "the irrationality of violence."

Benedict praises Teoctist

Late Romanian Orthodox leader saluted by Pope

Castel Gandolfo, Aug. 6, 2007 (CWNews.com) - During his Sunday public audience on August 5, Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news) paid tribute to the recently deceased leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Teoctist.

The Pope characterized Teoctist as a "noble pastor" who had done a great service for ecumenical relations by visiting the Holy See and welcoming the 1999 visit to Romania by Pope John Paul II (bio - news)-- the first trip by the Roman Pontiff to a predominantly Orthodox country.

Noting that Patriarch Teoctist's funeral had been held on August 3, with Cardinal Walter Kasper (bio - news) present as a papal representative, the Holy Father eulogized the Romanian prelate by invoking the final words of the Orthodox liturgy: "May his memory be eternal."

The Relativism of Multicultural Education

The Catholic Education Resource Center has a very good article by Roger Scruton on modern secular education and multiculturalism. Mr Scruton perceptively notes the irrationality of multicultural emphases. The inherent contradictions of relativism come to the fore in this well written piece. Below are several excerpts.

Multiculturalists argue that our curriculum has focused on the works of “dead white European males”, with the tacit or conscious intention of excluding the achievements of people regarded, on account of their race, sex, culture or locality, as “other”.

...

To someone educated in Britain during the postwar period, at a time when the old curriculum was assumed as the norm, the thesis is not only astonishing but also a vivid testimony to our cultural decline. Like others of my generation I was brought up on the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, on the Thousand and One Nights, Kim and The Last of the Mohicans; at school I was taught to love Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad; I was encouraged by my teachers to read Confucius in Pound’s translation and the Vedas in the edition by Max Müller, and I encountered through LP records and the concert hall amazing vistas of other worlds, from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Britten’s The Prince of the Pagodas, to Ravi Shankar playing evening ragas to packed halls of the young.

...

Although it was probably no part of Said’s intention, the combined effect of his attack on western “orientalism”, Foucault’s attack on bourgeois “discourse”, Derrida’s “deconstruction” and the general crushing of the old curriculum under a weight of inquisitorial “theory” has led to an orthodoxy of nihilism in the western academy. The effects of this nihilism are widespread, as in the addictive drumbeats and soundbites that form the background of popular culture.

...

Culture inherits this “knowledge of the heart” from a religious tradition. And one reason for the prevailing scepticism is that our religious tradition is in decline. But a culture can be passed on and enhanced, even when the religion that first engendered it has died. Art has an added importance, since it has become the sole communicable testimony to the higher life.

For the entire article, click here.

MAC vs PC? How about this ad....

It's from a Blog by Saginaw Seminarians, where you may find two other "commercials". Or, you can view them at YouTube.