The Crusades are a delicate topic, though they are seldom handled delicately. Most of us default to an emphatic (though largely uncomprehending) condemnation of them; some of us have realized that there were some just causes at work in the Crusades, such that even a non-Catholic historian like Rodney Stark could mount a book-long defense of them. Prompted by this insight, a few people lean too far in the other direction and embrace the history and iconography of the Crusades wholeheartedly, fancying themselves as neo-Crusaders going to spiritual war against whatever cultural development they find most threatening.
Admittedly, the Church has ordained saints who were involved with the Crusades, both as preachers and as warriors (in the case of St. John of Capistrano, sometimes both), but that doesn’t mean she gives or gave the Crusaders an unqualified endorsement. In fact, one of her most powerful spiritual traditions may have begun as a kind of criticism of her supposed heroes in the Holy Land.
March 29 is the feast of St. Berthold of Calambria. The details of Berthold’s life are a little murky, for reasons we’ll get into shortly, but we know he was born to the son of the Count of Limoges sometime in the early 12th century, was known to be a brilliant student at the University of Paris (the intellectual hub of Christendom at the time), and was ordained a priest in France. He was also the nephew of Aimery of Limoges, the intellectual nobleman who became the fourth Latin Patriarch of Antioch. (Aimery’s own life was certainly storied; one anecdote involves him being left beaten, naked, and covered with honey on top of a citadel over a dispute between the Prince of Antioch and the Byzantine emperor.)
Berthold joined his uncle in Antioch, traveling with an army of Crusaders and, by some accounts, actually fighting as one of the soldiers himself. He was reportedly in Antioch when it was in danger of being besieged by the Saracens. He implored his fellow Christians to turn to prayer and penance; they took his advice, and the city was delivered.
So far, it may seem like Berthold is the classic example of the kind of figure triumphalist Catholics love to appropriate as a mascot for their own petty cultural campaigns. But this is where the story takes an unexpected turn, one which explains why Berthold did not end up inheriting his uncle’s cathedra.
Berthold is said to have had a vision of Jesus where Our Lord told him that He was outraged by the offenses committed by soldiers–not by the Muslim hordes, but by the alleged warriors of the Cross. Of course, the fact that soldiers are wont to commit atrocities should not be news to students of the Crusades; the concept of chivalry and St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s rule for the Knights Templar were developed specifically to try to make this occupation, so prone to sins of blood, lust, and greed, into something noble and monastic. But, obviously, that kind of holy warfaring wasn’t widespread enough. Christ’s Sacred Heart was grieved by what Christian troops were doing, and Berthold now had a mission to call them to moral reform.
He did so by becoming a hermit, preaching repentance and mortification to the Christians of Antioch, and soon a community of ten disciples had joined themselves to him and his new lifestyle. This resembled the way that the Old Testament prophets often founded schools of prophet-followers who lived, traveled, and ministered with them (1 Samuel 19:18-24; 2 Kings 2) and which were, in many ways, the forerunners to the Church’s orders and apostolates. This “Bertholdian community”, which was dedicated to prayer and self-denial rather than to the ravages of war, eventually found its way to Mt. Carmel-where the prophet Elijah had routed the prophets of Baal–and constructed a monastery there. This, it seems, could well have been the origin of the religious order we know as the Carmelites.
Why isn’t something as significant as this better documented? Part of the reason seems to be that the Carmelites saw themselves as having been founded by Elijah, and thus Berthold’s role was marginalized so that he would not usurp the prophet’s status. As the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, Carmelite tradition “holds that from the days of the great Prophets there has been, if not an uninterrupted, at least a moral succession of hermits on Carmel.” Indeed, one legend recounts that Berthold was inspired to found the community by a vision of Elijah. But what seems most important (and, perhaps, the meaning of that story) is that Berthold was a spiritual successor to Elijah, taking up his mantle and mission of calling God’s people to turn from their wicked ways to prayer and to obedience.
This nascent order received official ecclesiastical support, with Aimery appointing his nephew its superior general, helping him organize it, and possibly offering financial support. Berthold spent forty-five years with his spiritual children in Carmel, and when he died, St. Brocard, the Elisha to Berthold’s Elijah, took over as their prior. It was Brocard who approached St. Albert, Patriarch of Jerusalem, to write a rule for the votaries in their cells at Carmel; when Albert acquiesced, the Bertholdian school became an order, one which would go on to claim St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, Sister Lúcia of Fatima, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux among its members.
Thérèse recorded an experience that is useful for helping us understand Berthold’s charism. In her spiritual diary, she tells of how she longed to fight and die on the battlefield of a holy war–”I feel I have the courage of a Crusader”–but was instead confined to her small Carmelite cell. But then the Lord revealed to her that “love includes all vocations,” and that the way to fulfil this desire in her spirit to be a holy warrior was to “be love in the heart of the Church,” which means “doing little things with great love.” This is essentially the same insight that the founder of her order experienced: You aren’t truly a soldier of Christ unless you are as humble and prayerful as Christ Himself. Modern “crusaders,” take note.
One final thought: The fact that Berthold waged his own “Crusade against the Crusaders” should remind us that, just because certain people are “on our team,” that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call them out and work against them when they contradict the Gospel of Christ. A purported victory for Christ that is against Christ’s Heart is worse than a defeat—and, if we are really “crusaders”, we should remember that the word “crusade” comes from the word crux, “cross”, the ultimate symbol of seeming defeat that conceals a true victory.
Graham Crackers 