![]() ![]() In rallying the European nobility to join the First Crusade, Pope Urban II promised them forgiveness of past sins. On their return home they wore it on their back. That’s why on the way to the Holy Land crusaders wore the cross on their chest. The word crusade means to “take up the cross,” hopefully after the example of Christ. The Crusaders were human beings, who like us, had mixed motives often in conflict. But to do so is to show our own kind of bigotry, one neglectful of the historical context of the European Middle Ages. ![]() Modern Christians want to dismiss that era of Church History as the insane bigotry of the illiterate and superstitious. As Bruce Shelly aptly states in in his excellent book Church History in Plain Language, for the past 700 years Christians have tried to forget the Crusades, though neither Jews nor Muslims will let them. ![]()
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